The Librarian in Black has a post about a service that provides time-released RSS which they call AutoResponder. The price seems a bit steep but it is centered towards business.
A number of potential uses are listed on the service’s website, some of which might be useful for libraries: delivering a training course one chunk at [...]
A recent post by Anil Dash is worth reading and goes over the use of “toread” as a tag:
The most beautiful thing, though, is that we have the tools to make manifest this part of human nature that’s always been with us. In our idle hours, we can look at the wanderings of the minds [...]
I’d been thinking about a Zen OPAC idea for quite awhile and now see that dchud thinks similarly. My first thought was to use some of the requirements being that it uses markup similar to what current template set-ups allow in commercial OPACs. I then scraped that and thought should be from scratch and try [...]
John Udell has a few requests for catalog vendors, including making it easier to search by ISBN and for related ISBN’s. Peter Murray commented that the url should probably be a bit more restful and mentioned PatREST. Talis responded that it would be quite simple except for the xISBN which could cost a lot with [...]
Sifting through the 200+ starred items in Google Reader I meant to blog months ago. One of the things I’ve always liked about Amazon was the versioned web-service. When they add features or change the structure your old application is still safe, presuming you’ve specified the version your using (I’ve made the mistake of not [...]
Some interesting visualizations that some may want to check out.
Summize
The first is from an online shopping site called summize.
Rather than build yet another price comparison shopping site - which are great once you know what to buy - we’ve taken a reviews-first approach: we crawl the web for product reviews, aggregate those reviews, select [...]
A nice article in Escapist magazine about gaming in libraries. Hard to choose just a small section to quote but definitely give it a read. The issue can be downloaded in PDF as well.
Neiburger stresses that libraries should be places for recreation, too. Their size, resources and virtually unlimited membership mean they can do gaming [...]
I’ve mentioned Wesabe’s Data Bill of Rights before. John Battelle has now posted on his formulation of a bill of rights:
So, I submit for your review, editing and clarification, a new draft of what rights we, as consumers, might demand from companies making hay off the data we create as we trip across the web
Some [...]
Offline-mode has gotten some press since it was added to the Firefox roadmap. Some of the rails programmers have probably been watching Joyent Slingshot:
Joyent Slingshot allows developers to deploy Rails applications that work both online and offline (with synchronization), and with drag/drop into and out of the application as in a standard desktop application.
There is [...]
Google has a preview available of their mapplets along with some documentation. Here’s a screenshot of the weatherbug mapplet:
With the custom markers and search form available it may be interesting to throw together a mapplet for worldcat or a local consortia, plotting the libraries that carry the item and possibly status if available. You could [...]
From the site:
reCAPTCHA improves the process of digitizing books by sending words that cannot be read by computers to the Web in the form of CAPTCHAs for humans to decipher. More specifically, each word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is placed on an image and used as a CAPTCHA. This is possible because [...]
One the great things about libraries are the events some hold, be it author talks, workshops or movies. Unfortunately I’ve been rather disappointed by the way events are presented on most library sites. Some don’t even feature or list them on the homepage which is a shame. There are some other things I think would [...]
Via the Bokardo blog:
I think that social features are bigger than many people view them. They are a long-term strategy that takes lots of resources. You can’t simply bolt on a feature here or there (well, unless it’s article sharing or something super simple like that) and expect to realize the benefits of making a [...]
Note: Many of the examples below only include screenshots. As these are development versions I don’t want to overwhelm them with traffic. If you pop in #code4lib you’ll probably be able to get a peek at them.
What is Solr?
If you were at Code4Lib 2007 then you were probably beat over the head with Solr. If [...]
I noted before the discussion on machine tags. Another example has come about with Revish, the book review community, pulling in images from Flickr that use the book:isbn=********** tag. An example page is Bulletproof Ajax. From their blog:
There are only a few people using this at Flickr at the moment, but there are a lot [...]
via O’Reilly Radar again (subscribe if you don’t already):
It adds the ability to create and share maps directly from Google’s site (you can see a map that I created above). These maps will be added to Google geoindex and will be available to search in Google Earth and in Local Search. These maps will be [...]
Once referred to as “tripletags” supposedly but now called Machine Tags, due to Flickr’s adoption of their use for geocoding, etc. From machinetags.org:
Machine tags, or triple tags, are tags that are made up of three parts (namespace:predicate=value) in order to give extra information. Machine tags have been in use for a while now on sites [...]
Had this problem with the home computer on Windows. Upgraded WMP but didn’t help. The solution is to install two missing DLL files in the Firefox plugins directory. You’ll likely need to restart Firefox. The DLL’s were:
npdsplay.dll
npwmsdrm.dll
Was a quick fix for me.
Update: Thanks to commenter’s there looks like there’s some decent information available at the [...]
There have been some great projects lately about moving information control into the hands of users such as Move My Data. In that vein there is the idea of profile data using microformats. For example you have a list of your friends marked up on hcard on your blog. When you sign up for a [...]
In case you missed it from my linklog, there’s a nice series of posts over at Alex Faaborg’s blog about microformats and the reasoning behind a new extension called Operator. The posts:
Microformats - Part 0: Introduction
An introduction to microformats and some related links. Also some information on why they are useful.
That’s what microformats are, adding [...]
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ebyblog is the blog of Ryan Eby. The opinions contained in are my own and likely the opposite of my employer and everyone else.
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