John Miedema

It was the kind of meal that, when the plates were clean, led some to dark corners to sleep with the hushing of the wind, and others to drink mulled wine until our voices had climbed an octave and finally deepened, in the small hours, into whispers.
I am just finishing The 100-Mile Diet: A Year of Local Eating by Smith & MacKinnon (2007). The couple tells of their year of eating food only grown within a hundred miles of their home. I’ll be reviewing it here soon. The quote above …

I have now finished The 100-Mile Diet: A Year of Local Eating by Smith & MacKinnon (2007). In Part I, I discussed how local eating is slow in a good sense on two dimensions of food: service and quality. The food takes time to prepare but it helps build local agriculture and reduce the transportation toll on our planet. It not only tastes great, it has fewer preservatives and more nutrition. Wouldn’t everyone want to eat it always? No, it turns out, mostly because of the effort. Still, most of …

click for larger image
The graph above is what frames my thinking about the digital vs. print debate. In short, there is no debate because digital and print are two “poles” on a spectrum, each with value, each serving different purposes, both required at different times.
The “leaves” and the “tree” metaphor is not a new one, but I was reminded of it by Peter Morville in Ambient Findability, who compared newer information technologies like folksonomy to leaves, handy for quick tasks like trendspotting but short-lived in value, and older information technologies …

Okay, things may have been a little stuffy in here lately with all my formal slow reading posts, but I’ve got another theory to offer today. My blog is just my way of thinking these things through. I count it a favour when others join the ride.
I previously posted The Leaves and the Tree: The Spectrum of Media. That piece described a continuum with digital technology on the one end and print technology on the other hand. My contention was that digital technology and its contents are the leaves — …

The One Big Library Unconference was a wonderful opportunity to talk face-to-face with some people I’ve met on-line, and others I met for the first time.
One Big Library? Catalogue? Community?
When the conference was first announced, Walt Crawford noted with concern the premise that “there’s just One Big Library, with branches all over the world” as stated on the conference wiki. A number of people replied. I think I’m accurate in saying that no one actually wanted all libraries to merge into one entity, that such a development would be a …

Information Ecologies is the antidote to polarized thinking and propaganda about technology. Nardi and O’Day reject both the rhetoric of inevitability about technology, as well as mindless resistance to it. They take a larger view, observing that questions and concerns about technology have a long history. The key lesson is that a technology may make sense in one context, and not in another.
The authors compare metaphors of technology. When we look at technology as a tool, we evaluate it by its affordances, its capacity to control things. The metaphor of …