Giving up -- No, not that way

One of the non-library specific blogs I read is a Wisconsin-based blog I picked up on before I even moved here. Can't tell you where or when, because I don't remember. I just added it to my Bloglines account. The blog is: 800-CEO-READ.

Monday's post is great and is called "Ending." It quotes that wonderful book Up the Organization by Robert Townsend which was originally published in 1970, and has been recently re-published.

Here is the key quote they excerpted which could apply to almost every library, government, or non-profit organization:

It's about eleven times as easy to start something as it is to stop something. But ideas are good for a limited time--but not forever.

If only we all could learn to LIVE this rule, not just we who are administrators, but our customers (that's what we call them in Eau Claire), or users, or patrons. There *always* seems to be someone (and it is often only ONE) who objects to an organization stopping doing something that is no longer needed or no longer part of the core mission.

What is Web 2.0?

Andrew Keen has a great article on the seductive nature of Web 2.0 in the Daily Standard. It was actually published some time ago, I noticed as I finally looked at the date. [This is, I guess, the daily on-line version of The Weekly Standard a DC based print and web publication.]

The quote which struck me was these two paragraphs at the end of "page 1."

In his mind, "big media"--the Hollywood studios, the major record labels and international publishing houses--really did represent the enemy. The promised land was user-generated online content. In Marxist terms, the traditional media had become the exploitative "bourgeoisie," and citizen media, those heroic bloggers and podcasters, were the "proletariat."

This outlook is typical of the Web 2.0 movement, which fuses '60s radicalism with the utopian eschatology of digital technology. The ideological outcome may be trouble for all of us.

I think it the "fus[ing] of 60s radicalism with the utopian eschatology of digital technology" which so captivates me. It echoes a phrase I have heard and used in ALA about "unreconstructed 60s radicals."

Thanks to my new Facebook friend Amy Kearns who called my attention to it.