Pew has released a new study, Internet: The Mainstreaming of Online Life.
The good is we, libraries, rank highly as a metaphor. The question/challenge/opportunity(!) is then how relevant are libraries to this metaphor and what can we do to raise this quotient.
The study talks a lot about blogging, citizen journalism and political engagement. Some of the stats are quite interesting, including the dramatic increase in blog readership last year…
As a further aside, I’ve been listening to Lawrence Lessig’s Free Culture in my car on the way to work. It’s an interesting book so far in many respects, but I must say that I was most surprised to hear him spend as much time on the impact of blogging on cultural life as he does.
For whatever reason, I still feel a stigma attached to blogging and that there always seems to be some need to justify it as more than just a tool for keeping teenage diaries. Lessig again shows this isn’t so.
Just acquiring the audio book was interesting process in and of itself. It’s licensed under a CC license which means that others were able to read and record it without violating copyright, presuming they distributed it for free.
I downloaded the bittorrent that I found through legaltorrents.com, although I see now that Lessig actually links to directly to the torrent on his website.
