If you recognize the leetspeak of the title, then you know about I can has cheezburger? - an anarchic site that captions photos - mainly of cats, but sometimes of walruses, gerbils and invisible things. It’s not all fluffy bunny, sometimes they are in very adult situations.

Twice a year or so, I read something so funny that tears roll down my cheeks, I have an asthma attack and giggles bubble out for the next couple of hours. This was one.

It’s got me thinking about the informality, injokes and creativity I’ve seen online in the last couple of weeks. For me, it’s moving away from blogging, reading blogs and commenting on blogs and into more synchronious collaboration, read/write and re-mixing. If what the young kids have been doing is reaching the olds like me, I wonder what the young’uns are doing now?

The main place I’ve been hanging out is still twitter. I think it’s beginning to get a bit quieter but at its peak, links and lives were flying backward and forward at a very fast pace, and just as the Perth blogging contingent would begin going to bed, the US biblioblabbers would be most lively.

Lolbrarians was a link thrown out by Steve Lawson to twitter that sent everyone off to look at the lolibrarians site, comment and then create their own post. As a mix of erudition and junk culture it is only second to the Shakespeare lolcats.

The Library Society of the World is the best, most efficient, egalitarian and effective alternative to any library association ever. Why? Because we say it is and we are not taking it seriously. After the ALA election results were announced there was the usual malcontent expressed via twitter by people who would love to make a difference but don’t have time…why can’t things be different?, can’t we have another association? Yada yada.

So Joshua Neff put up the wiki. Heaps of people have joined and chosen our positions (I’m Antipodean Antibibliorthodoxist). During the brief blip of collaboration, here’s the policies that were nutted out:

  • No Parliamentary Procedure
  • No one chairs meetings; no one motions; no one seconds. Just change things and see how the rest of us respond.
  • No Elections - Just give yourself a title and we’ll accept you!
  • No Budget Process - If you give someone a donation, they are going to keep it and spend it how they like.
  • No Unnecessary File Types -If the information can be displayed well in HTML, use it! Links to PDF and Word files are frequently unnecessary and inefficient.
  • No Policies - oops. I was just kidding about that first part. Sort of.
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2 Responses to “Im in ur sociation takin ova the library world”

  1. on 14 May 2007 at 12:47 pmSteve Lawson

    Just to give credit where it is due, I believe I first came across lolbrarians because of Jessamyn’s twitter: http://twitter.com/jessamyn/statuses/47261952

    And I think that’s her Ranganathan image above.

  2. on 14 May 2007 at 1:31 pmKathryn Greenhill

    Thanks Steve. Looks like Jesamyn blogged about it on 2 May also, lolbrarians. I don’t think it registered the first couple of times I saw the reference.

    Makes me realise that the links that I follow from twitter depend very much on what else I’m doing at the time. Your tweet must have come at a slow patch in the day, so I went with it. Novel..wonder if marketers that want to use twitter to get $$ have analysed the best time of the day for people to follow what you send out.

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