Grassroots Librarian

Elsevier Petition

2007-04-19T11:27:00.000-07:00

From the site:

"Reed Elsevier's main business is academic and medical publishing, but, through a subsidiary company, they help run international arms fairs. These include DSEi, one of the world's largest arms fairs. Reed Elsevier don't see any contradiction between facilitating the sale of arms and either their medical publishing or the corporate social responsibility commitments they've made. We do."

Follow the link to get more information and sign the petition.

-Miguel

28% of Online Americans Have Used the Internet to Tag Content

2007-02-02T14:34:00.000-08:00

This is an intersting report looking at the growth of tagging by online users in the U.S.

From the PEW/INTERNET site:

"Just as the internet allows users to create and share their own media, it is also enabling them to organize digital material their own way, rather than relying on pre-existing formats of classifying information.

A December 2006 survey has found that 28% of internet users have tagged or categorized content online such as photos, news stories or blog posts. On a typical day online, 7% of internet users say they tag or categorize online content.

The report features an interview with David Weinberger, a prominent blogger and fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society."

-Miguel

Librarian Central Blog

2007-01-18T08:08:00.000-08:00

The Google Librarian Newsletter has switched over to a blog format. Here's the text from the email announcement I received yesterday.

"I'm pleased to say that today, we're implementing one of your biggest requests. When we asked how we could improve the Google Librarian Newsletter, many of you said, "Make it a blog!" or "Send more up-to-date information." We've taken your feedback to heart, and we're doing just that. Starting today, the Librarian Center will make its home at http://librariancentral.blogspot.com, where you'll find the latest Google news, updates, and tips relevant to the librarian community. The blog includes links to the Newsletter Archive, the Your Stories page, and the Tools and Videos sections. And of course, we'll continue to add to these pages and develop new features.

We're excited about communicating Google's product and feature launches to you as they happen. You can even sign up to receive these blog posts by email, or choose to read them from your Google Personalized Homepage or Google Reader (or your preferred blog reader). For those of you who still prefer to hear from us on a quarterly basis, we'll continue to send out the Librarian Newsletter, which will include the "best of" the previous months' blog posts. As with many Google launches, consider this blog a beta test, open to refinements and changes over time. We'll be looking closely at your feedback, so please let us know what you think."

-Miguel

Libworm

2006-12-05T13:28:00.000-08:00

From the site:

"Search the Biblioblogosphere and Beyond... the librarian RSS engine - over 1000 RSS feeds go in, exactly what you need comes out!"

From the FAQ:

"What is LibWorm?
LibWorm is intended to be a search engine, a professional development tool, and a current awareness tool for people who work in libraries or care about libraries.

How does LibWorm work?
LibWorm collects updates from about 1400 RSS feeds (and growing). The contents of these feeds are then available for searching, and search results can themselves be output as an RSS feed that the user can subscribe to either in his/her favourite aggregator or in LibWorm's built-in aggregator."

Check out Medworm too!

-Miguel

We Are Smarter Than Me

2006-11-30T09:05:00.000-08:00

This is a wiki-based collaboration/experiment to write a business book. From the site:

"Be an author of the first networked book on business. Together we will write the book on how the emergence of community and social networks will change the future rules of business. Collaborate with authors from MIT, Wharton, and thousands of professionals from around the world. See your name in print when the book is published next fall by Pearson Publishing. Meet your co-authors in March, 2007 in Las Vegas at the Community 2.0 event."

-Miguel

Healia

2006-11-30T07:56:00.000-08:00

Here's a search engine (in beta) devoted to health. From the site:

"Healia is the premier consumer health search engine for finding high quality and personalized health information on the Web. It serves as an independent, unbiased gateway to the highest quality health information resources. We engineered Healia primarily with consumers and patients in mind but health professionals and researchers will also find it useful."

-Miguel

psiphon

2006-11-29T15:32:00.000-08:00

From the site:

"psiphon is a human rights software project developed by the Citizen Lab at the Munk Centre for International Studies that allows citizens in uncensored countries to provide unfettered access to the Net through their home computers to friends and family members who live behind firewalls of states that censor"

-Miguel

Collarity

2006-11-14T08:45:00.000-08:00

This community based search engine ties results into a user's and community's interests. If you have an account you can sign in and have the results tailored to your personal preferences and history. Interesting way to get relevance into the results.

-Miguel

Digital Maoism: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism

2006-11-13T08:27:00.000-08:00

Here's an article by Jaron Lanier, who always has an interesting perspective. I've been thinking about collectivism a bit lately, having had my first experience of it with a homeschool collective, but I'm still not sure what a collective is. I think there are probably many varieties of collectivism. It's something I want to study a bit more.

Here's the intro to the article:

"The hive mind is for the most part stupid and boring. Why pay attention to it?

The problem is in the way the Wikipedia has come to be regarded and used; how it's been elevated to such importance so quickly. And that is part of the larger pattern of the appeal of a new online collectivism that is nothing less than a resurgence of the idea that the collective is all-wise, that it is desirable to have influence concentrated in a bottleneck that can channel the collective with the most verity and force. This is different from representative democracy, or meritocracy. This idea has had dreadful consequences when thrust upon us from the extreme Right or the extreme Left in various historical periods. The fact that it's now being re-introduced today by prominent technologists and futurists, people who in many cases I know and like, doesn't make it any less dangerous."

-Miguel

Squidoo

2006-10-25T09:34:00.000-07:00

From the site:

"Squidoo: SKWID-OO, n. v., adj., addiction. 1) thousands of people creating a handbuilt catalog of the best stuff online 2) a free and fun way to make your own page and get traffic 3) a place to find what you're looking for, fast."

This looks like an interesting site/model for information finding and building. I'm going to be looking into this seriously over the next few days.

-Miguel

SearchMash

2006-10-03T16:28:00.000-07:00

From Google Operating System:

"Search results are numbered and you can reorder them. Clicking on the green URL, you'll see a list of options like "cached copy", "similar sites". You don't have click on the search box to type your query. There is no search button, you just have to type enter. Google shows the number of visible search results in the top right corner."

-Miguel

BuzzLogic calculates social media influence

2006-10-02T15:48:00.000-07:00

From ZDNet.com:

"Delivered as an on demand software service, BuzzLogic looks at content relevance, using full text analysis; the number of messages from a certain publisher over time; traffic, including users referred by influencers and total number of pages views; and attention to messages via link analysis, including temporal data and total number of inbound links."

-Miguel

Omgili

2006-08-22T14:11:00.000-07:00

From the site:

"Omgili (Beta) is a search engine designed to index web-based discussion forums. Omgili's unique algorithm analyzes forums not as a simple web page, but as an active discussion with a title, topic and replies.

Omgili was created in order to separate ordinary web pages from information rich discussion forums. The information contained in online forums is typically presented in a "question and answer" or debate style format. How is this significant?

Many times you will have a question that has already been answered. Using Omgili, you can avoid posting already asked questions and quickly find your answer. Unlike ordinary search engines that prioritize articles and edited web pages, Omgili only indexes discussion forums. Using Omgili's advanced search capabilities you can choose to independently search titles, topics or just the replies of a discussion."

-Miguel

Dabble

2006-08-16T14:37:00.000-07:00

From the site:

"Dabble's mission is to help you find and collect videos from all over the web, no matter where they are hosted.

What does this mean? Videos get put on the web in lots of different ways: uploaded from people's home computers, mobile phones, and digital cameras, as well as professionally produced and posted by the company that made them (or others who enjoy them).

With all of these different sources for online video, we knew people would need one place where they could collect videos from all over the web. Dabble gathers video data from hundreds of hosting sites, as well as from tens of thousands of other websites. Dabble keeps a record of where web videos are located, descriptions about the video, who made it, what it's about, how popular it is, and so on.

This record, called "metadata", makes it easy to search and find video. The community of Dabble members adds details and notes, correcting mistakes, and sharing what is valuable to them about the media, enhancing the metadata in a massive team effort that goes far beyond what any one site can do alone."

-Miguel

Talking With Talis

2006-08-09T11:33:00.000-07:00

"Listen to conversations with thought-leaders at the interface between Web 2.0, Libraries, and the Semantic Web..."

-Miguel

Berners-Lee on the read/write web

2006-08-09T08:27:00.000-07:00

From BBC News:

"In August 1991, Sir Tim Berners-Lee created the first website. Fourteen years on, he tells BBC Newsnight's Mark Lawson how blogging is closer to his original idea about a read/write web."

-Miguel

Library 2.0 Theory: Web 2.0 and Its Implications for Libraries

2006-08-03T08:17:00.000-07:00

From Webology:

"This article posits a definition and theory for "Library 2.0". It suggests that recent thinking describing the changing Web as "Web 2.0" will have substantial implications for libraries, and recognizes that while these implications keep very close to the history and mission of libraries, they still necessitate a new paradigm for librarianship. The paper applies the theory and definition to the practice of librarianship, specifically addressing how Web 2.0 technologies such as synchronous messaging and streaming media, blogs, wikis, social networks, tagging, RSS feeds, and mashups might intimate changes in how libraries provide access to their collections and user support for that access."

-Miguel

Search 2.0 vs Traditional Search, Part 1 and 2

2006-07-26T16:25:00.000-07:00

Great write up of some emerging search ideas for the Web 2.0 environment.

From Read/WriteWeb:

"In our previous post we coined the term "Search 2.0", in order to compare third-generation search technologies (of, or pertaining to, the current era of social web) with traditional search engines - to see where the future of search lies.

Even if some of the startups we're profiling in this series may not survive the next Internet bust, the underlying ideas are evolutionary and have proven to be effective so far. We think the ideas showcased by these new social search apps are worth embracing, to ensure the future growth of the search industry. And, as we note at the end of this post, the big search companies (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft) think so too...

Here then are some further profiles of search 2.0 apps, followed by our analysis of where the search industry is headed."

Part 1

Part 2

-Miguel

Cry Bias, and Let Slip the Blogs of War

2006-07-26T16:03:00.001-07:00

From The Wall Street Journal:

"J.P. Borda started a Web log during his 2004 National Guard deployment in Afghanistan to keep in touch with his family. But when he got home, he decided it was the mainstream media that was out of touch with the war.

"You hear so much about what's going wrong," he says. "It gets hard to hear after a while when there's so much good going on."

Mr. Borda, a specialist, read other soldiers' blogs and found he wasn't alone. Hundreds of other troops and veterans were blogging world-wide, and many focused on a common enemy: journalists."

-Miguel

Digg Labs / Stack & Swarm

2006-07-26T16:03:00.000-07:00

As visualizations of information these are pretty nifty tools. I'll have to play around with them a bit to see how they work, but it's a nice way to quickly see rankings/relevancy in the Digg community.

From Digg Labs:

"Digg moves very quickly, and has a great many stories submitted every day, so good material can sometimes fly by before you even know it. These interactive visualizations look beneath the surface of the Digg community's activities."

Stack

"Stack shows diggs occuring in real time on up to 100 stories at once. Diggers fall from above and stack up on popular stories. Brightly colored stories have more diggs.

The visualization has three modes: all activity, popular, and newly submitted stories."

Swarm

"Swarm draws a circle for stories as they're dugg. Diggers swarm around stories, and make them grow. Brightly colored stories have more diggs.

The visualization has three modes: all activity, popular, and newly submitted stories."

-Miguel

Shadows - the site for capturing the best of the web

2006-07-26T13:54:00.000-07:00

From the site:

"Shadows is the link-sharing website for people. By people. With Shadows, you have the power to discover the web's most fascinating content – the most interesting pages saved, discussed, and rated by you, your friends, and the Shadows community.

With Shadows you can collect links for instant retrieval from any computer. You can tap into the collective wisdom and interests of the entire Shadows community. Shadows is the one-stop source for your daily fix of news, diversions, and discussion.

Express your individuality through your links, comments, and profile. Join or start a group discussion. Let your voice be heard! Invite friends. Grow your community.
In Shadows, you can have fun surfing for the web's best links or you can create an account, jump in, add your best links, and become part of our thriving community."

-Miguel

Diigo / Social Annotation

2006-07-26T11:25:00.000-07:00

From the site:

"The name "Diigo" is an abbreviation for "Digest of Internet Information, Groups and Other stuff."

Diigo (dee'go) is about "Social Annotation". By combining social bookmarking, clippings, in situ annotation, tagging, full-text search, easy sharing and interactions, Diigo offers a powerful personal tool and a rich social platform for knowledge users, and in the process, turns the entire web into a writable, participatory and interactive media.

The social annotation service introduced by Diigo allows users to add highlights and sticky notes, in situ, on any web page they read. Imagine a giant transparency overlaying on top of all the web pages. Users can write on the transparency as they wish, as private notes or public comments. And they can read public comments on the transparency left by other readers of the same page, and hear their "two cents" and interact with them."

-Miguel

Book 2.0 - Scholars turn monographs into digital conversations

2006-07-25T16:09:00.000-07:00

From The Chronicle of Higher Education:

"While most scholarly books are reviewed by a few carefully chosen experts before publication, McKenzie Wark's latest monograph is getting line-by-line critiques from hundreds of strangers in cyberspace, many of whom know absolutely nothing about his academic field.

Mr. Wark, a professor of media and cultural studies at New School University, has put the draft of his latest book online in an experimental format inspired by academic blogs and the free-for-all spirit of Wikipedia, the popular online encyclopedia that anyone can edit. Each paragraph of Mr. Wark's book has its own Web page, and next to each of those paragraphs is a box where anyone can comment — though readers are not permitted to alter the original text."

-Miguel

Folksonomies: A User-Driven Approach to Organizing Content

2006-07-25T16:08:00.000-07:00

From User Interface Engineering:

"Many of the design teams we talk to face the same major issue: how to organize the information on their sites. From creating navigation schemes to developing site hierarchies to refining checkout sequences, it’s highly important for design teams to organize information effectively for their users.

Information architects frequently must deal with the problem of managing more and more information. Rarely can they remove information from a site; in most cases, it’s add, add, add. Design teams must make room for this new content in some way, either by incorporating it into the current organizational scheme or by altering the information architecture to allow for it."

-Miguel

Senators Hear Grassroots Drumbeat on Net Neutrality

2006-07-25T15:35:00.000-07:00

From Save the Internet Blog:

"Senator Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) spoke before the Senate on Friday to “outline what is at stake” should Congress ignore public opinion and let phone and cable companies gut Net Neutrality.

“If you listen to some of the so-called experts about communications, they would suggest that [Net Neutrality] is so complicated, so arcane, so difficult for anybody to understand, you ought to let the lawyers and the lobbyists sort this out,” Wyden told his colleagues.

This is a mistake, Wyden said."

-Miguel

Flash Mobs and Memes

2006-07-21T15:30:00.000-07:00

This is an old story from The San Francisco Chronicle, but it illustrates the opportunity and power of collaborative, spontaneous, internet/communication driven gatherings.

From the article:

Pillow fight erupts amid shrieks, giggles
Big crowd lured by Internet postings, word of mouth

"Flash mobs, a phenomenon in which adults converge to do something silly, rely largely on cell phones and the Internet, spreading word of events via e-mail, chat rooms, and text messaging.

"It's just a meme. A meme is when a thought goes out and becomes part of consciousness," said Amacker Bullwinkle, a Palo Alto artist with purple streaks in her hair who claimed affiliation with a mysterious group called the Pillow Fight Club."

-Miguel

Blogosphere: Best of the Blogs

2006-07-21T13:09:00.000-07:00

This site was mentioned in the recent issue (Jul/Aug) of Online Magazine as a supplement to the book Blogosphere:Best of the Blogs by Peter Kuhns and Adrienne Crew. It's an excellent resource for keeping up on trends and events in the world of blogs, and unlike the book, can be modified and updated at will.

-Paul

On Blogs, YouTube and Flickr, Glimpses of Life in War Zone

2006-07-21T09:35:00.000-07:00

From The Wall Street Journal:

"As fighting continues along the Israeli-Lebanese border, a small army of bloggers and photographers are filing digital dispatches.

Though grainy, raw, sometimes unsteady and often unverifiable, footage gives viewers insight into everyday life in the war-torn region. (Warning: Some links include graphic content.) On video-sharing site YouTube1 , young men are awed2 by a nearby Israeli bombing in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley. An Israeli family copes3 with Hezbollah rockets raining down on Haifa. A videographer films behind the scenes of a BBC broadcast4. Users have also posted video such as filmed footage from the Israeli Defense Force5."

-Miguel

Crisis in the Middle East: Bloggers Report

2006-07-21T09:12:00.000-07:00

From The Truth Laid Bear:

A listing of Middle East bloggers responding to current crises.

-Miguel

Google Teacher Newsletter Signup

2006-07-21T09:03:00.000-07:00

"Google and teachers have a similar objective: to help people build knowledge by providing greater access to useful information. Google recognizes the central role teachers play in breaking down the barriers between people and information, and we support educators who work each day to empower their students and expand the frontiers of human knowledge. The Google Teachers' Newsletter is one of the ways we're working to bolster that support and explore how Google and educators can work together.

Subscribe now to receive updates on new features, tips and other information relevant to teachers."

-Miguel

Librarians and Google: Tips of the Trade

2006-07-21T08:53:00.000-07:00

From Google:

"Check out how librarians across the country are using Google to help students and patrons find information. Then read more stories on the "Tips of the Trade" page."

-Miguel

Update on India bans blogs: bloggers want answers

2006-07-21T08:39:00.000-07:00

From Boing Boing:

"Following up on news earlier this week that the government of India blocked access to a wide array of websites (Link to BB post), Mridula says,

Nandan, an Indian blogger filed an application under Right to Information Act 2005 seeking the government to explain:

"My RTI Application was filed to find out why a blanket block has taken place for Blogspot.com, Typepad.com and Geocities.com. You can find a step by step guide to filing an RTI application (specifically for this ban) here."

The irony is the Government takes one month to reply and then can deny an answer quoting 'National Security' as a reason."

-Miguel

AT&T, Comcast Rout Google, Microsoft in `Net Neutrality' Battle

2006-07-21T08:33:00.000-07:00

From Bloomberg.com:

"When it comes to getting their way in Washington, Internet-era darlings Google Inc. and Microsoft Corp. still have a lot to learn from the likes of AT&T Inc. and Comcast Corp.

The telephone and cable-television companies are routing Google, Microsoft and other online-content providers in the fight over whether the carriers can impose fees on Web site owners in exchange for priority access to their high-speed networks.

The carriers won a 269-152 vote in the House of Representatives, and an 11-11 vote in the Senate Commerce Committee, rejecting the Web companies' bid for a ban on new fees. Google and other companies are still urging the full Senate to adopt the neutrality measure when sponsors try to revive it as early as September."

-Miguel

Indian gov blocks Blogspot, Typepad, Geocities blogs

2006-07-19T11:15:00.000-07:00

From Boing Boing:

"India's Department of Telecommunications (DoT) passed an order to ISPs Friday to block several websites. The list is confidential. Indian ISPs have been slowly coming into compliance. SpectraNet, MTNL, Reliance, and as of Monday afternoon, Airtel. State-backed BSNL and VSNL have not started yet but likely will soon. The known list of blocked domains is *.blogspot.com, *.typepad.com and geocities.com/*."

-Miguel

OCLC to Open WorldCat Searching to the World

2006-07-19T09:01:00.000-07:00

From Information Today NewsBreaks:

"In a move designed to reach users outside library environments, OCLC (http://www.oclc.org) is planning to launch a new destination site and downloadable search box for searching the content of libraries participating in WorldCat. Scheduled for a beta release sometime in August 2006, the new WorldCat.org site will continue OCLC’s efforts begun with its Open WorldCat program (http://www.oclc.org/worldcat/open/default.htm)—to make library resources more visible to Web users and to increase awareness of libraries as a primary source of reliable information. The WorldCat.org search box will make visible all 70-plus million records in the WorldCat database—not just the smaller data subsets of 3.4 to 4.4 million currently made available by the Open WorldCat partner sites, such as Google, Yahoo!, and others. And, where Open WorldCat inserts “Find in a Library” results within regular search engine results—where they can get lost—WorldCat.org promises to provide greater visibility and accessibility of library materials."

-Miguel

Introducing MediaCommons

2006-07-18T13:25:00.000-07:00

From if:book - A Project of The Institute for the Future of the Book:

"As has been mentioned several times here, the Institute for the Future of the Book has spent much of 2006 exploring the future of electronic scholarly publishing and its many implications, including the development of alternate modes of peer-review and the possibilities for networked interaction amongst authors and texts. Over the course of the spring, we brainstormed, wrote a bunch of manifestos, and planned a meeting at which a group of primarily humanities-based scholars discussed the possibilities for a new model of academic publishing. Since that meeting, we've been working on a draft proposal for what we're now thinking of as a wide-ranging scholarly network -- an ecosystem, if you can bear that metaphor -- in which folks working in media studies can write, publish, review, and discuss, in forms ranging from the blog to the monograph, from the purely textual to the multi-mediated, with all manner of degrees inbetween."

-Miguel

Breaking paper's stranglehold on the academy

2006-07-18T10:44:00.000-07:00

Interesting piece on one possible model of the future of academic publishing. Especially note the mention of blogs, wikis, and collaborative processess.

From arstechnica.com:

"While most journals now offer online access to subscribers (often through databases like Project Muse and JSTOR), these journals are still printed, bound, and distributed. Purely electronic journals have yet to match their printed compatriots in prestige and authority, but USC's Institute for the Future of the Book wants to change that. Its new MediaCommons program is a test bed for purely digital academic publishing projects."

-Miguel

5 Ways Google is Shaking the Security World

2006-07-18T08:39:00.000-07:00

From CSOonline.com:

"Whether you're charged with preventing hacks, protecting assets, stopping fraud or defending trademarks, Google and other search engines present a new mix of risks for everybody in the security game."

-Miguel

The Hive Mind: Folksonomies and User-Based Tagging

2006-07-17T15:53:00.000-07:00

by Ellyssa Kroski - from InfoTangle:

"There is a revolution happening on the Internet that is alive and building momentum with each passing tag. With the advent of social software and Web 2.0, we usher in a new era of Internet order. One in which the user has the power to effect their own online experience, and contribute to others’. Today, users are adding metadata and using tags to organize their own digital collections, categorize the content of others and build bottom-up classification systems. The wisdom of crowds, the hive mind, and the collective intelligence are doing what heretofore only expert catalogers, information architects and website authors have done. They are categorizing and organizing the Internet and determining the user experience, and it’s working. No longer do the experts have the monopoly on this domain; in this new age users have been empowered to determine their own cataloging needs. Metadata is now in the realm of the Everyman."

-Miguel

The Tagosphere

2006-07-06T16:27:00.000-07:00

Search the tagosphere of user generated tags, with new search engine TagFetch.

Or try Gada.be, which also searches tags, and much more - from the site:

What is Gada.be? We're a free "metasearch" service! Instead of having to browse to hundreds of different search engines, we enable you to retrieve results from all of them through a single search.

-Miguel

Google says bill could spark anti-trust complaints

2006-07-06T16:16:00.000-07:00

From washingtonpost.com:

"Google warned on Tuesday it will not hesitate to file anti-trust complaints in the United States if high-speed Internet providers abuse the market power they could receive from U.S. legislators."

-Miguel

Top Five Science Blogs

2006-07-06T11:50:00.000-07:00

From Nature:

"Weblogs written by scientists are relatively rare, but some of them are proving popular. Out of 46.7 million blogs indexed by the Technorati blog search engine, five scientists' sites make it into the top 3,500. Declan Butler asks the winners about the reasons for their success."

And here is a list of Nature's 50 Popular Science Blogs.

-Miguel

The Monster Arrives: Software Patent Lawsuits Against Open Source Developers

2006-07-06T09:03:00.000-07:00

From Technocrat.net

"We've warned you for a decade. Now the monster has finally arrived: attacks against Open Source developers by patent holders, big and small. One is a lawsuit against Red Hat for the use of the principle of Object Relational Mapping used in Hibernate, a popular component of enterprise Java applications everywhere. The other attack is on an individual Open Source developer for his model railroad software.

These two attacks are the tip of the iceberg, thousands more are possible as software patent holders turn to enforcement as an income producer and away from the patent cross-licensing détente exercised by large companies until the mid-1990s. Open Source will not be the only victim: small and medium-sized companies make up 80% of our economy and any of those companies that develops software, either proprietary or Open Source, will be vulnerable. The American IP Law Association estimates that defense against a single software patent lawsuit will cost between 2 and 5 million dollars. Under US law, even a company that only uses software can be sued."

-Miguel

KatrinaWiki, Katrina PeopleFinder: Distributed Technology Responses to Disaster

2006-07-03T23:40:00.000-07:00

From WorldChanging.com

"The aftermath of Hurricane Katrina has fast become a global experience on par with the aftermaths of past four years of terrorist attacks and the Boxing Day tsunami. Extraordinary efforts of coooperation, communication and community are underway, with many dozens of folks contributing to an almost ground-up invention of technological and networked assistance systems to help people get emergency help, share info, and find each other amidst the destruction on the Gulf Coast, and the massive exodus of refugees/evacuees from New Orleans."

-Miguel

The new watchdogs: Internet bloggers take debate to the edge

2006-07-03T14:29:00.000-07:00

From The Cincinnati Post

"Immediately after Nickolas criticized Kentucky Gov. Ernie Fletcher in a Times piece, Fletcher's administration added his blog site and others to a list of Internet sites unable to be accessed on state computers. The ban has raised questions of censorship and constitutional rights, (as well as a wave of national criticism called "a blog swarm"), and could spark a lawsuit."

-Miguel

Social Networking for Bookworms

2006-07-03T08:55:00.000-07:00

From The Wall Street Journal:

"If bookcases are a way to casually display interests dear to the owner, the Internet throws open the doors on reading habits. Social-networking and book retailers' sites are already rife with lists of readers' favorite material, allowing people to compare notes on taste and compatibility.

But for Tim Spalding, a computer programmer and bibliophile, listing a few titles in an online profile isn't enough. He sought a way to catalog his entire book collection -- and to check out what was lining other people's shelves."

-Miguel

His Space

2006-07-03T08:41:00.000-07:00

From Wired:

"Twilight of the media moguls? Not for this guy. With the $580 million purchase of MySpace, News Corp. chief Rupert Murdoch is betting he can transform a free social network into a colossal marketing machine."

-Miguel

PeopleAggregator

2006-07-03T08:36:00.000-07:00

Open Social Networking. Create or join a network. Build your community. Connect your community.

-Miguel

China Cracks Down on Blogs, Search Engines

2006-06-30T15:06:00.000-07:00

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!

2006-06-30T08:26:00.000-07:00

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

2006-06-28T10:47:00.000-07:00

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

2006-06-28T07:58:00.000-07:00

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

2006-06-22T13:47:00.000-07:00

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

2006-06-20T16:08:00.000-07:00

From comScore Networks:

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

-Miguel

Plagiarism and Google generation under spotlight

2006-06-20T15:22:00.000-07:00

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

2006-06-20T14:34:00.000-07:00

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

2006-06-20T14:17:00.000-07:00

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

2006-06-20T08:11:00.000-07:00

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

2006-06-19T20:16:00.000-07:00

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

2006-06-19T20:15:00.001-07:00

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

2006-06-19T20:13:00.000-07:00

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

2006-06-19T13:43:00.000-07:00

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

2006-06-19T13:42:00.001-07:00

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

2006-06-19T13:42:00.000-07:00

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

2006-06-19T13:41:00.001-07:00

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

2006-06-19T13:41:00.000-07:00

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!

2006-06-19T13:38:00.000-07:00

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