Group items tagged

An interesting article covering some of the many problems in in developing consistency and open standards among discovery services. Notably the article mentions the Open Discovery Initiative and also talks about indexing concerns and resource coverage.

A sort article about how some web users are going to anonymous web search engines after the revelations about the widespread snooping of the NSA.

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.

Most exciting article I've read about responsive web design!

An interesting web vendor that is offering interactive textbooks, which is in some ways the repackaging of the original "multimedia" CD-ROM's of the early 1990's, but now offered as a "book." They claim to be partnered with McGraw-Hill and Pearson, and it looks like a user needs to have a perpetual account to use their material although offline access is allowed. Some features such as streaming video and music are separate from the book so they are not true stand alone files, and purchasing a book as an app is currently only for a handful of titles. The list price of several of the books is very steep, and my main concern is how well the multimedia is integrated with the text and if there is any ability to share or transfer a license, which I can't find listed in their website FAQ.

The two PDF files linked on the pages are reports from the House of Commons about the state and future of libraries in the United Kingdom. One thing I found concerning was how the operation of many libraries has been turned over from Councils to community volunteers.

A web review complaining about the current state of online reviews or products and places, that often rather than being an overall assessment or comprehensive review are often a few quick sentences based on a singular experience.

A hack you can stick in your browser window to make any web page Katamari Damacy!

Can you repost the link? A giant ball just rolled over this page and now it's gone :(

A related concept to T-Pen, but focused more on collecting together references, summary, bibliography, and related information from manuscripts in the Parker Library at Corpus Christi Cambridge. It allows material that ordinarily would have to be handled with care or viewed from a microfilm or facsimile copy to be used with no fear of damage and considerably enhanced by the additional reference material.

A taped college lecture about how large scale social media has connected millions of people, but many of the promises of the early Internet have been lost, such as people owning their own identities and websites.

An interesting although perhaps idealistic view of what could happen. The author contends that Google faltered in paying and making arrangements with publishers rather than defending Book Search as fair use, although I'd argue it led directly to the Google Play store for selling media including books. Libraries cooperating to make a Digital Public Library is to me a much more agreeable plan than getting materials digitized and put online by means of a corporation.

Review of Google's new Knowledge Graph search.

I think this is a cool and worthwhile improvement, but where the article makes a comparison to Wolfram Alpha I have to disagree. Google's knowledge engine is exactly the type of thing you get to do with the semantic web - and it's awesome - but it's not a *computational* knowledge engine like WA. If you google "The moon" you get some useful information about it including it's distance. But the distance there is just some number pulled from some resource. WA /calculates/ the distance to the moon at the exact moment of your search. Not to say WA is better - it's just different. WA has an entry for Leonardo da Vinci, and has a lot of the same facts as Google does - but it doesn't really have much of a capacity to show you anything related to him. Anyway, cool new feature that I'd noticed and used already but hadn't actually heard mention of. One of those things that Google just kinda slipped in that works.

A collection of interesting things on the web via MOBIUS staff. So this is my first posting so we'll see if this works. I thought this article was a nice little summary of the virtual conference. Also we need a Mario lamp!

You bookmarked the diigo page and not the article ;)

Of course I meant to do that. I think this is a really great resource and we should use it some time . . .oh wait we already do. I tried reposting we'll see if that works.