China Cracks Down on Blogs, Search Engines

From Breitbart.com

"China encourages Internet use for business and education but tries to block access to obscene or subversive material. It has the world's second-biggest population of Internet users after the United States, with 111 million people online."

-Miguel

Scan This Book!

From The New York Times:

In several dozen nondescript office buildings around the world, thousands of hourly workers bend over table-top scanners and haul dusty books into high-tech scanning booths. They are assembling the universal library page by page.

-Miguel

User-Driven Social Content Sites

Digg is all about user powered content. Every article on digg is submitted and voted on by the digg community. Share, discover, bookmark, and promote the news that's important to you!

From the site:

"Digg is a user driven social content website. Ok, so what the heck does that mean? Well, everything on digg is submitted by the digg user community (that would be you). After you submit content, other digg users read your submission and digg what they like best. If your story rocks and receives enough diggs, it is promoted to the front page for the millions of digg visitors to see.

What can you do as a digg user? Lots. Every digg user can digg (help promote), bury (help remove spam), and comment on stories... you can even digg and bury comments you like or dislike. Digg also allows you to track your friends' activity throughout the site — want to share a video or news story with a friend? Digg it!"

popurls.com - popular urls to the latest web buzz

From Federated Media Publishing:

"Thomas Marban's popurls.com | popular urls to the latest web buzz, is the dashboard for the hive mind — a single page that replaces the need to directly read Digg, Delicious, Flickr, Wired, Slashdot, NewsVine, Metafilter, Youtube and many other web-buzz related sites. With up-to-the-minute headlines presented in a minimalistic two-flavor design one can scan the latest headlines of what the web collectively thinks is either popular or interesting. A simple mouse over the headline will cleverly reveal a small box of expanded text on the article. Popurls ranks top for terms like "news" on bookmarking services and has a loyal and web-savvy readership."

-Miguel

What Was Missing At Yearly Kos

From In These Times

"YearlyKos made it clear that the netroots is a vanguard—a smart, savvy, compassionate and courageous vanguard, but a vanguard nonetheless. There’s nothing wrong with vanguards, but they do not a majority make."

This article touches on some important aspects of the blogosphere, its potential political impact and future. There's always room for improvement, and many ways that bloggers can and will effect progressive politics in the USA.

-Miguel

Google Librarian Newsletter

The fourth issue of the Google Librarian Newsletter is now available.

There are some interesting articles, such as:

"Google Book Search and libraries"

"A new tool for genealogical research"

And some free downloadable posters:

Anatomy of a Search (How online search works)

Discover Buried Treasure (How to find a book using Google Book Search)

-Miguel

Social Networking Sites Continue to Attract Record Numbers as Myspace.Com Surpasses 50 Million U.S. Visitors in May

From comScore Networks:

“The popularity of social networking is not expected to wane in the near future”

-Miguel

Plagiarism and Google generation under spotlight

From the UK's Guardian:

"postmodern, eclectic, Google-generationists, Wikipediasts, who don't necessarily recognise the concepts of authorships/ownerships"

-Miguel

Growing Wikipedia Revises Its 'Anyone Can Edit' Policy

From the NY Times - you'll have to log in to use the link, or get it through ProQuest or at your library.

In response to well-publicized problems with some entries, the online encyclopedia is exercising more editorial control.

-Miguel

S5 Web Slide Show

For any of you who saw our presentation, rather than powerpoint we used a free open-source product called S5. It provides an elegant and dynamic presentation format. Check it out at http://www.meyerweb.com/eric/tools/s5/

Paul

The RFID Hacking Underground

From Wired:

"They can steal your smartcard, lift your passport, jack your car, even clone the chip in your arm. And you won't feel a thing. 5 tales from the RFID-hacking underground."

This is an interesting article examining some of the weaknesses in current RFID architecture, and has a library specific example looking at the Oakland Public Library's implementation of RFIDs and the "Lib~Chip" vendor Libramation.

-Miguel

Welcome

I want to welcome everyone to the Grassroots Librarian blog, and pass along a couple of interesting resources. The first is the January 2006 issue of Library Trends, which is entitled "The Library Blog: Innovative Idea or Wasted Words". The author, Steven Bell, director of the Paul J Gutman Library at Philadelphia University has some interesting information about library blogs, and also about RSS to HTML technology, allowing RSS feed to translate into educational software such as Blackboard.

On a much different note, an article in the Monday, June 12 Wall Street Journal details the trials and successes of a Chinese blogger, Zou Tao, in a mini revolt against property values and prices in Shenzen and other locations. The article is entitled "Blogger Hits Home by Urging Boycott of Chinese Property".
Blog on!

Paul

Starting Over

Paul and I are migrating the grassrootsloex blog over to this one so that we can both access it. You'll see all seven original posts from grassrootsloex below.

The blog I originally set up for the LOEX conference used my personal Blogger account/password (for reasons of the time constraints during the presentation). We both think this is a valuable forum and want to continue it, but with both of use being able to participate.

Pentagon Sets Its Sights on Social Networking Websites

From New Scientist:

"New Scientist has discovered that Pentagon's National Security Agency, which specialises in eavesdropping and code-breaking, is funding research into the mass harvesting of the information that people post about themselves on social networks. And it could harness advances in internet technology - specifically the forthcoming "semantic web" championed by the web standards organisation W3C - to combine data from social networking websites with details such as banking, retail and property records, allowing the NSA to build extensive, all-embracing personal profiles of individuals."

-Miguel

US Plans to 'Fight the Net' Revealed

From BBC News:

Bloggers Beware

"A newly declassified document gives a fascinating glimpse into the US military's plans for "information operations" - from psychological operations, to attacks on hostile computer networks."

And here's a link to a PDF of the report mentioned in this article: Information Operations Roadmap.

-Miguel

ARDA

Information Technology Advanced Research and Development Activity.

Also from the New Scientist article:

"According to a report entitled Data Mining and Homeland Security, published by the Congressional Research Service in January, ARDA's role is to spend NSA money on research that can "solve some of the most critical problems facing the US intelligence community". Chief among ARDA's aims is to make sense of the massive amounts of data the NSA collects - some of its sources grow by around 4 million gigabytes a month."

Note: ARDA's website was taken down in 2005. This organization has since been replace by the Disrputive Technology Office.

-Miguel

Semantic Analytics on Social Networks

This paper is noted in the article below. Click here to get a PDF of it.

From the New Scientist article:

"That paper, entitled Semantic Analytics on Social Networks, by a research team led by Amit Sheth of the University of Georgia in Athens and Anupam Joshi of the University of Maryland in Baltimore reveals how data from online social networks and other databases can be combined to uncover facts about people. The footnote said the work was part-funded by an organisation called ARDA."

-Miguel

Links

If you look on the top right side of this blog you'll find a list of links to the blogs discussed during our presentation, as well as links to other resources mentioned in a seperate list below - in the order discussed during the presentation within each category. How's that for organized?

-Miguel

Last Day @ LOEX Hawaii

I've really enjoyed this conference (my first as a librarian). It was great to present on a topic I'm deeply interested in for a field I'm passionate about. I met many interesting people and had some great conversations on topics ranging from using blogs to facilitate communication between students in the U.S. and the Middle East to the merits of moving back to Eugene, OR. The presentations I saw were all valuable in their many diverse ways.

What a wonderful place to have a conference too - though highly distracting for a first time visitor. I have a late flight out tomorrow so get to experience the real world here for one more day. Mahalo!

-Miguel

Hello LOEXers!

I'm writing from the LOEX 2006 Conference in Hawaii. Paul Piper and I finished our presentation on grassroots information use on blogs and wikis today. We had more than 45 minutes worth of material, and hope to continue our discussion with you, our attendees, and anyone else from the conference or other interested parties.

Please use the comments section to bring up any topics you'd like to talk about or any questions you've come up with since the presentation. I'll post new entries on those topics and we can continue the conversation through the comments feature for each topic. This is a chance to continue our learning and collaboration - I hope it proves valuable and interesting for you.

We'll also post occasional observations or thoughts about using blogs and wikis in both the library and learning environment. Mahalo!

-Miguel