A few Google Map hacks including some fun bookmarklets that move a non-google image of a man or spider (or anything someone wants to come up with) along a route.
As I noted a couple days ago, more info on how Google Maps works can be found here.
Need help choosing a wiki engine, particularly for use with a library? I’ve spent some time with a number of different options and have come down to two engines that can fill different needs.
1. PmWiki
PmWiki is, IMO, probably the single best option for a library. In fact, the Univeristy of Minnesota Libraries staff […]
From the
If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of everyone, and […]
Want to know the dirty details? Joel Webber breaks it down.
In a post on his plasticbag.org, Tom Coates summerizes the movement toward amateurization of, well, nearly everything. Most of the article focuses on weblogs and how they’ve enabled just about anyone to publish if they are inclined to do so. It’s the new homepage, he notes, but with temporal context and ease of […]
The EFF has released a new privacy tool for system administrators called Logfinder that hunts down unwanted logs.
Google is really on a roll. Now online is Google Maps, a competitor to MapQuest. I played around with it for a second and it seems like the easiest to use and smoothest mapping service I can think of. Everything renders very quickly and there’s actually a slider for zooming in and […]
The Economist is running an article on a paper by Yochai Benkler in the Yale Law Journal (PDF) on the economics of sharing. As explained in the article, the recent growth of sharing in technology, such as open source software, has been something of a mystery to economists, but what’s even more interesting […]
Search Engine Watch and Battelle are reporting that the Google Images database has been updated to 1.1 billion images and images are officially being displayed with the main search engine results page (as I noted yesterday). For a long list of searches that display images, see Aaron Swartz’s Google Weblog.
Libraries and National Security, an article recently published in First Monday, details the history of librarians and national security from WWI to the present. Libraries have done a complete 180° from their position during the First World War when they sought out a role in the war effort and willingly restricted information. In […]
This is just a quick pointer to the recent discussion about how closed online newspaper archives are hurting both the public and newspapers themselves. The discussion recently heated up after this post by Dan Gillmor in which he describes this issue in detail. Another log on the fire is Searching for The New […]
It’s starting to happen pretty frequently for me, with two searches just today. Maybe I’m in one of the select IP ranges for testing, a practice noted by Google’s Marissa Mayer, since I don’t see anyone reporting on it going live. Here’s an example from one search:
UPDATE: The Search Engine Blog reports […]
Last week it was the Eiffel Tower, now it’s Chicago’s Millenium Park and, in particular, the Bean. This week’s Chicago Reader relates the story of a local photographer’s run-in with security while trying to take photos of this public park. Article author Ben Joravsky contacted the park director’s office and got this response […]
I’m no fan of listservs, but saying blogs and rss will kill them? That doesn’t really make sense. Listservs are for discussions. They are far more analogous to forums than to blogs. Many of the listservs I am subscribed to, take ILL-L as an example, serve as a central point of […]
OCLC is sponsoring a cool software contest:
Prize
* $2,500 in cash
* Visit with OCLC Online Computer Library Center Inc., in Dublin, Ohio
* Potentially have your code incorporated in OCLC services for libraries
The challenge
OCLC is providing a set of bibliographic records extracted from WorldCat plus […]
Apparently so. It turns out that the company that did the lighting has copyrighted the work, so if you take a photo and publish it, it’s a violation of copyright.
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Chris Anderson wrote a post on his Long Tail blog yesterday that talked a bit about how friends don’t make the best
Library Journal has a short Google Scholar review that makes a couple of quick points to note including:
Karen Blakeman, director, RBA Information Services, “would like to see a list of sources” included. Her experiences with Google Scholar have been disappointing because of missing power search features: a consistent, controlled vocabulary (or even access to vocabularies […]
I just finished reading a pretty good intro article to the whole wiki thing. Check it out if you aren’t familiar with the concept.
What caught my eye, however, was this comment by Steven Cohen over @ Library Stuff:
When I think of wikis, my brain immediately turns to collaboration, but I can see how […]