A Librarian at the H.O.P.E (Hackers on Planet Earth) Conference
So, this weekend I attended my first hacker conference, “The Last H.O.P.E (Hackers on Planet Earth)” sponsored by 2600 Magazine. Featured con speakers were: Steven Levy, Kevin Mitnick, Jello Biafra, Steve Rambam and Adam Savage of MythBusters fame. Some of the sessions I did attend included: “Evil Interfaces: Violating the User”, “A Hacker’s View of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)”, “Hacking Democracy: An In Depth Analysis of the ES&S Voting Systems”, “One Last Time: The Hack/Phreak History Primer”, Wikipedia: You Will Never Find a More Wretched Hive of Scum and Villainy”, “YouTomb – A Free Culture Hack” and all the featured speakers (except I very sadly missed Steven Levy, I loved that iPod book!). So what’s a librarian to make of all this? Well believe it or not, there is some common ground between the hacker community and us information science professionals. Chief among these are copyright (especially now… Read More »
New to me Social Software Pt. I – Wakoopa!

http://wakoopa.com/ What a fun little app! Total invasion of private software time…however, very, very interesting. Below is a embeddable widget from the site listing all the software I am currently running on my PC. Wow! Pretty scary when you think about it. Right now I am just trying to understand the benefits of something like this, or rather the social software benefits of this. Here are some of my initial thoughts. discover new software via your contacts see what other people are doing see how you spend your time Also from a software development/use standpoint, there is lots of usage statistics that can be harvested. For example they have this quote on the website: “Did you know communicating is the second biggest activity on the computer? We do. Wakoopa knows software”






