Not sure how many of you already know about this NextGov.com website, but I just found out about it and I think it's only been around for a year. It's a spin off of Government Executive.com and provides "coverage and commentary on the management of information technology in the federal government". I'm also enjoying their Tech Insider blog.

Take a look at NextGov's recently posted news article - "Public satisfaction with e-government lowest since 2005":

"The dip in scores is due to several factors, including uncertainty about the upcoming presidential election and administration transition...rather than reflecting an actual decline in service,...the dip in scores more likely reflects users' rising expectations. For the first time, government has to keep up with the private sector in terms of service levels. They are just not used to moving at the same pace, with the same focus and intensity as the private sector."

danah boyd has done some of the best and most creative research on social networking, particularly how teenagers are using technology. She is a PhD candidate at the School of Information (iSchool) at the University of California Berkeley. She describes her research this way:

My research focuses on how people negotiate a presentation of self to unknown audiences in mediated contexts. In particular, my dissertation examines how American teenagers socialize in networked publics like MySpace, Facebook, LiveJournal, Xanga and YouTube. I am interested in how the architectural differences between unmediated and mediated publics affect sociality, identity and culture.

She is a dynamic speaker, prolific blogger, and insightful, passionate researcher. If you have never heard danah speak, I recommend watching this brief video! It should be of interest to anyone who wants to understand how young people are using technology and that should be all librarians because that is affecting how they use (and expect to be able to use) the  library and its  services. (It starts off looking like it is going to be a beer ad, but stick with it; that's just showing where the interview was held.)

• Video Interview with danah boyd, Discover Magazine (Feb 12, 2008). 14 minutes. (here is an alternate link to the same video)

This article was first published in 1997 but Government Technology reprinted it this month. Enjoy!

• When Our Systems Make Us Stupid, by Gopal Kapur, Government Technology, Jan 18, 2008.

This past weekend I was at my local Costco and not one, but two brands of 1 Terabyte (1000 GB) drives selling at around $300. I also saw a 500 GB (1/2 T) drive for $130. All of the drives were USB friendly meaning you could take one off the shelf and plug it into a USB port and have all that memory available to you.

What can you store in a Terabyte? According to an FBI article on digital forensics, plenty:

"a terabyte is equivalent to about 250 million pages of text, which would stack 10 miles high if printed on both sides of the page."

Surely that's enough space for even smaller libraries considering telling the Government Printing Office that they would like PDF ("access derivitives") delivered to them based on their profiles.

I admit, space isn't the only issue. But it's the objection I've heard most often and I honestly believe that technology has taken it away.