Cites & Insights 8:10 (October 2008) available

Cites & Insights 8:10, October 2008, is now available.

The 28-page issue is PDF as usual, although HTML versions of each essay are also available from the Cites & Insights homepage or via the links below.

This issue includes five essays:

Trends & Quick Takes

Improving patents, the future of the internet, why I give Pew such a bad tome, the HD watch, the purloined bibliography and invisible gifts, plus five quicker takes.

Interesting & Peculiar Products

Six of them--including a hockey-puck home theater PC and a digital projector that throws a 98"-diagonal image from 15 inches away--and six Editors' Picks and Group Reviews

Net Media/Making it Work: Blogging about Liblogging

A range of posts and commentary about liblogs and library blogs, some up to a year old, all worth noting.

Offtopic Perspective: 50 Movie Western Classics, Part 2

From the sublime (The Outlaw) to the ridiculous (Gone with the West), with spaghetti westerns, singing cowboys and much more in between--including Bill Shatner playing an arrogant, sexist, tinhorn ruler who doesn't happen to be on a starship but is instead a half-Comanche bad guy (White Comanche)--and Shatner also plays his sort-of-good-guy twin. I couldn't make this stuff up if I tried.

Retrospective: Pointing with Pride, Part 6

The responses to my "copyrights and wrongs" quiz, remembering some 1989 projections for the world of 2000-2001...and lots more.

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A note about the HTML versions:

I've been tweaking the Word template used to do quick-and-dirty HTML from a document that's primarily designed for print/PDF output. I've indented the text to leave a little white space on screen, for example. I think it's getting better--but the process still yields strange gotchas now and then, such as strings of forced blanks I don't believe should be there (this time, I think, only in quotes that are also bullets).

I don't spend that much time cleaning up the HTML versions. They're just there as a courtesy to those who just can't abide PDF, for whatever reason. Cites & Insights is fundamentally a PDF publication, and I spend my layout time trying to get that to look good and work well.