Is The Answers.com API Public?

October 29, 2007 – 1:50 pm

Answers.com is throwing a bone to WordPress users with their new AnswerLinks plugin written by Alex King.
But wait, there’s an Answers.com API? A few pokes at the Google machine reveal nothing relevant, and Asnwers.com’s site is mum too. Taking apart the code, I get the following (modded enough to make it run-able if you drop [...]

By Casey | Posted in Libraries & Networked Information, Technology | Comments (1)



Remixability vs. Business Self Interest vs. Libraries and the Public Good

April 30, 2007 – 12:29 pm

I’ve been talking a lot about remixability lately, but Nat Torkington just pointed out that the web services and APIs from commercial organizations aren’t as infrastructural as we might think.
Offering the example of Amazon suing Alexaholic (for remixing Alexa’s data), he tells us that APIs are not “a commons of goodies to be built on [...]

By Casey | Posted in Libraries & Networked Information, Politics & Controversy, Technology | Comments (0)

Usability, Findability, and Remixability, Especially Remixability

April 17, 2007 – 12:06 pm

It’s been more than a year since I first demonstrated Scriblio (was WPopac) at ALA Midwinter in San Antonio. More than a year since NCSU debuted their Endeca-based OPAC. And by now most every major library vendor has announced a product that promises to finally deliver some real improvements to our systems.
My over-simplified list said [...]

By Casey | Posted in Libraries & Networked Information | Comments (10)

APIs Are Big Business

March 29, 2007 – 2:22 pm

ProgrammableWeb pointed out an InformationWeek story that claimed 28% of Amazon’s sales in early 2005 were attributable to Amazon affiliates. And C|net claims Amazon now has 180,000 AWS developers (up from the 140,000 Amazon was claiming about a year ago).
(Note: not every Amazon affiliate/associate is an Amazon Web Services (AWS) developer, but Amazon hasn’t [...]

By Casey | Posted in Libraries & Networked Information, Technology | Comments (1)

ISBN1013 API Followup

October 4, 2006 – 11:01 pm

A couple questions about my API to convert 10 digit ISBNs to 13 digits pointed out somethings I failed to mention earlier.
First, the API actually works both ways. That is, it identifies and validates both 10 and 13 digit ISBNs on input, and returns both versions in the output. Example: 0811822842 and 978081182284-8.
And, as yet, [...]

By Casey | Posted in Libraries & Networked Information | Comments (0)



OpenSearch In A Nutshell

July 19, 2006 – 12:19 pm

OpenSearch is a standard way of querying a database for content and returning the results.
The official docs note simply: “Any website that has a search feature can make their results available in OpenSearch format,” then adds: “Publishing your search results in OpenSearch™ format will draw more people to your content, by exposing it to a [...]

By Casey | Posted in Libraries & Networked Information | Comments (2)

Technology Scouts At AALL

July 11, 2006 – 12:59 pm

I’m honored to join Katie Bauer, of Yale University Library, in a program coordinated by Mary Jane Kelsey, of Yale Law’s Lillian Goldman Library.
The full title of our program is Technology Scouts: how to keep your library and ILS current in the IT world (H-4, 4PM Tuesday, room 274). My portion of the presentation [...]

By Casey | Posted in Libraries & Networked Information | Comments (0)

OPAC Web Services Should Be Like Amazon Web Services

November 30, 2005 – 3:25 pm

No, I’m not talking about the interface our users see in the web browser — there’s enough argument about that — I’m talking about web services, the technologies that form much of the infrastructure for Web 2.0.
Once upon a time, the technology that displayed a set of data, let’s say catalog records, was inextricably [...]

By Casey | Posted in Libraries & Networked Information, Technology | Comments (6)

Wikipedia API?

August 21, 2005 – 11:39 pm

I want Wikipedia to have an API, but it doesn’t. Some web searching turned up Gina Trapani’s WikipedizeText, but that still wasn’t exactly what I wanted. A note in the source code, however, put me back on the trail to the Wikipedia database downloads, and while that’s not what I want, I did learn that [...]

By Casey | Posted in Libraries & Networked Information, Technology | Comments (9)

Google Maps Rock, The Google Maps API Rocks More

July 1, 2005 – 8:26 pm

We don’t need to hack Google Maps anymore. Now that Google has released a public maps API, we can make more reliable map-dependent apps (which will now have better browser compatibility, thank you). Within a few minutes of signing up for a maps API key I had put together the following of the Nevada Test [...]

By Casey | Posted in Technology | Comments (96)

Geolocating The News

June 15, 2005 – 1:07 am

Last week I got excited about the as-yet unreleased geolocation API for BBC Backstage. Now Larry D. Larsen of the Poynter Institute is excited too. In a post titled The Future of News (… Hint: GPS) he talks about putting news in geographic context with geolocation tags.
Eventually, clicking an article in a news/Google Map hybrid [...]

By Casey | Posted in Libraries & Networked Information, Technology | Comments (5)

BBC Backstage Is Gonna Rock (Once They Release The APIs)

June 8, 2005 – 1:32 am

The APIs aren’t yet out, but the BBC has already won me over with their Backstage BBC concept. Of course, I’m a fan of anything with an API, but the real deal here is that it appears they’re planning on releasing a “query by geo-location data” API — and I’m all a gaga about about [...]

By Casey | Posted in Libraries & Networked Information, Technology | Comments (0)

On The Media Does Copyright Issue

June 6, 2005 – 1:40 am

I had just sat down to post a note about an interview with J.D. Lasica in On The Media (listen to MP3) this week when I found David Rothman beat me to it. The interview was one of the better treatments of copyright issues that’s I’ve heard/seen in the (relatively-) popular media.
Here’s the summary from [...]

By Casey | Posted in Copyrights & Intellectual Property | Comments (1)

Of WordPress Tags, Keywords, XML-RPC, and the MovableType API

May 28, 2005 – 11:58 pm

WordPress’s XML-RPC support looks pretty good. Heck, it supports a half dozen APIs and works well with ecto … except for tag support, which is my only complaint with it so far.
The Movable Type API supports a “keywords” field that I’m thinking can be hijacked as a “tags” field instead, but while ecto sends the [...]

By Casey | Posted in Books, Movies, Music | Comments (3)