Hey, PodCamp Boston is this weekend. I can’t go, but Sean M. Brown will be and he’s looking for librarians to join him.
Search Trends vs Community Standards
Via MotherJones: Pensacola residents Clinton Raymond McCowen and Kevin Patrick Stevens, producers of a very NSFW website last week faced a judge in an obscenity and racketeering trial for their work. The interesting thing? The defense planned to use Google search trends to demonstrate community standards. “Time and time again you’ll have jurors sitting on […] » about 200 words
Where Do They Find The Time?
Clay Shirky recently posted (wayback) a transcript of his Web 2.0 Expo keynote. …If you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project — every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in — that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million […] » about 500 words
Anglia Ruskin University Faces Criticism 2.0
Anglia Ruskin University is in Cambridge, but it’s not Cambridge University. It’s likely that none of us would even know of Anglia Ruskin‘s existence if it wasn’t for Naomi Sugai, but she’s not interested in promoting the school.
She’s got complaints, she’s fed up, and she’s taking her case to YouTube.
Well, she took her case to YouTube, and then she got suspended. The video that’s up now doesn’t seem suspension-worthy, but the Telegraph story suggests there’s a different version that may slander an ARU administrator, and that’s the reason ARU gives for suspending her.
SWIFT: Another Ham Handed Attempt At Social Networking
All yesterday and this morning I’ve been seeing tweets about SWIFT, so I finally googled it to see what it was about. The service promises to help organize conferences in some new 2.0 way, but it looks to be about as preposterous a social network as WalMart’s aborted 2006 attempt at copying MySpace. There are […] » about 300 words
Evil Google
Aaron Swartz‘s Bubble City, Chapter 8:
He sent the report to his superior and wandered off for a bit to dwell on the power he had as a faceless person deep inside an office park in Mountain View to know every detail of another person’s life. He wondered what it would be like if he came across that person on the street, he would know every detail of his life, his household budget, the secrets he confided over IM, even what he looked like naked.
Google PageRank Is/Is Not/Is All Machine Generated
Google’s always been in the awkward position of claiming that PageRank is algorithmic, not editorial, while also explaining that they’re constantly adjusting their algorithms to ensure that PageRank reflects editorial judgments of quality. Here’s a peek inside the machine.
Where The Previews Are
I announced yesterday Scriblio‘s integration of Google’s new book viewability API that links to full text, previews, or additional book information (depending on copyright status and publisher foresight). Now that it’s live with Plymouth’s full catalog, I spent a moment browsing the collection and taking note of what books had what. I get no preview […] » about 300 words
Scriblio Integrates Google Book Search Links
(crossposted at Scriblio.net) Using the newly released book viewability API in Google Book Search, Plymouth State University’s Lamson Library and Learning Commons is one of the first libraries to move beyond simply listing their books online and open them up to reading and searching via the web. Take a look at how this works with […] » about 200 words
Warming
If this doesn’t warm your heart, check to see that it’s not made of stone.
Netflix for Audio Books
Netflix for audio books: Simply Audiobooks. Though it makes me wonder why we don’t say “like a library for audiobooks where they send you the stuff you want.”
Quaint vs. Libraries
This Slashdot post asks the same question a lot of people do: “can libraries be saved from the internet?” Slate has an interesting photo essay exploring the question of how to build a public library in the age of Google, Wikipedia, and Kindle. The grand old reading rooms and stacks of past civic monuments are […] » about 400 words
Scriblio Feature: Text This To Me
Take note of the “New Feature: Text this to your cellphone” line above. Adam Brin of Tricollege Libraries explained that the “text this to me” feature he built to send location information about items in the library catalog as text messages to a user’s cell phone is being used as many as 60 times a […] » about 100 words
Apache Reverse Proxy
Apache mod_proxy does most of the work, Nick Kew’s howto on running a reverse proxy with Apache explains it. Now, can I tack on some authentication and make it replace III’s WAM or EZproxy?
Western North Carolina Library Network’s Classification Outline
Western North Carolina Library Network‘s LC outline is full of detail.
LC outline, classification, Western North Carolina Library Network, libraries
Looking ahead from 2008: top tech trends
I’m excited and honored to be joining Meredith Farkas and David J. Fiander in a roundtable discussion of Top Tech Trends, an OLITA program at Superconference. We’ve made a pact not to share our trends with each other in advance, so it’ll be interesting to see how much overlap… » about 1100 words
OLA Superconference Presentation: Scriblio
I’m honored to be invited to the Ontario Library Association Superconference to present my work on Scriblio today (session #1329). A PDF of my slides is online. Scriblio has had about a year of use in production at each of three sites, and the lessons suggest that Web 2.0 technologies really do work for libraries. […] » about 200 words
What Do Coots Eat?
Turns out that coots are omnivorous, but prefer plant matter. Why.
LCSH News: “Mountain Biking” Replaces “All Terrain Cycling”
Even though mountain bike sales and participation are down (as a percentage of market share, biking has been declining for ten years), the Library of Congress has just issued a directive to change the subject heading from “All Terrain Cycling” to “Mountain Biking.” The term was apparently first coined by Charlie Kelly and Gary Fisher in 1979.
Stephen King Doesn’t Hate Kindle
Stephen King writes at Entertainment Weekly.com that he doesn’t hate the Kindle:
Will Kindles replace books? No. And not just because books furnish a room, either. There’s a permanence to books that underlines the importance of the ideas and the stories we find inside them; books solidify an otherwise fragile medium.
But can a Kindle enrich any reader’s life? My own experience — so far limited to 1.5 books, I’ll admit — suggests that it can. For a while I was very aware that I was looking at a screen and bopping a button instead of turning pages. Then the story simply swallowed me, as the good ones always do. I wasn’t thinking about my Kindle anymore; I was rooting for someone to stop the evil Lady Powerstock. It became about the message instead of the medium, and that’s the way it’s supposed to be.
Introducing Phonepedia, a Voice-Activated Wikipedia Mashup
The Phonepedia concept is simple: take Wikipedia’s rich content and add voice recognition. It’s as easy as calling a number and asking your question, the answer will be returned via SMS and email. Go ahead and try it for yourself. The voice recognition is powered by Jott, and thanks are due to Heidi for writing […] » about 400 words
Like Mr. Ranganathong said…
Like Mr. Ranganathong said: “The intellect cannot be tied down with a decimal thong.” (via)
Is Facebook Really The Point?
A post to Web4lib alerted me to this U Mich survey about libraries in social networks (blog post) that finds 77% of students don’t care for or want libraries in Facebook or MySpace. the biggest reason being that they feel the current methods (in-person, email, IM) are more than sufficient. 14% said no because they […] » about 500 words
How Do I Create A Semantic Web Site?
A member of the Web4lib mail list asked: How do I create a semantic web site? I know I have to use either RDF or OWL but do I use either of these to create a mark up language which I then use to create the web site or, with the semantic web do we […] » about 700 words
Free Report On Accessible Web Design From Jakob Nielsen
Free from Nielsen Norman Group: Beyond ALT Text, Making the Web Easy to Use for Users With Disabilities, a report on web design for users with disabilities. “Seventy-five best practices for design of websites and intranets, based on usability studies with people who use assistive technology” According to the blog post, usability is three times better for non-disabled users.