Even that guy from Memento is like, "Dude, I get it."

I've noticed something about the library's movies. Certain titles circulate like crazy for years without being damaged, lost, or stolen. How crazy, you ask? Like one copy of Sabrina added in 2003 that has circ'd 161 times and 22 times last year! Or Being There, which might have the all-time record at 171 total checkouts. And it's not just classics. There's a copy of Memento that has 115 checkouts. So maybe movies aren't being stolen quite as often as we think.

What books are getting this many circulations in a lifetime? It turns out, not many. In a sample of 400 items in the catalog that have over 150 total checkouts, only 17 items are books. I'm sure many books are just as popular or more popular than movies, but a book may actually be more fragile than a disc, despite the perception that DVD's don't last.

Kindle DX

I started subscribing to RSS feeds and I got distracted by one of the stories from slashdot.org, which is a handy site for both techy and nerdy news. (So far I like having the RSS feeds on my homepage (iGoogle) rather than in Outlook or Bloglines.)

Anyway, a new version of the Kindle has been released, this time with a larger screen. I do think e-ink is getting better and better and more and more like an actual printed page, which might help convince some people to transition from book to e-book. I'm not of a collector mentality, so I don't really care about the container- my interest in books is the content. If Kindle's ever become more compatible with libraries and their e-books, I'll be sold.

But I understand some people feel attachment to books themselves. I had a friend who told me that they would never let go of books for an e-book reader, because the experience of turning the page was too special to them. Of course, at one point the page was the latest technology, so I wonder if people were reluctant to give up turning the scroll.

This video has been around for awhile, but maybe some of you haven't seen it:

Folksonomy: Threat or Menace?

Actually, I'm a big fan of folksonomies and tagging. Even though all the tags on Flickr are user-created, it still works almost as elegantly as if it were being cataloged by a professional.

Still, it's interesting to see how people manipulate tags, as it clearly can be abused. Some people use misleading but popular tags to sneak in images that otherwise would remain buried (usually promotional and/or shocking images). Flickr seems to have a system to counter-act this kind of thing, though.

Others use arbitrary tags to form their own community within Flickr. For example, the author of a webcomic I read started promoting the use of the tag haylookit for anything his readers found interesting or noteworthy. Now there are over a thousand images tagged with haylookit on Flickr.