via jblyberg:
The U.S. House of Representatives on Wednesday overwhelmingly approved a bill saying that anyone offering an open Wi-Fi connection to the public must report illegal images including “obscene” cartoons and drawings–or face fines of up to $300,000.
That broad definition would cover individuals, coffee shops, libraries, hotels, and even some government agencies that provide Wi-Fi. [...]
I’ve seen various discussions that have confused or equated privacy (or freedom) with anonymity. Things such as social DRM which marks items with some unique information. There a nice article by Schneier on the differences and relation to security that is worth reading.
As the name implies, Alcoholics Anonymous meetings are anonymous. You don’t have to [...]
As most who probably read this blog know, it was recently talk like a pirate day. Like the pirate bay usually does, Flickr changed their logo a bit. Via Waxy I found that there were at least a few that were not amused, from those who thought the interestingness was lacking to those who thought [...]
A post worth reading over at Annoyed Librarian. She does seem annoyed:
But the twopointopians definitely do. For them, disagreement lets them show how self-righteous and “user-centered” they are, while showing how clueless and selfish everyone else is. You see, the twopointopians “get it,” while the rest of us just don’t understand. They’re like religious converts [...]
There’s a nice post over at LibraryTechtonics about geocaching and the problem with associating literacy with just books:
Geocaching teaches problem solving skills, environmental awareness and conservation, health and exercise, treading lightly on the earth, and using the internet and gadgetry (quickly becoming an everyday fixture in people’s lives). Geocaching is information literacy as much as [...]
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 [...]
Found quite a few new things today via Planet RDF which included a post about using URI’s to identify music items:
The question I had: what URI should I use for J.S. Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier? This is a non-trivial question if one wants to use, say, the Music Ontology in cataloging one’s music: indeed there is [...]
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 [...]
The idea of mobile reference was first brought to my attention by Alan Gray at Darien who has a nice post on the topic on his blog. He terms the current desk situation as siege warfare.
What they’ve decided is that we are NOT going to have a desk or any kind of barrier, but that [...]
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 [...]
There’s plenty of comments regarding the Gorman blogging but I like this snippet from within Clay Shirkey’s response:
Academic libraries, which in earlier days provided a service, have outsourced themselves as bouncers to publishers like Reed-Elsevier; their principal job, in the digital realm, is to prevent interested readers from gaining access to scholarly material.
Karen Schneider gave [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Particletree has a nice post called The Underbelly of a Web App where he talks about things that need to go on behind the scenes. As someone who has worked in support for many years, I can’t stress some enough:
Good Administration Interfaces
You can have the best people in your support team but if they can’t [...]
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 [...]
Via O’reilly Radar I found a blog post that is definitely worth reading. If you haven’t already read it, you should. Also read O’reilly as he comments on why digitization of full-text is important and provides a few other links.
I was idly trying a search on “roads” to see what sort of a literature would [...]
I’m way behind in lots of things right now but I might as well post something. The keynote on the first day of Code4Lib 2007 was by Karen Schneider who writes at Free Range Librarian, among other places. You can view a video of her presentation on google and download links should be available soon [...]
In response to Steve Job’s “Thoughts on Music” piece, Bill McCoy of Adobe has responded with regards to ebooks. While Adobe supports DRM:
Yet, I would like nothing more than to have DRM technology just fade away. After all the main challenge we have in digital publishing is to get it adopted by mainstream consumers. And [...]
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