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Encyclopedia Virginia is looking for an Assistant Editor. Knowledge of and interest in Virginia history a big plus. This will be a full time classified staff position at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. For more information, contact Brendan Wolfe at EV.

And there’s more! According to Brendan:

We’re entering into a partnership with the Library of Virginia that involves publishing on our site the entirety of the Dictionary of Virginia Biography. At the same time, we’re beginning to edit our pre-colonial and colonial history sections and are developing a smart-phone application that uses one’s current geographical coordinates to identify nearby historical events and connect them to encyclopedia entries. It’s pretty cool — all of which is to say that this is a great time to join the staff.

But don’t wait—register now if you want to learn about blogging, social networks, websites and how to be a freelance writer on the web. This is a soup-to-nuts picture of what it means to be a writer in the digital world, led by copywriter and communications consultant Kristen King. The first part is an introduction and the second part is a hands-on follow up. Part 1: Saturday, August 15, 9am – 4:30 pm, Part 2: Saturday September 12, 9am-4:30pm. More info…

WriterHouse, 508 Dale Avenue, Charlottesville, 434-296-1922.

2 Saturdays, August 15, and September 12, 9 am – 4:30 pm

In Part 1, copywriter and communications consultant Kristen King will give a soup-to-nuts picture of what it means to be a writer in the digital world. In Part 2, King will work with seminar attendees to create and or revamp their blogs and social media presence. Advance registration required. For complete details: www.writerhouse.org/onlinewriter.html

Slowpoke Comics: Amazon Kindle in an Alternate Universe.

You’ve seen ‘em on YouTube. Now see ‘em in person! The original Nerdfighters are coming to town at the Northside Library on November 10 at 6pm.

John Green is the award winning author of Looking for Alaska, An Abundance of Katherines, and Paper Towns. Hank Green is the founder of ecogeek and costar of the TV show “The G Word.” Together, they are the Vlogbrothers, one of the most popular (and nerdy!) channels in the history of YouTube.

They’re coming to the Northside Library to talk, sing, and discuss all things awesome. Books and CDs will be signed! Nerdiness will be celebrated! Happy dances will be danced!

NOTE: Tickets are required for this event. Stop by the Northside Library or call (434) 973-7893 to pick up or reserve your free tickets.

Sponsored by the JMRL Friends of the Library.

Cutting through the spin of political campaigns can make one’s head spin, but thanks to Albemarle resident Dan Doernberg, founder of Fairness.com, voters across the country will have a new tool just in time for tomorrow night’s first presidential debate.

Dubbed “CriTweak”— a combination of critique and tweak— the tool is a computer program that Doernberg hopes will revolutionize the way people read and comment on online articles and documents. Instead of the typical commenting format, in which readers post comments at the bottom of the page, CriTweak allows users to comment on specific passages simply by mousing over them, and to see what other commenters have posted on those same passages without leaving the page.

The Hook News Blog » Blog Archive » New toy cuts campaign spin.

Learn to use HeritageQuest for your genealogical sleuthing.

The Jefferson-Madison Regional Library will provide two training sessions on how to use HeritageQuest which is a collection of research materials for doing genealogy research. The sessions will be Friday Oct 31, 9:30 am at the Central Library and Saturday Nov 1, 10:00 am at the Northside Library.

HeritageQuest, which is JMRLs most popular database with 2000 3000 searches per month, is a collection of research materials for tracing family history and American culture that contains over 25,000 family records and local histories. This collection assembles every extant U.S. federal census, banking and military records, genealogies, primary source materials, and genealogical and local history serials.

Any any case, once the Amazon/Shelfari deal goes through, we are competing against Amazon.

The second element, as many also know, is that Amazon recently announced its intention to acquire Abebooks, the Canadian used-books aggregator that owns 40% of LibraryThing. The acquisiton will take place a month or two from now, I as undertstand it.

As a minority investor, Abe–and soon Amazon–does not control LibraryThing. I remain the majority investor and the President of the company. They have certain rights, but they don’t get our data and they don’t run the company. As president, I have traditionally worked very closely with Abe–beyond their rights as investors. I’m hoping that can continue, but I’m certainly going to stop talking about upcoming projects that Shelfari shouldn’t know about.

The problem. I myself can’t figure out what it all means, and how it will shake out. Some questions:

*Can Amazon own 100% of LibraryThing’s main competitor and manage its 40% stake in LibraryThing without implicating itself in fiduciary-responsibility conflict issues?
*Can LibraryThing continue to compete vigorously against Shelfari when Shelfari is owned by one of our investors? (Yes, I say. We wish only the best for Amazon qua investor, but not Amazon qua competitor.)
*What can LibraryThing do to protect itself against the possibility that Amazon uses its enormous financial and technical resources to fund and promote Shelfari?

This is rough. LibraryThing is a Good Thing, not least because of its open development model and “featureful” interface. As we know, however, the best product doesn’t always win the marketplace competition when there are deep pockets involved.

LibraryThing strategy in an age of Amazon/Shelfari | Recommend Site Improvements | LibraryThing.

Greetings from Duotrope’s Digest,

Notes for this week:
We were 8% short of our contributions goal for the month of June. We thank everyone who donated!

What the heck is going on at duotrope.com? If you’ve been on our site lately, you’ve probably noticed that it’s running very slowly and that there are more timeouts and other errors than usual. A few weeks ago, Duotrope’s traffic increased to the point that it starting putting a heavy strain on the database technology we’ve been using for the past 3 years. We’ve been planning an upgrade for a while, but this has forced us to start earlier (and work more frantically) than we had planned. We realize the site can be incredibly frustrating at times (even more so for us). We beg your patience. We are working as hard and as fast as we can, but we still have day jobs and families to attend to. To those of you who have kindly offered your assistance, we appreciate it, but we do all development ourselves. We will post an announcement when we’ve finalized the move to the new database technology.

How is our Keep It Free Campaign going?
CODE ORANGE! We are behind on meeting our current goal for this month. Even a small amount will help. If all of our subscribers contributed just $4.25 per year, we would meet our goal for the year. Unfortunately, only a small percentage of our subscribers contributes. So far this year, 7.19% of our subscribers have donated. The average donation has been $16.89.
(Learn more about the campaign and why we need donations.)

$4.25 a year? I know I wouldn’t miss that — would you?