Through Google.Dirson.com I just found out about Google Scholar, a new service of Google destined only to the search of academic and scientific material. In my first tests, I have to admit that it found a large number of very interesting material, but it’s not too clear the differences between free and pay-for-access material -for instance, the ones in Ingenta.

One of the most interesting things of Scholar Google is the possibility to access quickly to working papers that refer to an article that interests us. This way, maybe we cannot download the text we’re looking for -when they’re not free, it can get a little expensive for some of us- but at least we can read other authors that cite the text. Sounds a little third-world, but it can be a solution for our poor-in-dollars wallets.

We have to recognize, Google is taking lots of initiatives around the search theme. Of course, we can’t help to ask ourselves if it’s ok for a single company to have such power on the search field in the Internet.

I was browsing through the categories of the 2004 Weblog Awards, and found that those blogs written in spansih or in this region of the world belong to this category:

Best Mexican or Central/South American Blog

It’s so clear. Latin America is, first, mexican, and then the rest. There is nothing innocent about this; it’s estimated that at least 58% of inmigrants referred to as “hispanics” -this label we haven’t established ourselves- that live in the United States are mexicans or direct descendents of mexicans. Again, the world is first seen from the quotidianity, what we see everyday and has installed itself as obvious. That the category starts by Mexico says much about what many places in the United States think Latin America is. And this, rather than a problem of ignorance -the typical excuse to justify why those we qualify, in an essencialistic way, as “US americans” see the world in a different way- should be understood from the use of an obvious category of quotidian application by many people that live in the North.

The same thing happens with categories like Best Liberal Blog or Best Conservative Blog; these are clearly created for the US american political reality.

I want to state that the idea of this post is to discuss a naturalized vision of Latin America. We are quietly allowing categories such as “hispanic” or “latino” to define us, establishing a false sense of homogeneity in our region, one that is so marked up by its differences within. Also, to empty the “latin american” category of any political oppositional content. If we let others classify the world for us, I’m afraid we’ll be more fucked up than we already are. It’s not wrong to play with categories, but we should remember that relations between the hierarchization of what’s real and its representation are sometimes too narrow.

The other day we talked about Google Scholar, the Google search engine especificallly destined to scientific and academic fields. One of the most interesting things is that not only can we access to texts that match our thematic search, but also to a number of references from other papers and texts published on the Internet. As stated in Lago at Errant, this implies a new component when checking for the relevance of an article. Instead of checking the endless citation index, we have in Google Scholar a free source to stablish the importance of determined articles.

Under the light of this innovation by Google, it’s likely that some things will change substantially, concerning blogs and journals. One of the problems of charging for articles is that its relevance seems seriously limited, since fewer people can access to it. It also becomes good news for those whoy publish their working papers directly on the web, in their blogs or personal sites. It can be a good alternative to start building an academic background without depending exclusively on formal academic channels of publication. Anyways, for now, we only have speculations on the impact of Google Scholar, which time will determine if they’re true or not.

With these changes, the strategy of companies, like Sage, of opening every now and then the complete file of their journals so that more people can read the papers stored can have interesting consequences in the future, since their articles and reviews will be used as references much more often than the competition’s -for instance, Routledge.

More on the subject at the blog of Alex Halavais, Academic-Gamers; Creativity/Machine and Ponderance. By the way, if you have an academic blog, you can complete this survey on academic blogging held by the people of Crooked Timber.

Update: a very interesting article about Google Scholar and the agreements with the editors for permission to search the abstracts (through El Tintero) can be found in Search Engine Watch.

Starbucks is one of those companies that fascinate me. On one hand, I can’t help to feel very comfortable every time I’m at any of their locations. In part, because that means I’m away, travelling -there are no Starbucks stores in Argentina. But, also because this coffee scene set, their flavors, smells and colors extend to all of its surroundings. Even the ritual of drinking coffee from the plastic cups has its charm. And it wins over even those of us who come from hypercaffeinated cities, such as Buenos Aires.

On the other hand, Starbucks is one of those typical posfordist economy companies. Anchored in the service market, a large amount of resources are destined to branding, which forces them to minimize production costs. Low salaries, minimum social benefits, poor payments for the coffee harvested by Central American peasants, they all fall into the ugly recount. Not for nothing, Naomi Klein dedicates Starbucks a good number of pages in her famous No Logo. The company achieved an image of tranquility and harmony, aimed mainly at liberal professionals, and despite this they used the Wal-Mart policy of “wasteland”. How to concile a policy so linked to the exploitation of human resources with the bucolic image of a company so devoted to the adoration of coffee?

The truth is, that the first time I sat to read No Logo, I did it in a Starbucks location inside a Barnes and Noble store, in Denver. What at first sight seems a true irony, only hides something rather obvious in these times: in an era marked by the aboundance of information and the utilitary resignification of values and identities, even criticism can become another merchandise, which limits its posibilities of achieving changes. Even with a book with such an intriguing hypothesis as No Logo: the triumph of marketing and its huge budgets only can be accomplished to the cost of the slavery and exploitation of hundreds of millions of workers. Much of this can be found in the same No Logo: a book that criticizes brands, but at the same it positions itself as one of them, and exploits the identification of a phrase with a whole movement against the marketing of public spaces.