The NYTimes ran an article today discussing the future of the online newspaper model. There has been quite a bit of criticism of the way online news sites give free access to current news and either make users pay for archives or not have them complete (or not have archives at all). I’m […]
Google’s addition of customization features to Google News follows this pattern they are developing of offering really cool, simple and user-friendly web apps. It works great and makes the service much more powerful. I was concerned about how to get my customizations into Firefox from Safari and to my PC, but I see […]
Barbara Fister makes a number of great points in this Library Issues article. On online books:
Evidence suggests people will pay for the convenience of reading sustained texts offline. After all, the 9/11 Commission’s report became a bestseller even though it was available for free on the Web. The National Academies Press, which makes the […]
How cool is that? Reviews, hours, phone, etc. This thing is starting to save me so much time. Internet OS indeed…
John Heilemann gives us tons of dirt on Google’s path to IPO. Tons of untold stories, like the engineer squating in CEO Schmidt’s office to Sergey and Larry playing hardball with VCs, breaking rules all along the way.
From Cory Doctorow:
It’s not a service I’d use, but I believe that it’s the kind of service that is vital to the Web’s health. The ability of end-users to avail themselves of tools that decomopose and reassemble web-pages to their tastes is an issue like inlining, framing, and linking: it’s a matter of letting users […]
Google has implemented a new “movie:” operator that can be used for finding info on, obviously, movies. Type in movie: followed by a zip code or city name to get show times and theaters (Evanston, IL). This will be a pretty cool supplement to IMDb which I have been addicted to for a […]
Last week we had a very interesting discussion on the Web4Lib discussion list about how libraries relate to other online tools like, of course, Amazon and Google. I thought Alane Wilson’s post was dead on in a lot of ways, although we shouldn’t forget the absolutely vital role that non-tech librarians play. Going […]
Battelle links to Vimeo, a Flickr-like system for videos.
A couple cool videos on there are a clip of Marc Cantor talking about the lack of metadata for podcasting, etc, and a clip of Wooden Mirror by Daniel Rozin which was all the rage at the 2000 Siggraph (and one of my personal favorite works of […]
Over the past week or so folks have been up in arms about the Google Toolbar’s new AutoLink feature. I haven’t tried it (IE only), but the core of the major complaints is that it adds links to web pages without the consent of web authors, something very much like the Microsoft Smart Tags […]
A couple interesting articles on Google from Library Journal:
The first, Google Out of Print by Roy Tennant, takes a critical look at the copyright restrictions of the service, speculating that there will be an overrepresentation of text from the pre-1923 books.
The second, The Google Opportunity by Stephen Abram, lists some ways that libraries can keep […]
I don’t have much to say that can’t be taken care of with the following links:
mSpace info
Classical Music Browser (requires Mozilla-based browser)
Slashdot article and discussion
Register aritcle
more on the semantic web movement (interesting articles and applications with varying degrees of relevance):
Wikipedia entry
A Comparison of Hyperstructures: Zzstructures, mSpaces, and Polyarchies (PDF)
Taking a Stand on the Semantic Web
August […]
Google Scholar now has a preferences page to specify your institution (if it’s among the few included in the pilot) and get links to your resolver in the results. I don’t have time to play with it just yet, but according to a post by North Carolina State University’s Andrew Pace on the web4lib […]
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.
From the
Want to know the dirty details? Joel Webber breaks it down.
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 […]
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.
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 […]