Group items tagged

A somewhat limited article about "ethnic cleansing" on the Internet. What I can agree with is the prospect of countries making their own versions of popular websites such as Youtube, the larger question that has been debated since the beginning of the Internet is who should decide about material outside the borders of a country that it may still try to control.

Some relevant questions are asked about the recently unveiled PRISM Internet monitoring program of the NSA.

An interesting perspective on the unfolding NSA scandals, regarding how much of the massive surveillance is actually legal.

An interesting article about how the Warsaw Ghetto in World War Two was carefully documented and stored in metal milk cans in the foundations of buildings; the largest cache of which still has not been found.

Really cool article that looks at : "Espresso Book Machines can offer two kinds of services: print-on-demand of any title available through the EspressNet database (which includes Google Books, the Internet Archive, all of Ingram's partnered publishers, and more) and self-­publishing services for authors and small publishers."

I sincerely love the idea of these book machines and have ever since they've become available. I don't know why every library doesn't have one (aside from cost).

I think I'd heard of the Digital Public Library of America; I wonder if it will be able to get past the issues Google faced.

I think the article is right that a non-profit organization will get farther than Google did. It will also be nice to have an organization outside of the ALA that will make a stand on the copyright issues involved in digitization.

This is an interesting article about a course called "Lying About the Past" run by T. Mills Kelly at George Mason University. He encourages his students to make fictitious stories up to show how readily people will accept things as the truth, such as a lost pirate or a lost recipe for a historic beer. This angers some people but shows how quickly wrong information can spread and be accepted. In particular the article notes the one website that caught the false stories was Reddit, where a centralized exchange of information is encouraged and once doubts were voiced the material was verified by several people, as opposed to Wikipedia where the material is controlled by a minority of editors and most users are passive readers.

The chart in this article shows an interesting anomaly. Initially it appears that print ads only take up a small amount of a user's attention, yet the money spent on those ads is considerably more than all other media. However, another chart shows the revenue per user for newspapers is almost 10 times that of Google and 50-100 times that of several websites, so there's a convincing argument that advertisers still see print as a viable medium.

A look at the logistics how an open access journal may be set up-- as you can see, it's both cheap and easy, which which may give pause to some people who would otherwise submit articles.  For that reason, the first thing that Eve stresses is to place high priority on the quality of your board and reviewers, to give your new title some legitimacy.

Discusses the state of the humanities in education (secondary and higher). Although the article is about three years old, I find a great deal of relevance here. Slouka discusses the commodifcation of education, how America's educational system is being altered to provide "product" for business, rather than critically thinking citizens.

Is the Social Web being integrated into our public libraries? This installment in ReadWriteWeb's Social Books series aims to find out.

Well, this is ambitious and I imagine will be very time-consuming.  It's a good resource guide to the IFLA (International Federation of Library Associations)'s attempt to liberalize copyright laws on an international scale.

A fairly interesting read how copyright has diminished the availability of books from 1923 (the start of copyright protections for titles), so there is a large gap of material from before then that is out of copyright and widely available, and currently published material. However, material in between those times is scarce. However numbers can be deceiving as these are books in current publication, not available used copies, and it would make sense that copyrighted material not widely in demand would have low publication numbers.

A preview of an upcoming publication it doesn't necessarily appear to cover any new ground but does describe the stages in how a disruptive technology that changes an industry is perceived and takes effect.

An ambitious plan for Norway to scan all printed material in Norwegian in about 15 years, based on how copies of any new book are to be deposited in the national library and therefore by scanning the entire national library all materials will be digitized.

A cautionary story about something that has come up before, namely relying so strongly in machines that when a human needs to intervene they either don't know what to do or end up making what should be a fixable situation into a disaster. Examples given include airline pilots who respond wrongly to a warning from the airplane, and hunters who had a GPS fail and don't know how to find their way home without it.