Group items tagged

"There's two things you can do right now to lose most of your privacy. Share everything that comes to mind on Facebook and search everything that comes to mind on Google. I don't want to single out Google or Facebook but they're the best representatives of two common ways for online companies to commercialise you."

Warning: Has some bad language.

More seriously, I've moved my feeds to collected.info. I have liked it so far; I'll even admit that it's easier on the eye than Google Reader.

That is soooo cool! I want a pair.

Took less than 24 hours for some genius to come up with this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3TAOYXT840

That actually made me LOL! Thanks for that. ;)

Suck it Oracle.

Yay for open access! CBC Global Header Navigation Andraka used free online science papers to invent an award-winning pancreatic cancer testing procedure. (YouTube / Channel Intel) Fifteen-year-old Jack Andraka took home top science fair honours this year for the development of a cancer-testing method found to be 168 times faster, 26,000 times cheaper and 400 times more sensitive than the current gold-medal standard.

A twofold interest in this article, one that we forget we don't own or manage website content services. With older software installed on a PC we could continue as long as it was supported or useful, an online service can simply be pulled. The other is that with multiple sources and sites now that aggregate material RSS feeds may finally be declining in popularity and use.

In light of Meebo (NOT Google Reader, ahem) biting the dust, Becky Yoose meditates on having contingency plans. Doing occasional third-party application audits is a good idea.

Both Google and a Web security company called Umbrella Security Labs are indicating that the entire country of Syria was severed from the Internet on May 7 at 2:45 p.m.

The article is interesting for what it gets wrong and for what it brings up. The phrase "Boise Public Library's new Enterprise Discover System, which was funded by a consortium of more than 15 Idaho libraries" makes it sound like this was a home grown discovery system, but it's actually Sirsi-Dynix's Enterprise system. It's interesting because it's one of the first general news articles I've seen showing awareness of a discovery service, which means they are gradually filtering their way into the public realm of what libraries are supposed to be about.

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).

This works amazingly well. The javascript we use to send text messages in the webpacs went from 8.5k to 4.3k. Also this works to combine multiple scripts and optimize them all together.

This is an awesome tool I saw at the Evergreen conference. I used it on the Merlin git repo which was cool to see but since everything is in a flat directory structure and it's mostly Jessica (and a little bit me) committing it's not nearly as cool as some of the videos from other projects.

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.

This is absolutely amazing. The action starts around 4:45 but you've gotta watch till the end.

An interesting page from an interactive News Museum that shows the daily front pages from approximately 900 newspapers worldwide. While not as useful as Google as it doesn't include full articles and the archive is only selected "of interest" topics it does give a quick view of what is important in the world today.

With eBooks having taken off in the past few years I was curious about the current status of Project Gutenberg, the original resource of online books. Starting in 1971 with the Declaration of Independence Gutenberg initially relied on manually typing in royalty free books into a text format. The project is still continuing, but the founder died last year and as of July 8th the archive is only 40,000 books, an almost miniscule number compared to the digitization efforts of Google.

Paul Otlet was a Belgian inventor who had several visionary ideas, such as a "World City" which would be a gathering of all the leading institutions of the world that would radiate knowledge and the Universal Decimal Classification scheme which is still used in some libraries. He also had a concept in 1934 for a radiated library that was in some ways a precursor to the Internet. It was limited by the technology he knew at the time, and consisted of a center where users would call in to ask for research and information to be displayed, which would then be displayed on a television screen. Aside from the need to call in some of his concepts are similar to early community access cable television.

I would say this is still more of a niche interest than an "antidote," but it does say something that people would still prefer to use the Espresso Book Machine and publish a physical copy of a book and it still sells rather than create it as an eBook on Amazon or Google Books. Probably the most useful aspect is for small independent booksellers to maintain a large accessible inventory but only keep and produce a small physical supply as needed, which could also apply to libraries--however not mention in the the articles is these units also have a hefty price tag of over $100,000.

Way to go Yahoo! At a time when most people have already forgotten your company still exists... release a security problem. Any press is good press, right?