LibWorm: Mashups

Funding collections and services in the public interest

Tue, 18 Nov 2008 21:48:35 +0100

Do you ever worry about funding for your library? Have you ever thought about how to get a grant to help your library? Do you wonder about how you might attract grant funding to a library in the age of Google and the Web? If you answered "yes" to any of those questions, I recommend the article Digital Infrastructure and Public Interest by Vince Stehle, in Grantmakers in the Arts Reader, Fall 2008. (I posted a link to this article a few days ago but, after John referred to it in his 66 Days to Government Information Liberation post, I wanted to follow up a bit and mention why I think the Stehle article is important for libraries. This also gives me an opportunity to contribute some more to the excellent discussion that John is facilitating about Government Information Liberation.) Stehle is a program director at the Surdna Foundation, which makes grants in the areas of environment, community revitalization, effective citizenry, the arts, and the nonprofit sector, and he was writing for Grantmakers in the Arts Reader. In addressing his audience of grantmakers, foundations, and people who support non-profits he says that there is an opportunity and even "an imperative" for foundations to support non-commercial work and help build "a public interest infrastructure" that will "promote the free exchange of knowledge over the Internet." In specifically emphasizing the need for non-commercial support he says that we cannot rely on the private sector to operate in the broad public interest except as that interest translates into profit: "While there are billions of dollars in Silicon Valley venture firms seeking to invest in the next Google, Facebook, or YouTube, there is no equivalent capital pool available for investment in the expansion of social enterprises operating in the public interest. ...

Neues logo für zukunftswerkstatt

Mon, 17 Nov 2008 15:48:08 +0100

Mit vielen Interessen und Hilfe können wir das Projekt Zukunftswerkstatt bis jetzt sehr gut fortführen. Der Flensburger Künstler Nori Abassi hat für Zukunftswerkstatt ein ganz tolles Logo gemacht. Damit sind wir mit dem Projekt wieder ein Schritt weiter gegangen. Ich schreibe momentan zusammen mit zwei anderen kompetenten Projektmitgliedern auf dem Projektblog von Zukunftswerkstatt, die viele neue Ideen, möchten wir auf nächsten Bibliothekartag verwirklichen und euch zusammen mal in der zukünftigen Bibliotheken “spielen“. Schaut ihr mal bitte auf unserem Blog an, wir freuen uns sehr über jede Unterstützung und neue Ideen. Bibliotheken gehen Spielen - Spielen Sie mit! (Source: Bibliotan)

Innovation in institutions - and yet more jobs…

Mon, 17 Nov 2008 13:31:35 +0100

One of the things I’ve noticed about Twitter is that if you post a link there to a recent blog post, the post can start to get read very quickly. I’ve done a couple of experiments by tweeting links to old posts and comment threads to see if it can give them a little burst of renewed life, and I can anecdotally report that it does seem to work, if you get your twittertext right… And it’s potentially also a way of using a subset of readers as a sounding board for whether or not to post more widely, to a larger set of readers. So for example, on Friday I replied to a comment on an earlier post (Printing Out Online Course Materials With Embedded Movie Links) with a rather <ranty> comment of my own… and got the following tweet back from @jukesie: So here goes - I’ve blockquoted it, but it’s not strictly a quote - I have made a few minor changes - so if you want to read the comment in it’s original form, and in the original context, you can find it here. The context was whether there was any value in adding a QR code visual link to a Youtube movie in the print stylesheet of a piece of online learning material that included an embedded video. I picked up a catch phrase earlier today, about what UK HE needs: Flexibility, Innovation, Imagination. So here’s my problem. The future lies around us, and some of us paddle in it. Innovation in the OU is hard to achieve - the feeling is whatever we give to our students, it has to scale and it has to be equally accessible to everyone. We often go for lowest common denominator plays, particularly with respect to assumptions about the availability of technology. The Innovator’s Dilemma rules… Time out: When I play with mashups - when I play with ideas - I’m balancing logic rocks. Sometimes they fall over, but that’s okay; if I wanted to build something a little longer lasting, I’d use concrete. ...

Madnight: new album from riaa

Mon, 17 Nov 2008 12:49:00 +0100

RIAA, the mashup geniuses that brought you Sounds for the Space-Set, have a new (fully free and downloadable) album out called Madnight. Their own description:Inspirations: dreams, nightmares, Los Angeles noir film and literature, "Lowbrow" and Surreal art, carnivals and sideshows, 78 rpm records, weird old black and white movies, autumnal weather.Sources listed include Kate Bush, some dialogue from an Ed Wood film, Tom Waits, Jelly Roll Morton, Young MC, Sal Mineo, "Jesus Wants Me For a Sunbeam," audio from "Children's Fairyland amusement park," a school filmstrip called "Who's Afraid?", Suzanne Vega, Alan Ladd, and many others.You can listen to or download most of RIAA's albums here. (Source: poesygalore<IMG SRC=http://www.geocities.com/emilylloyd.geo/glore.jpg>)

Massive mashups

Mon, 17 Nov 2008 12:00:00 +0100

Kapow introduces Mashup Server (Source: KMWorld RSS Feeds : Research Center: Content Management)

Infopeople at cla: mini-demos and bits of knowledge

Fri, 14 Nov 2008 22:59:59 +0100

If good things really do come in small packages, attendees at the California Library Association 2008 Conference and Exhibition in San Jose are going to find plenty of treasures through the Infopeople Mini-Demo sessions which begin this evening and continue through Sunday afternoon (November 16, 2008). While many of us extol the virtues of learning sessions which include preparatory time and extensive follow-up, we also find a great deal of charm and useful information in these brief sessions which bring trainers and learners together for 10-minute tip-laden teasers that cover a variety of topics. It’s an enticing format for trainers and learners alike, and gives all of us food for thought in how we approach our own training-teaching-learning experiences. With more than four dozen time slots filled with mini-demos and more than two dozen presenters scheduled, there is something for nearly everyone working in libraries. Trainers will see plenty of examples of how to break their material into concise and effective sessions from Infopeople presenters including Linda Demmers, Beth Gallaway; Cheryl Gould; George Needham and Joan Frye Williams; and Mary Ross as well as State Librarian Susan Hildreth and Deputy State Librarian Stacey Aldrich. Learners, at the same time, will be able to pick and choose from a variety of topics including spontaneous programming; planning book clubs; using library mashups; what open source software can offer libraries; bringing creativity to the workplace; creating exciting and memorable user experiences with minimal expenditures; and strategic positions for libraries in today’s changing environment. Those of us used to much more in-depth presentations stand to learn a lot from these sessions, and the sessions promise to be fun as well. All events will be held in Infopeople’s space with the Exhibitors’ Area (Booths 410, 411, and 511). (Source: Infoblog)

Born digital talk notes

Fri, 14 Nov 2008 05:00:00 +0100

If you're interested in learning more abou the net generation--and if you aren't you should be--you'll want to read about John Palfrey's [Harvard Law School] presentation on "Born Digital." They have 5 characteristics: 1. "I blog therefore I am." 2. They are multitaskers. 3. They create content. 4. They create mashups. 5. They have an international perspective. Read Jenny Levine's post on her (Source: OPL Plus (not just for OPLs anymore))

Uk ordnance survey pushes back against psi re-use

Fri, 14 Nov 2008 05:00:00 +0100

The Free Our Data blog reported on November 12 that the Ordnance Survey, the UK's mapping agency, has been contacting local agencies instructing them not to re-use any data derived from the Ordnance Survey (for instance, no Google Maps mashups). (Thanks to Glyn Moody.) The news comes on the heels of the Show Us A Better Way competition, which asked Britons for their ideas on how to re-use public sector information. See also our past posts on the Ordnance Survey or the Free Our Data campaign. (Source: Open Access News)

Work together!

Thu, 13 Nov 2008 23:19:24 +0100

With all thanks to Helene Blowers, who made this, believe it or not, to use in a workshop we did together. I know it sounds crazy, but it fit *perfectly* as a demo of what the workshop was talking about. We didn’thave time to use it during the event, so here you are: Try JibJab Sendables® eCards today! (Source: Libraryman)

Ariadne (oct. 08)

Thu, 13 Nov 2008 21:31:00 +0100

Au sommaire, notamment, du dernier n° d'Ariadne (n° 57, octobre 08):Articles:- Copyright Angst, Lust for Prestige and Cost Control: What Institutions Can Do to Ease Open AccessLeo Waaijers writes about copyright, prestige and cost control in the world of open access while in two appendices Bas Savenije and Michel Wesseling compare the costs of open access publishing and subscriptions/licences for their respective institutions.- Implementing e-Legal Deposit: A British Library PerspectiveRonald Milne and John Tuck summarise progress towards implementation of the Legal Deposit Libraries Act 2003 which extended provision to non-print materials. Particular reference is made to the British Library.- A Bug's Life?: How Metaphors from Ecology Can Articulate the Messy Details of Repository InteractionsR. John Robertson, Mahendra Mahey and Phil Barker introduce work investigating an alternative model of repository and service interaction.- OAI-ORE, PRESERV2 and Digital PreservationSally Rumsey and Ben O'Steen describe OAI-ORE and how it can contribute to digital preservation activities.Comptes-rendus:- Embedding Web Preservation Strategies Within Your InstitutionChristopher Eddie reports on the third one-day workshop of the JISC-PoWR (Preservation of Web Resources) Project held at the University of Manchester on 12 September 2008.- iPRES 2008Frances Boyle and Adam Farquhar report on the two-day international conference which was the fifth in the series on digital preservation of digital objects held at the British Library, on 29 – 30 September 2008.Critique d'ouvrage:- Pro Web 2.0 Mashups: Remixing Data and Web ServicesRalph LeVan looks at a comprehensive work on how to consume and repurpose Web services. (Source: pintiniblog)

Levan on yee on mashups

Thu, 13 Nov 2008 13:42:08 +0100

I mentioned Raymond Yee's book on mashups a while ago and signaled that a fuller review would follow from my colleague Ralph LeVan. This has now appeared: Ralph reviews the book positively in the current issue of Ariadne. I can’t imagine a more comprehensive book on mashups. This book would make a great textbook for a class on the topic. If you are a developer of mashups, this book must be in your reference library. However, if you’re looking for a gentle introduction to the topic, it may be more than you want. [News and Reviews: 'Pro Web 2.0 Mashups: Remixing Data and Web Services', Ariadne Issue 57] Raymond is the originator of the useful and widely used phrase "gather, create, share" to characterise personal information use. Quick Bookmarks: del.icio.us Digg Google Reddit Furl (Source: Lorcan Dempsey)

John palfrey: “born digital” presentation

Thu, 13 Nov 2008 06:17:13 +0100

Notes from John Palfrey’s talk for the MacArthur Foundation at Google Chicago point of the book Born Digital was to bust some of the myths and look at differences in behavior between digital natives and people like their grandparents shouldn’t treat everybody the same way just because they have the same technology - may not use it the same way how they define this specific group of kids (not all millennials) - born after 1980, access to the technology (only 1 billion people), skills to use it 5 characteristics 1. “I blog therefore I am” express their identity online and offline - they don’t distinguish between the two avatars as another version of identity one difference is “subscribe to *me*” 2. multitaskers a lot of debate over multitasking and what it is, but they’re doing multiple things at once example of game in which boys tried to maintain as many IM conversations with as many girls as they could at once 3. consumers to creators interact with digital format - seems self-evident, but presumption is immediate access because digital (eg, digital camera vs a disposable one); movie theater vs YouTube, print vs searchable text presumption of media in digital form and that it’s social and shared held a contest to design the logo for “Digital Natives” project at Harvard Law School - got 136 entries (32 from the kid who won), just for the glory (no prize) 4. mash up different media, putting different forms of media together comes down to a series of technologies - RSS, Google Docs, lightweight collaborative tools 5. ...

Comment on government information liberation

Wed, 12 Nov 2008 19:39:37 +0100

John, Thanks for this interesting thread about Government Information Liberation! I hope I am not misreading your enthusiasm if I characterize it as part of a new optimism that so many of us are feeling after the election. I certainly feel more optimistic than I have for a long time! I want to key in on two things you've mentioned in your first few posts in your thread. (I may be going off on a bit of a tangent from what you were saying, but I hope not.) One is the idea of "weaving the political perspective with the policy perspective with the governmental structure perspective." The other is the "values" of libraries and librarians. First: weaving. A few of us at FGI had a conversation this week about the intersection of government information with non-government information. We discussed how the old model of separating government documents departments and collections in libraries was probably more of a library operational convenience than anything else. We certainly did the best we could with that model and the tools we had at the time to provide the best access we could to government information, but the model of separate collections was never ideal for users. Now, in the digital age, the model of separate (ok, I'll even use the buzzword: "stovepipe") collections has become less necessary and even less fruitful than it was in the paper and ink world. Projects like govtrack.us and the many projects from the Sunlight Foundation and other remixes and Insanely Useful Web Sites demonstrate how technology can help us overcome a lot of limitations we faced in the past and create tools for civic engagement. I would really like to see libraries creating similar projects and collaborating with projects like these! We have done it before when we created gateways to GPO Access and were so successful that GPO had to stop charging for access and start cooperating with this grass-roots effort. ...

How to use opencongress.org

Wed, 12 Nov 2008 16:34:59 +0100

Have you used OpenCongress.org recently? Are you aware of all its cool features, from RSS feeds to Facebook widgets? Check it all out is this short screencast: OpenCongress.org: What’s Happening In Congress? by ryanne, November 2, 2008. (Source: Free Government Information (FGI) blogs)

A mashup of pop culture and ya lit

Wed, 12 Nov 2008 05:00:00 +0100

I was lucky enough to attend the YA Lit Symposium, and to see our own Liz and Carlie present Fandom, Fan Life and Participatory Culture. It was a great program, giving newbies the info they need to present fandom programs in their libraries, as well has giving old-school fans some new ideas. Beginning with a brief introduction to fandom and its terminology, Carlie and Liz focused on how libraries can use book-based fandom as a launchpad for library programs, running the gamut from fanfiction workshops or library conventions to LOLBook covers. For those concerned about the legality of these issues, Liz used her legal background to explain how libraries can present fandom-based programming while living within copyright's restrictions.Attendees also went away with a great handout, full of definitions and further reading suggestions. Those of you who didn't get a chance to attend this great program, fear not! The PowerPoint slides are available, and there's also my post at Librarian by Day with notes on the presentation. Liz also leads off this video, talking about the presentation. With all these great resources, hopefully it'll be like you were right there in Nashville with all of us! (Source: Pop Goes the Library)

Ple workshop/mashing up your ple session

Thu, 06 Nov 2008 18:56:28 +0100

http://edtechpost.wikispaces.com/PLE+workshop Yesterday it was my IMMENSE privilege to co-facilitate a pre-conference workshop with Jared Stein and Chris Lott on “Weaving your own PLE.” I think for all three of us it was an experiment, developed at a distance through Google docs, wikispaces and a couple of Skype calls. Ultimately, it is up to the participants to judge if it was a success, and the proof will be in how many of them continue on with what they started over that day, but it felt like it went pretty well. My contribution was a 2 hour session on “Mashing up your PLE.” We had decided to split it into 2 streams, and the (suggested self-)selelction criteria was prior experience reading and writing blogs (and, sort of as an obvious corollary, awareness of RSS.) (As an aside - we are WELL aware of the issues that surround this approach. We made every effort to emphasize: personal choice; that PLEs involve people and resources not on the network; the PEOPLE are critical, and that they need to grow their OWN networks, not adopt someone else’s; etc. But our goal was to get people who were not swimming in the flow, but who will increasingly be met by students and colleagues who ARE, to start, somewhere, anywhere. To take the plunge, with as many supports as we could muster, in the context of a pre-conference f2f workshop, to sustain it long term.) I picked 4 “mashup” skills or techniques that I think can help people who already partly immersed in networked learning to be more effective networked learners: Re-syndication, Feed Rolling Scraping Sites Personal/Constrained Search Engines Enhancing their Browsing Experience It was a lot to get through in under 2 hours. ...

Al qaida-like mobile discussions & potential creative uses

Sat, 01 Nov 2008 18:13:24 +0100

al Qaida-Like Mobile Discussions & Potential Creative Uses (PDF; 6.9 MB) Source: 304th MI Bn OSINT Team (U.S. Army, via Secrecy News) Terrorists and persons sympathetic to terrorism recommend a variety of different mobile to web technologies, software, and Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) for their mobile phone use. Some of the tactics are old, some of the tactics are still emerging, and some tactics may emerge from hacker, activist, and criminal non-terrorist use. This paper briefly covers a few examples of terrorist use and potential use of mobile to web and web to mobile technologies and tactics from an open source perspective. The paper includes the following five topics: Pro Terrorist Mobile Interfaces; Mobile Phone GPS for Movements, Ops, Targeting, and Explotation; The Mobile Phone as a Surveillance Tool; Voice Changers for Terrorist Phone Calls; a Red Teaming Perspective of the Potential Terrorist Use of Twitter, and a sample of software that is recommended on one pro terrorist website for mobile phone activities. There are numerous possibilities that are not covered in this paper due to time and research constraints. For example, Google Earth, Mobile GPS Mashups, and Mobile Phone Number Spoofing techniques are not addresses in this paper but are certainly worth Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) consideration and probably deserve a paper (if not a book) unto itself. Marked FOUO (For Official Use Only). (Source: Docuticker)

New york times apis

Thu, 30 Oct 2008 19:15:00 +0100

I’m catching up on blog reading after ages away from home and found two new APIs from the New York Times. First the TimesTags API: Today we’re releasing the TimesTags API, which is the gateway to a lush garden of Times metadata. What’s so great about metadata? Well, you’ve probably heard that “information wants to be free.” But even more than that, information wants to be found. And metadata — data about the data — improves findability. Second the Movie Reviews API: Today we’re launching the Movie Reviews API, a new way to access over 22,000 New York Times movie reviews going all the way back to 1924. Keep ‘em coming!!! This is great stuff. One day soon we’re going to see a ’super OPAC’ that uses a ton of APIs to enhance content displayed to our patrons!! (Source: What I Learned Today...)

Internet librarian 2008 conference presentations now online

Thu, 30 Oct 2008 04:00:00 +0100

Many of the presentations from the Internet Librarian conference that ended last week in Monterrey, California are starting to become available on the conference website:Monday, October 20, 2008 (Information Discovery & Search, Outreach & Marketing Public Libraries in a 2.0 World, Web Design, Digital Libraries)Tuesday, October 21, 2008 (Enterprise Trends, Innovation & Change, Learning, Solving Problems)Wednesday, October 22, 2008 (Digital Operations, Social Media, Virtual Worlds & Gaming, Planning)According to the conference overview, Internet Librarian is "the most comprehensive conference for library and information professionals interested in technology to discover the insights, strategies and practices that will allow us to tame the net, manage libraries and digital information, and enhance the information and learning experience of people in our communities":"Web 2.0 tools and practices, web services, social media, and new platforms of social computing are enabling libraries and information professionals to interact with their clients and communities in new and exciting ways. New tools and processes have ignited creative integrated content mashups, specialized and personalized services for community segments, and exciting new techniques for dealing with voluminous information flows, including user-generated content. Our conference theme, Beyond 2.0: User-Focused Tools & Practices, captures leading-edge online initiatives and innovations in all types of information enterprises, tools and techniques for enhancing user-friendly digital information flows, information discovery and visualization methods for dealing with today’s information overload, building new communities and supporting online connections in engaging ways, and more (... ...

Looking up alternative copies of a book on amazon, via thingisbn

Wed, 29 Oct 2008 11:36:33 +0100

As Amazon improves access to the long tail of books through Amazon’s marketplace sellers and maybe even their ownership of Abebooks, it’s increasingly easy to find multiple editions of the same book. So when I followed a link to a book that Mike Ellis recommended last week (to The Victorian Internet in fact) and found that none of the editions of the book were in stock, as new, on Amazon, I had the tangential thought that it’d be quite handy to have a service that would take an ISBN and then look up the prices for all the various editions of that book on Amazon. Given an ISBN for a book, there are at least a couple of ways of finding the ISBNs for other editions of the book - the Worldcat xISBN service, and ThingISBN from LibraryThing (now part owned by Amazon through Amazon’s ownership of Abebooks; for who else Amazon owns, see Amazon “Edge Services” - Digital Manufacturing). So here’s a couple of Yahoo pipes for looking up the alternative editions of a book on the Amazon website, after discovering those editions from ThingISBN. First of all a pipe that takes an ISBN and looks up alternative editions using ThingISBN: What this pipe does is construct a URL that calls for the list of alternative ISBNs for a given ISBN. That is, it constructs a URL of the form http://www.librarything.com/api/thingISBN/ISBNHERE, which returns an XML file containing the alternative ISBNs (example), grabs the XML file back using the Fetch Data block, renames the internal representation of the grabbed XML so that the pipe will generate a valid RSS feed, and output the result. So now we have an RSS feed that contains a list of alternative ISBNs, via ThingISBN, for a given ISBN. Now to find out how much these books cost on Amazon. For that, we shall find it convenient to construct a pipe that will look up the details of a book on Amazon using the Amazon Associates web service, given an ISBN. ...

Ottawa crime map

Tue, 28 Oct 2008 04:00:00 +0100

They're using a third-party service, CrimeReports.com , for the mapping. I'll give you a direct link so you can skip the giant disclaimer they present on the OttawaPolice.ca site http://www.crimereports.com/map?search=Ottawa+Ontario Looks like the Market and Bank Street are popular amongst the criminals, which won't be much of a surprise to Ottawa residents. If this doesn't seem too novel, keep in mind that chicagocrime.org was one of the original crime map mashups, and it was only created in May 2005 (see In memory of chicagocrime.org ). (Source: Science Library Pad)

Looking for authors

Tue, 28 Oct 2008 04:00:00 +0100

Hi all, I'm working on a book about mashups in libraries. I have had 4 authors pull out on me and so I'm in need of a few more chapters. I'm looking for content that will appeal to the average library employee - coding can be discussed - but it should be overwhelming. I'd love to have something about LibraryThing and how their API is being used, I'm also open to other ideas. You have be able to write the chapter in 2 weeks - no extensions - now that I've given too many of them out and I'm stuck :( Thanks in advance!! --- Nicole C. Engard Open Source Evangelist, LibLime (888) Koha ILS (564-2457) ext. 714 nce-dH/yH1cuEJxBDgjK7y7TUQ< at >public.gmane.org AIM/Y!/Skype: nengard http://liblime.com http://blogs.liblime.com/open-sesame/ (Source: gmane.education.web4lib)

Links for 2008-10-26 [del.icio.us]

Mon, 27 Oct 2008 08:30:02 +0100

Connectivism - LTCWiki Connectivism and Connective Knowledge is a twelve week course that will explore the concepts of connectivism and connective knowledge and explore their application as a framework for theories of teaching and learning. It will outline a connectivist understanding of educational systems of the future. This course will help participants make sense of the transformative impact of technology in teaching and learning over the last decade. The voices calling for reform do so from many perspectives, with some suggesting 'new learners' require different learning models, others suggesting reform is needed due to globalization and increased competition, and still others suggesting technology is the salvation for the shortfalls evident in the system today. While each of these views tell us about the need for change, they overlook the primary reasons why change is required. Babbler : avenging avatar » Babbler is a mashup between Second Life and Yahoo! Pipes. It allows your chatting to be translated. Pirate translation is via http://pirate.monkeyness.com/. It translates you to a language of your choice, as well as others people to your language. Currently supports the following in one way or another: “French”,”German”, “Spanish”, “English”, “Italian”, “Portuguese”, “Japanese”, “Chinese”,”Dutch” (Source: DigiCMB)

Keynote: communities and communication in a social and mobile world

Mon, 27 Oct 2008 04:00:00 +0100

I really enjoyed this keynote by author Howard Rheingold, who wrote Smart Mobs. The themes were of trust and communication over time. Rheingold noted that when he had written other books, he researched them, wrote them, and then put the topic away, but this topic has stuck with him. His presentation was lively, interesting and relevant, with visuals reminiscent of Flat Stanley or Where's Waldo. I've stuck pretty closely with my notes from his presentation:Cell phones are changing the way the world looks at time, children, and each other. In Finland, the word for cell phone is the diminutive of “hand.” In Tokyo, people were walking around looking at their cell phones instead of around themselves or at each other. Rheingold heard the saying, “kids flock like birds” and noticed a softening of time, where we don't meet at a pre-specified time as much, but rather plan to meet in the afternoon and work out the details of when and where later, on the phone. Protests, meetings, etc., have all been arranged by cell phone (for example: "everyone show up at this time in this place wearing black"), lowering the threshold for cooperation. Oh My News (Korea) tipped the election on election day via social networking, and there are many more examples of this type of thing from all over the world: high school kids in Chile, Basques in Madrid, violent radicals in Denmark, Nigeria, Australia, and more.This isn't new. Way back when, hunter-gatherers needed protein every day. They gathered together in extended family groups and managed to drive all large mammals in North America to extinction more quickly. These were big, so hunters could provide for more than themselves and their families. Communication was key for hunting and sharing.Later, big civilizations grew in the river deltas. Writing began from record-keeping: accountants started it all! Reading and writing was limited to the elite until the printing press. ...

Shinobi life

Sun, 26 Oct 2008 22:14:13 +0100

Shinobi Life Volume 1 by Shoko Conami (amazon) I like ninjas and I like romance, so I should be finding a bunch of ninja romance manga that I like to read, right? I don’t necessarily have the best track record when it comes to this sub-genre of manga. I love Tail of the Moon, but the other two ninja romantic comedies that I’ve sampled, Kage Tora and Teru Teru X Shonen left me decidedly underwhelmed. I was intrigued by the cover image for Shinobi Life and wanted to check it out. Shinobi Life opens with a scene in the past. A woman gives her ninja protector Kagetora a hair comb. A blast knocks them into the water, and everything goes black. In the present day a young woman named Beni is trapped on the edge of a roof with a bumbling kidnapper. Unfortunately Beni is used to kidnappings because her family is rich and powerful and her father is extremely arrogant and abrasive. She insults her kidnapper and he grabs her throat. It suddenly starts to rain and a ninja drops out of the sky. He knocks Beni off the roof but manages to save them both with a handy ninja claw. The ninja is Kagetora, and he greets Beni by calling her “Beni Hime Sama.” She wonders why he’s calling her a princess when she’s never seen him before. He’s shocked at her mannerisms and thinks that she must have hit her head during their fall. When Kagetora looks around, he assumes that the modern world is an elaborate trick. Beni realizes that Kagetora thinks she’s one of her distant ancestors. They go back to her estate and Kagetora stays with Beni as the latest in her rotating line of bodyguards. Beni has a severe case of “poor little rich girl syndrome” with the added issue of being slightly suicidal. She allows Kagetora to continue believing that the modern world is an illusion, and starts developing feelings for him. ...

Calles y plazas

Sat, 25 Oct 2008 04:00:00 +0100

Muy pocas, la verdad. Todo esto viene a cuento de una aplicación web híbrida, algo que los entendidos llaman Mashup, y que en este caso concreto te permite averiguar la dirección postal de un punto determinado del mapa. Find Postal Address (vía The Presurfer) ¿Conoces alguna dirección postal relacionada con los libros, la lectura o las bibliotecas? (Source: A Nosa Biblioteca 3.0)

Bridging worlds 2008 conference, part 6: sidsel bech-peterson - the mashup library

Sat, 25 Oct 2008 04:00:00 +0100

[From Part 5]Sidsel Bech-Peterson, from The Main Library, Aarhus, Denmark.Sidsel spoke about Aarhus Public Library's efforts in mashing up digital and physical spaces, and people.People?Yeah, I heard her right.They have conceived the term "mash-up"to be about "Co-creation", and user involvement in service prototyping.Sidsel showed several videos. Check them out:StorySurferTransformation Lab - Prototyping the FutureI-LandI was impressed with this service called the "Info-Column" (see Transformation Lab video at the 4:10 min mark), where item information can be bluetoothed to the patron's mobile device.Another cool idea --an "User Suggestion" website (like Dell's Idea Storm)-- where library users can submit suggestions, comment and vote on what others have suggested.You might think "Oh, nothing special... just a site for users to submit ideas". But it's more complicated than that and I'm sure it took some amount of institutional courage to implement it.For instance, I can think of these issues to be addressed:Would setting up such a site lead to expectations that all ideas have to be implemented?How do you handle a point where there's a "diminished returns" of ideas? How much time/ opportunity costs are we prepared to spend, in responding to submissions? (because surely most responses deserve some acknowledgment, if not direct feedback)But those issues are not insurmountable. When planned ahead, they can be managed in several different ways.Example -- the library can explain what's their "response policy" -- whether you are able to respond to all comments? Or publish some broad guidelines on how the library would evaluate suggestions and choose those for implementation. Maybe even a cut-off for the life of the website, i.e. Migrate it to part of regular customer contact/ feedback process rather than a specific "Idea Storm" website. ...

Apis in 15 minutes

Fri, 24 Oct 2008 18:33:56 +0100

There is a lot of talk about making data accessible via APIs, but there is also a lot of confusion about what this means, how to do it, and why it is beneficial when the average citizen cannot make heads or tails of an API. API stands for "Application Programming Interface" but typically what we are discussing when we talk about APIs around data is a way to access data in a machine readable format. A machine readable format is something that is more or less understandable by a computer program, so that it may be used to present data in new and interesting ways. The house.gov website has a listing of all representatives by state but a computer program has no way of knowing how to understand this listing. A more useful listing might look like an excel (or CSV) file that listed each congressperson's name in the first column, state in the second, and so on. This is the fundamental advantage of an API, it makes data available in a way that a computer program can understand so that more complicated things can be done by such a computer program. (eg. draw a map with states colored according to their representatives' party affiliations) A side effect of this computer readable format is that it is possible to ask more useful and specific questions of the data. When you go to the above house.gov site it is possible to get a listing of all Representatives, but it is impossible to say "show me all representatives that are Democrats from North Carolina" or "show me all representatives named John." It is the availability of these APIs that have allowed all sorts of interesting sites that combine data from multiple sources known as "mashups." One of the earliest and most popular examples was a site called HousingMaps that combines Craigslist housing data with Google maps. A handful of APIs exist to help make government data more accessible, through which it is now possible to make mashups using government data. ...

Calling amazon associates/ecommerce web services from a google spreadsheet

Fri, 24 Oct 2008 08:50:12 +0100

I’ve never really been one for using spreadsheets - I’d rather write code in a text environment than macros and formulae in a Microsoft environment (because Excel is the spreadsheet you’re likely to have to hand in most cases, right?), but over the last week or so, I’ve really been switched on to how we might be able to use them as a scribble pad for playing with web services… So for example, in Viewing Campaign Finance Data In a Google Spreadsheet via the New York Times Campaign Data API I showed how to do what it says on the tin… … and today I had a look at Amazon Associates Web Service (formerly known Amazon ECS (eCommerce webservices)). Until now, the best way of getting your head round what these services can do has been to use the tools on AWSzone, a playground (or scratchpad) for previewing calls to Amazon web services. In the case of the REST flavoured web service, the form simply provides a quick’n'easy way of creating the RESTful URL that calls the webservice. The SubscriptionId is required and can be obtained by registering for access with the Amazon Associates web service. So just pick the web service/function you want to call (ItemSearch in this case), fill in some necessary details (and some optional ones, if you like…) and view the results: (You might also notice the scratchpad contains a tab for creating a minimal SOAP request to the web service (and viewing the associated SOAP response) and a tab for creating Java (or C#) code that will call the service). Amusingly, you view the SOAP request and response via a URL ;-) Whilst the scratchpad makes it easy to construct web service calling URLs, the XML response is still likely to be unmanageable at best (and meaningless at worst) for most people. Which is where using a Google spreadsheet as a display surface comes in. ...

Mashup mayhem bcs (glasgow branch) young professionals talk

Thu, 23 Oct 2008 16:08:06 +0100

On Monday I gave a presentation for the BCS Glasgow branch at the invite of Daniel Livingstone, who I met in the mashup mart session at the CETIS bash last year. I’d prepared some slides - even rehearsed a couple of the mashups I was going to do - and then fell apart somewhat when the IE6 browser I was using on the lectern PC failed to play nicely with either Pageflakes or Yahoo Pipes. (I had intended to use my own laptop, but the end of the projector cable was locked away…) “Why not use Firefox Portable?” came a cry from the floor (and I did, in the end, thanks to Daniel…). And indeed, why not? When I was in the swing of doing regular social bookmarking sessions, often in IT training suites, I always used the local machines, and I always used Portable Firefox. But whilst I’ve started “playing safe” by uploading at least a basic version of the slides I intend to use to Slideshare before I leave home on the way to a presentation, I’ve stopped using Portable Firefox on a USB key even if I am taking the presentation off one… (There is always a risk that “proxy settings” are required when you use your own browser, of course, but a quick check beforehand usually sorts that…) So note to self - get back in the habit of taking everything on a USB key, as well as doing the Slideshare backup, and ideally prepping links in a feed somewhere (I half did that on Monday) so they can be referred to via a live bookmark or feedshow. Anyway, some of the feedback from the session suggested handouts would have been handy, so here are handouts of a sort - a set of repurposed slides in which I’ve taken some of the bits that hopefully worked on Monday, along with a little bit of extra visual explanation added in. ...

Il2008: danah boyd keynote

Wed, 22 Oct 2008 16:58:22 +0100

danah boyd gave this morning’s keynote session. An aside - Howard Rheingold AND danah boyd - way to go, Information Today! Title: Social Media & Networked Technologies: Research & Insights Web 2.0 means different things to different people. user-generated content techies - always beta business crowd - it was a glimmer of hope (an “after the first crash” thing) Early days of the web - very topic driven. Now instead of information organized around topics, it’s arranged around people - around friends. What make it a social network site? Profile: physical world - clothes, hair styles, etc define us digital world - we’re an IP address… - we repurpose stuff to reflect us (ie., lying about age in myspace). - younger people’s profile pages are similar to their bedroom walls (and probably horrify their parents in the same way) Friending (not sure that was the word she used): - it’s still awkward to us - some have 30-50 friends (it reflects their real life friends) - some have 1-200 friends, trying to collect a whole school - 3rd category - people who collect as many friends as possible - MySpace lets you arrange friends “in order” Top Friends is a very tricky thing. Bands are safe, put them in your family list (that’s safe), put your girlfriend in the top 10, etc. ...

Danah boyd - social media & network technologies

Wed, 22 Oct 2008 15:48:19 +0100

Web 2.0 Shift in development and deployment Users effect the technology cycle User generated content Flows tech bubble & means hope Reshape the way people see interact and use technology Reshaping of public spaces online Rise of social network sites Key characteristics of - profile - digital body, way of making yourself known in a particular context - public articulation of friends - weirdness of “are you my friend yes/no?” Different patterns of friends and how people choose to collect them - Wall/comments section - form of social grooming, not much real exchange, public performance Status updates (microblogging) becoming a critical feature creates a culture of peripheral awareness List has become the social gathering place because kids aren’t allowed to be outside and roaming around, lack of mobility, fear Not quite the same as physical public spaces Properties of these spaces Persistence - things stick around even though people meant them to be ephemeral Replicablity - can’t tell copy from original Scalability - potential to reach millions reality of reaching noone, what spreads and what doesn’t Searchability - not searchable on physical space when you participate on the internet you become searchable many reasons why you don’t want to be searchable Invisible audiences - don’t know who the audience is Collapsed contexts - space typically delineate contexts, don’t have the walls online, public and private are no longer bounded by space Radical change in the information ecologies People’s understanding of organizing information dramatically different Need to teach people about how knowledge is produced “there is nothing neutral about history” Breakdown of traditional forms of authorship Mashups remixes People are engaging with text to produce new text and content How do we deal with an ecology where everything is about attention? 4 points of ...

Mashup reuse - are you lazy enough?

Mon, 20 Oct 2008 14:38:00 +0100

Late on Friday night, I picked up a challenge (again on Twitter) from Scott Leslie: After a little more probing, the problem turned out to be to do with pulling a list of URLs from a page on the Guardian blog together into a playlist: The 50 greatest arts videos on YouTube. As Scott suggested, it would have been far more useful to provide the list as a Youtube playlist. But they didn’t… So was there an easy way of creating one? Now it’s quite possible that there is a way to programmatically create a playlist via the Youtube gdata API, but here’s a workaround that uses a Grazr widget as a player for a list of Youtube URLs: So let’s work back from this widget to see how it was put together. The Grazr widget works by loading in the URL of an OPML or RSS feed, or the URL of an HTML page that contains an autodiscoverable feed: The URL loaded into the widget is this: http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=crKH_KOc3RGjaN6YPxJ3AQ&_render=rss If we load this URL into our normal browser, (and then maybe also “View Source” from the browser Edit menu, or “Page Source” from the browser View menu) this is what the Grazr widget is consuming: If you know anything about Grazr widgets, then you’ll maybe know that if the feed contains a media enclosure, Grazr will try to embed it in an appropriate player… So where is the feed the Grazr widget is feeding on actually come from? The answer, a Yahoo pipe. ...

Libx - enhancing user access to library resources

Sat, 18 Oct 2008 07:00:22 +0100

Libraries are creating service-oriented architectures, support mashups and widgets, and reate online tutorials, guides, and visualizations. The LibX (Source: pligg - all)

Libx - enhancing user access to library resources

Sat, 18 Oct 2008 07:00:22 +0100

Libraries are creating service-oriented architectures, support mashups and widgets, and reate online tutorials, guides, and visualizations. The LibX (Source: pligg - all)

Libx - enhancing user access to library resources

Sat, 18 Oct 2008 07:00:22 +0100

Libraries are creating service-oriented architectures, support mashups and widgets, and reate online tutorials, guides, and visualizations. The LibX (Source: pligg - all)

Libx - enhancing user access to library resources

Fri, 17 Oct 2008 21:46:34 +0100

LibX - Enhancing User Access to Library Resources Annette Bailey, Virginia Tech LibX - A Browser Plugin for Libraries Annette reviewed the history of LibX and the initial motivation behind creating this tool: users were increasingly bypassing the library and using search engines and other online search tools. LibX, as a browser plugin, puts the library back into the research process by guiding the user to library resources no matter where they are online. Edition Builder Study The LibX team conducted a study of Edition Builder, a LibX feature that allows libraries to create LibX editions for their particular library. Through analyzying their user logs, and a user survey that included 139 participants, they asked three questions about Edition Builder: Is the interaface easy to learn and use? (yes) How successful are edition maintainers in creating LibX editions? (successful) Is the auto-discovery feature effective? (yes) According to self-reports, the majority of Edition Builder users creators found it easy or very easy to learn and use and preferred its single-page application interface. Logs showed that 50% of users built their edition in 72 minutes or less, and 80% in 190 minutes or less. Auto-discovery of the library catalog, databases, and Open URL Resolver generally worked well, and most of the users who needed to do manual configuration were able to do so easily. LibX 2.0: the next stage for LibX Libraries are creating service-oriented architectures, support mashups and widgets, and reate online tutorials, guides, and visualizations. The LibX team returned to their initial motivation: how can libraries provide these services and resources at the user’s point of need? Adding features to the library catalog or web site isn’t helpful if people aren’t visiting the library catalog or web site. Annette gave a demo of sample features they have developed, “LibX 1. ...

Taskonomy : assembling for use

Thu, 16 Oct 2008 21:28:08 +0100

Patrick Lambe has a great video presentation on information neighbourhoods. He firstly presents a typical framework of the islands or assets of information in an organisation (eg. repository, applications, Intranet), which are glued together as a content management system, tags, taxonomy, search, etc.. He then displays a workers personal information cloud including more objects like share drives, email, phone, instant messaging, SMS, people, web, etc… When he asked the audience how do they get things done, the main answers were: email, people, phone, web This is a predictable answer, people go to people for help, we have conversations, we are each others filter or information scent. And of course the idea of social tools like social bookmarks, blogs, wikis and social networks is more in tune to the flow of human behaviour. I posted not long ago about knowledge tools being embedded into our flow of work, rather than being servant and frustrated with rigid tools, or having to stop and visit islands to seek stuff, then have to dive back into our flow. Now we can use new flexible and unstructured tools, and put our own complexity into them to suit our needs, kind of like sculpturers of flow. Another aspect is drawing pieces from the islands of information (these filing cabinets) and creating our own interfaces, to use as a toolkit, perhaps for a project team. eg. a startpage, or shared startpage. At the moment we can even assemble these social tools into a flow, but we wait for the day when the current rigid business process tools allow us to re-model them as movable pieces. Patrick gives an example of a taxonomy as important for a Blacksmith when they go to the shop and look to replace one of their tools. ...

Scotland’s information

Wed, 15 Oct 2008 10:53:33 +0100

I’ve been given a heads-up on a new site from SLIC and CILIP in Scotland, which has been developed by the Centre for Digital Library Research (CDLR) at the University of Strathclyde. Scotland’s Information is a service to help identify and locate Scotland’s wealth of collections held in libraries, archives and museums. Although the site is live now, it’s official launch will be on 24th October 2008, the centenary of CILIP in Scotland. One could be flippant and note that this is just another Google Maps mashup, which it is, but this is a good example of producing something much greater than the sum of it’s parts. Google Maps mashups have only been around for three years – Google announced their API in June 2005, as we covered here on Panlibus – yet they are a widely used tool on the web and a key part of many a web site that users are familiar and comfortable in using. It is amazing to note how rapidly the click/drag/zoom metaphor for interacting with a map became the de facto way to do it. Back to Scotland’s Information, this site draws together a wealth of information about libraries, archives and museums in Scotland and the topics, people and organisations they represent. What is in my opinion different and very useful in the way the site works is how you can filter your way through this data (often with the use of tag clouds) to arrive at a map containing pins for each location (museum, library, or archive) that can help you. For instance this is the result of clicking on Robert Burns in the People tag cloud - ‘Information collections about Robert Burns (1759-1796)’. 35 locations associated with that famous Scot, which can then be limited further for those with wheelchair and/or internet access. A final link in the chain is that from information about individual collections, there is a link through to the relevant OPAC or search interface. ...

Nytimes announces campaign finance api

Wed, 15 Oct 2008 02:24:15 +0100

The New York Times has just announced an API that makes available the data they have gleaned from the Federal Election Commission's electronic filings for the presidential candidates. "The initial version of the Campaign Finance API offers overall figures for presidential candidates, as well as state-by-state and ZIP code totals for specific candidates. In addition, the API supports a contributor name search using any of the following parameters: first name, last name and ZIP code." This allows people with the appropriate technical skills to build mashups and other web services that take a look at donations by individual or by area with relative ease. In essence it is now possible for web developers to create views on this valuable data that previously would have involved digging through millions of FEC electronic filings. It should also be possible for researchers with moderate technical knowledge to analyze the individual contributions going to candidates to perform statistical and other analysis on what makes for a very interesting dataset. The New York times providing this service is certainly a positive step towards helping people make use of what is one of the richest (pun not intended) datasets the federal government has to offer. (Source: Free Government Information (FGI) blogs)

Gov data mashups: apps for democracy contest

Tue, 14 Oct 2008 18:48:34 +0100

Are you a techie who has a passion for government information, transparency, coding, mashups, and/or web 2.0 tools? Then sign up for the Apps for Democracy contest! In conjunction with the DC Government’s Office of the Chief Technology Officer, the contest is offering $20,000 in prizes to be given to 60 different creators. The goal of the contest is "to reward technology developers with cash prizes and public recognition for creating applications that are useful for the DC government and the citizens, visitors and businesses of Washington, DC." For more information, visit the Apps for Democracy website, and you can follow the contest on Twitter or through their Facebook Group. Dang...if only I was better at coding... (Source: Free Government Information (FGI) blogs)

Mashlogic y el espíritu original de la web

Mon, 13 Oct 2008 17:50:36 +0100

Así que los intereses comerciales han viciado la visión de una red interconectada, global, nacida del hipertexto útil y no de enlaces internos y ocultos a publicidad… Mashlogic, una nueva extensión para Firefox nace con el ambicioso objetivo de devolvérnosla. Más allá de esta declaración de principios redentora, resulta, en la práctica, bastante interesante: Una vez instalado en nuestro navegador y a partir de nuestra selección de intereses (música, noticias de actualidad, idioma inglés, deportes o cualquier otra cosa que actualmente o en un futuro no muy lejano soporte), el complemento enriquecerá nuestra experiencia como usuarios en cualquier página web y marcará los términos que puedan sernos de interes para desplegarlos en una ventana (popup) con descripciones, titulares, eventos, o cualquier cosa de interés sobre el concepto en cuestión. Navegación interactiva, más objetiva y ajustada a nuestros intereses que a los de la persona que redactó el artículo por el que navegamos. Interesante… Existen scripts de Greasemonkey con funciones parecidas y servicios semánticos, como Adaptive Blue, Hyperwords o Sphere Related Content (recientemente de AOL) que enriquecen también la experiencia del usuario, pero quizás de forma menos integral, personalizada y sobretodo directa. En cuanto a tecnología, combina algunas técnicas pendientes de patente, servicios web y tecnologías para el enriquecimiento de la experiencia del usuario (rich UI), como AJAX. En un futuro prometen “entender” el comportamiento del usuario y adaptar sus algoritmos e interface para integrarse en mayor medida en la navegación. Como no podía ser de otro modo, incorporan tecnología semántica (también leen marcas semánticas cuando están disponibles, con la intención de descubrir relaciones entre objetos de la página (nombres de personas) y recursos que sirven esos objetos (ej. LinkedIn). Prometen mejorar en ese sentido. ...

Lemmasleuren met wikipedia roll

Sun, 12 Oct 2008 16:39:00 +0100

Er zijn van die mashups die voor je gevoel weinig toevoegen aan je informatiebeleving, maar die je tegelijkertijd toch weten te intrigeren. Wikipedia Roll is zo'n mashup. Het doet je een beetje denken aan het associatief zoeken binnen de Aquabrowser maar dan met meer relevante associaties. Of je beeld van een bepaald onderwerp ook echt scherper wordt door Wikipedia Roll waag ik te betwijfelen.De uitermate soepele manier waarop je met de infomodules kunt slepen vind ik bijzonder fraai.Daarmee is alles wel gezegd over deze Mashup.Het instructiefilmpje beperkt het aantal woorden overigens ook tot een minimum. De stem van de computer is gortdroog. Het wordt bijna hilarisch.@ (Source: Digitaal Inlichtingenwerk Zeeuwse Bibliotheek)

Your seat is waiting! new business conferences starting online now

Thu, 09 Oct 2008 22:15:36 +0100

Opportunities for learning and professional development are quickly expanding as it becomes easier for everyone to develop and add their own content to the Internet. Earlier this week Mitch Joel, President of marketing firm Twist Image, put together Pixelated, a free full-day online conference with some of the world’s leading speakers on the topic of how business is changing including Sir Ken Robinson, Seth Godin, Chris Anderson, Avinash Kaushik, Chris Brogan and many more. What is incredible is it is all freely available video from around the web, and he has posted it to his blog. His idea was adapted from Bryan Eisenberg, co-author of Call To Action, Waiting For Your Cat To Bark? and Always Be Testing. According to Joel, on his GrokDotCom blog Eisenberg created OnClick: The Online Marketing Virtual Conference Mashup. Eisenberg collected and posted some of the best presentations he’s found online on the topic of online marketing as if he were the conference organizer. What a fantastic idea! Simple, easy, and yet effective. Not to mention cost-effective, for those of us who are experiencing shrinking professional development budgets. There is strikingly little overlap between the two conference line-ups. It has me thinking as to what videos I would include in my own online conference. It also has me wondering where the law leaders are. Where are their videos? Besides Lawrence Lessig and Michael Geist, what other law-related speakers/talks can we gather together? (Source: Slaw)

Innovative interfaces in school libraries

Wed, 08 Oct 2008 05:52:46 +0100

Libraries/media centres/resource centres have a critical role in our schools in terms of the full range of resourcing they can provide for our teachers and learners. As I engage in deep and meaningful conversations with our artchitect/project manager of our revitalisation programme, I can’t help but muse how much we still have to do in the overall scale of things compared to public and academic libraries. I’ve spoken about this a lot in some of my presentations, but I am more amazed than ever at how much we still have to do. The Wilton Library Association has put together a list of Innovative Internet Applications in Libraries. What a wonderful list, and it continues to grow. I highly recommend that school librarians bookmark this link and use it as a bit of a source of inspiration. I must not forget to try and develop more innovative things for my school once our Simply Books mashup has a “life of its own”. Hot on the heals of this great list are the continuing changes coming out of Google, that can often help support the work of our school libraries. Mashable writes that Google Book Search, the popular and somewhat controversial service which has archived millions of books into digital format, has added a new set of tools and partnerships, none bigger than the ability to embed a preview of The Da Vinci Code or the entire encyclopedia on Diabetes onto external websites. Now this is a particularly interesting development. Though it is not a service I can use just yet, it does seem that several libraries including the University of California and the University of Texas Libraries are incorporating the previews into their online catalogues. This is a new form of content enrichment, and one to keep a close watch on. ...

Mashup your article

Wed, 08 Oct 2008 04:00:00 +0100

After the Grand Challenge, Elsevier Article 2.0 is another initiative in "user contribution"Rafael Sidi (Really Simple Sidi) (Source: Really Simple Sidi (RSS))

Encontro sobre web 2.0

Mon, 06 Oct 2008 19:39:00 +0100

Universidade do Minho, Campus de Gualtar, sexta-feira, dia 10 de Outubro de 2008 Realiza-se, no próximo dia 10 de Outubro, o Encontro sobre Web 2.0, a ter lugar no Campus de Gualtar, da Universidade do Minho. O Encontro Web 2.0 tem por objectivo sensibilizar docentes e educadores para a necessidade que a escola tem de se abrir a novos cenários de educação formal e não formal e ser um agente activo nesta nova geração da Internet social que se focaliza nas interacções, nos grupos e na construção social do conhecimento. Pretende-se que seja um ponto de encontro de investigação e de boas práticas. Os participantes assistem a conferências e comunicações que reportam a utilização de ferramentas da Web 2.0, como blogues, wikis, podcasts, Second Life, entre outros, bem como podem escolher um workshop dos 9 disponíveis: 1. Blogue, YouTube, Flickr e Delicious - Sónia Cruz2. Podcast e utilização do software Audacity - Adão Sousa e Fátima Bessa3. Dandelife, Wiki e Goowy - Hugo Martins4. Ferramentas Google: Page Creator, Docs e Calendar - Célio Gonçalo Marques5. PopFly - como editor de mashups - Pedro Ferreira e Ricardo Pinto6. A Web 2.0 e as Tecnologias Móveis - Adelina Moura7. Ambientes Virtuais e Second Life - Nelson Zagalo e Luís Pereira8. Do Movie Maker ao YouTube - Joana Carvalho9. Mapas Conceptuais Online - Graça Magalhães e Filomena del RioManual de Ferramentas da Web 2.0No âmbito do Encontro sobre Web 2.0, vai ser distribuído o Manual de Ferramentas da Web 2.0 para Professores, publicado pelo Ministério de Educação - ref.ª: Carvalho, Ana Amélia A. (org.) (2008). Manual de Ferramentas da Web 2.0 para Professores. Lisboa: DGIDC, Ministério da Educação.Com o aparecimento das funcionalidades da Web 2.0, a facilidade de publicação online e a facilidade de interacção entre os cibernautas torna-se uma realidade. ...

Voting card woes

Thu, 02 Oct 2008 14:24:12 +0100

My husband and I received our voting cards for the upcoming Federal Election. Much to our surprise we were in different constituencies. It seemed a bit incongruous that we would potentially have different MPs and yet live in the same house. I decided to check out the Elections Canada website for a remedy. I am happy to report that there is a great deal of information on the site, with the ability to lookup voter information through the voter information service. Unfortunatley, I now live on the ambiguously described line between two electoral districts. A down side to the maps linked on the voter information service is the lack of reference points. Highways and boundary roads would be a great addition to these maps for next time, or even a mashup like Google Maps, or something similar. When you are challenged, you can call for information. 1-800-463-6868 is the number on the website, and a very nice person (after you get through various voice mail prompting levels) will give you another 800 number for your specific electoral district. The lovely woman (Shelli from Elections Canada) on the final end of the phone was very helpful and informed me that a lot of people have incorrect information on their voter registration cards. Shelli also took responsibilty for calling me back when she needed more information that whe originally thought, and she called me on my cell phone, after getting the number from my children. Now that is great government service! If you think the information on your card is incorrect, you may be right. (Source: Slaw)

Tweetsense

Thu, 02 Oct 2008 04:00:00 +0100

I think the business model at Twitter is going to be really, really interesting, and I think it's going to leverage search, but search as a proxy for data and pattern recognition. We get an inkling of it at Election 2008, Twitter's mashup of Tweets relating to the election, but there's a lot more to think through. First off, Twitter is using its real estate to promote its deal with Current, which is a first, from what I can tell. The "ads" are on the right, right below each users' profile. I remember covering every new pixel as the Google homepage caved to promotional reality, it's interesting to watch it happen at Twitter, too, which I think has a lot of similarities to Google in terms of potential models. Also worth watching is the hash function, where you can tag any topic (IE #redsox, as Churbuck pointed out). This function is not likely to catch on with my mother (I can't imagine her adding hashes to her tweets, much less tweeting...yet), but what it enables certainly could. The problem is, when you create a site to pull hashed stuff out into a stream the result is often less than useful (as Churbuck noted in his post). This is where the role of curation and editors is paramount. Voice, as Fred pointed out. There is voice in editing, voice in curation. And voice adds value. And where value is added, marketers can play, both on Twitter (imagine a cars.twitter.com, with auto advertisers on the right rail and at the top, perhaps using contextual TweetSense - yes, it's owned, by...), and off (think about a feed of contextual Tweets and TweetSense next to conversational sites like Digg and, well, millions of others, as well as sites created simply from Twitter feeds on popular hashes...). Just a (half) thought.... PS - why isn't search.twitter.com, where you can see hash streams, even promoted on the home page of Twitter? Am I missing something, as I usually do? (Source: John Battelle's Searchblog)

Rumsey historical maps integrated into google maps

Wed, 01 Oct 2008 04:00:00 +0100

Elisabeth Grant at the American Historical Association's AHA Today points out that there is a Google Earth/David Rumsey Historical Map Collection mashup. The mashup puts the historical map on top of the current Google map.For example, you can see what Washington, DC looked like in 1851 on top of Washington, DC today. In the upper right-hand corner, you make the historical map fade in and out to pinpoint it against today's buildings.There do seem to be problems opening some of the maps. So, it's not perfect, but those without problems sure are fascinating (like Japan in 1694)! (Source: AbsTracked)

Highlights of new titles 22-28 september 2008

Tue, 30 Sep 2008 04:00:00 +0100

Each week CSU Library adds hundreds of new resources to our catalogue, including books, DVDs, CDs, and electronic resources. The following selection highlights some of the new books added to the collection last week. Click on a book's title to read more information about the book, or click on 'Check Availability' to find the book in the Library Catalogue. Click here to view the complete list of new titles.Creating mashups with Adobe Flex and Air by Chris Korhonen, David Hassoun and John Crosby Check AvailabilityIntentionality, deliberation and autonomy : the action-theoretic basis of practical philosophy edited by Christoph Lumer Check AvailabilityDoing a literature review : releasing the social science research imagination by Chris Hart Check AvailabilityMethod and meaning in polls and surveys by Howard Schuman Check AvailabilityThe new blue media : how Michael Moore, MoveOn. ...

Seen, heard, read

Mon, 29 Sep 2008 07:00:21 +0100

Hennepin County Library's project titled, Media MashUp: public libraries, youth and 21st century literacy. This project focuses on developing best pr (Source: pligg - all)

Christian stelzenmüller: mashups in bibliotheken

Wed, 24 Sep 2008 05:11:24 +0100

Mashups können durch die Kombination von Daten einen Mehrwert gegenüber den ursprünglichen Informationsquellen bieten. Diese Arbeit stellt Mashups vor und zeigt, wie Bibliotheken Mashups bislang für sich nutzen. Des weiteren wird untersucht, wie verbreitet sie auf ausgewählten Websites wissenschaftlicher Bibliotheken sind. Abschließend wird anhand eines einfachen, praktischen Beispiels erläutert, wie ein Mashup realisiert werden kann, und welche Schritte dafür notwendig sind. Die Bachelorarbeit von Christian Stelzenmüller “Mashups in Bibliotheken : Untersuchung der Verbreitung von Mashups auf Webseiten wissenschaftlicher Bibliotheken und Erstellung eines praktischen Beispiels” ist hier online verfügbar. Das im Abstract erwähnte praktische Beispiel ist eine Karte sämtlicher wissenschaftlicher Bibliotheken, die am BIX-WB im Jahr 2007 teilgenommen haben. Es wird neben der Adresse und den BIX-Ergebnisdaten der Bibliotheken auch ein Link zur Homepage der einzelnen Bibliotheks-Website angezeigt. Diese Bachelorarbeit zeigt sehr schön, dass Mashups keine Zauberkunst sind, und durchaus praktische Anwendung finden können. Somit ist sie ein weiteres Argument dafür, dass auch Bachelorarbeiten oft veröffentlichungswürdig sind. Share This (Source: Infobib)

Timeline google. 10 ans. 10 dates.

Tue, 23 Sep 2008 04:00:00 +0100

A l'occasion de son dixième anniversaire (je vous passe les débats sur l'âge réel du moteur selon que l'on prend en compte la publication de l'article originel sur le Pagerank, la date d'enregistrement du nom de domaine Google.com, le lancement du moteur mais hébergé sur le site de Stanford, etc ...), à l'occasion de son dixième anniversaire donc, Google met en place une Timeline très bien faite qui va réjouir à la fois les fans (qui sont de toute façon naturellement réjouis), mais aussi et surtout les analystes et observateurs du moteurs, tant il était pour ces derniers devenu délicat de disposer d'une grille de lecture fiable, aisément consultable et à jour des différentes acquisitions, innovations, et services du même moteur, bon sang que cette phrase est longue. On y retrouve notamment (spéciale dédicace à Jean-Michel) les étapes importantes de l'évolution de la Home Page la plus visitée du monde.Voici mon petit relevé à moi des 10 dates qui m'ont le plus marqué (ou me semblent les plus importantes) depuis ces 10 ans : 3 Mai 1999 : Google embauche son 11ème employé. Le premier à n'être pas un ingénieur. Il s'agit d'Omid Kordestani. Monsieur "ads are content". Il a fait (pas tout seul, certes) du modèle économique de Google ce qu'il est aujourd'hui. 26 Juin 2000 : Google est le premier à franchir la barre du milliard de pages indexées. La "taille" de l'index de Google est indissociable de son succès. 12 Février 2001 : Google acquiert Usenet. En d'autres termes, il est la première société marchande à pouvoir se payer tout un pan d'une mémoire et d'une histoire collective, en l'occurence celle des forums de discussion qui furent à la fois les laboratoires, les incubateurs et les prémisses de l'Internet. A l'époque la nouvelle ne semble pas choquer grand monde. Moi si. 17 Décembre 2003 : lancement de Google Print, qui deviendra Google Books. ...

From the pale-faced moon

Mon, 22 Sep 2008 16:06:06 +0100

When I was a sophomore in high school, I fell utterly in love with Henry IV Part One’s Hotspur. This, I presume, surprises no one? Idealistic (though his ideals are somewhat constrained), passionate, honest, believing the best of his allies, eager to excel himself, possessed of considerable native ability, jawdroppingly unstrategic, even more jawdroppingly tactless, intolerant of stupid lazy bureaucrats and not politic enough to hide or move past it, eyes too fixed on the prize to give way merely because of impossible odds. Mm. Yes. Can’t imagine why such a character would resonate with me, even then… truthfully, I’m at once intrigued and appalled that my character was apparent so early as my sophomore year in high school. He had to die. I understood that even in high school, and I understood that more was happening than mere plot. It is to Shakespeare’s credit that he took a historical necessity and made it a dramatic necessity. Now that I am older, I understand even better; honesty and excellence without charisma and politico-psychological awareness are not proof against treachery born of calculated cowardice. It is not Prince Hal who dooms Hotspur; it is not even Hotspur’s own weaknesses, many and tragic though they are. It is Northumberland and Worcester, those canny self-preserving politicians. (Shakespeare must have liked his Hotspur at least a little, to have gloated so in Worcester getting ‘the guerdon of his guile,’ as E.R. Eddison would have put it.) I have a weakness for well-constructed drama leading to a sense that the denouement is perfectly inevitable and perfectly fitting. Henry IV Part One is pure brilliance in that regard. The finely-wrought difference between the relationships Hal and Hotspur have with their fathers (leaving Falstaff out of it for the nonce, though I wholeheartedly agree that Falstaff is Henry IV’s foil) makes me happy. ...

I love baseball. i don't so much love the mlb

Mon, 22 Sep 2008 04:00:00 +0100

But they are learning. From Larry's blog: Russ Gooberman wrote to tell a happy story about Major League Baseball. ---------- A month ago, I created a mashup clip of some MLB's All-Star Game Home Run Derby. Specifically, I wanted to feature the record-breaking home run streak of Texas Rangers youngster, Josh Hamilton. So, I cut up some YouTube footage of his longest homerun of the contest, and set it to the audio of the final homerun sequence of the movie, The Natural. The next day, the mashup was featured on SportsIllustrated.com as their "Video of the Day." Here's My Mashup. The following day, MLB Advanced Media sent a trademark claim to YouTube, and had the video taken down. ....The interpretation of such an event in the public discourse is not for Major League Baseball to determine or influence. These events that affect our perceptions of our national pastime cannot be copyrighted. The discussion and dissemination of ideas relating to them cannot be censored. There are countless cases of MLB pursuing copyright infringements that go beyond their rights as copyright holders. Evidence of overzealous prosecution has been abundant. This Sisyphean struggle to stop any and all interpretations of MLB material will eventually fail. (Source: John Battelle's Searchblog)

Masser af kort mashups

Thu, 18 Sep 2008 10:35:19 +0100

Min tidligere medblogger Søren Johannesen, der nu skriver sin egen blog Microformats er blevet en rigtig kort-mashup haj. Forleden dag kunne han fejre, at han havde udviklet sit kort mashup nr. 1000. Blandt de mange forskellige mashups, det er blevet til siden starten i 2005, er Gennem byen sidste gang, en geografisk nyfortolkning af Dan Turells berømte digt, De nye kommuners biblioteksledere, hvor man via et Google Maps kan finde en oversigt over landets folkebiblioteksledere og et kort over områder med høj koncentration af nitrat i drikkevandet, som er et af de senste projekter. Du kan finde mange flere kort mashups på Sørens oversigtsside. Søren er en af de første, der for alvor har set lyset og mulighederne med at bruge kort som en del af formidlingen af snart sagt hvad som helst, og han har oparbejdet stor ekspertise i de forskellige kort mashup teknologier, som han glædeligt øser ud af på sin blog. Så hvis du ikke allerede har smidt Sørens feed i din læser, så er det måske på tide. Specielt hvis du synes at kommunikation med kort er spændende. (Source: e-klumme)

Web 2.0 in government? yes.

Wed, 17 Sep 2008 04:00:00 +0100

Michel-Adrien Sheppard, reference librarian at the Supreme Court of Canada gives the update on the latest meeting of the Federal Government Librarians Web 2.0 Interest Group. Some highlights:# The Industry Canada library has launched an internal wiki and implemented RSS feeds for content# The Bank of Canada is looking into creating wikis for its economists and for developing guidelines for the use of social networks by its employees# NSERC, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, has been using LinkedIn and Facebook to recruit people to sit on its science grant committees# The Communications Security Establishment, Canada's electronic intelligence agency, uses wikis, mashups and social bookmarking# The Privy Council Office is examining the possibility of using wikis and blogs to replace newslettersMore News From Federal Library Web 2.0 Interest Group - Library Boy - September 16, 2008 (Source: Science Library Pad)

More news from federal library web 2.0 interest group

Tue, 16 Sep 2008 16:27:00 +0100

In the summer, federal government librarians in Canada created a Web 2.0 Interest Group (WIG) to explore ways of incorporating collaborative technologies into their work.The most recent meeting was held yesterday at Library and Archives Canada.It was a great opportunity to see what work has been done on the Web 2.0 front. Here are a few of the projects mentioned at the roundtable that opened the meeting:The Industry Canada library has launched an internal wiki and implemented RSS feeds for contentThe Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information has launched a CISTI Facebook group, a wiki for posting known problems about its online services, and has created dozens of subject guides using delicious.com social bookmarksThe Bank of Canada is looking into creating wikis for its economists and for developing guidelines for the use of social networks by its employeesNSERC, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, has been using LinkedIn and Facebook to recruit people to sit on its science grant committeesThe Communications Security Establishment, Canada's electronic intelligence agency, uses wikis, mashups and social bookmarkingThe Privy Council Office is examining the possibility of using wikis and blogs to replace newslettersStatistics Canada has started using screencasting software for e-trainingHealth Canada has been using screencasting software and will initiate chat reference when it relaunches its website redesignCanada Mortgage and Housing Corporation is looking at the potential of Flickr for its large photo archiveNatural Resources Canada uses screencasting, wikis, blogs, and delicious.com and is about to move to an open source library management/cataloguing system that offers social tagging of content by usersthe Public Service Commission will launch a blog pilot and wiki this fall and its library has started a delicious.com accountthe Canadian Agriculture Library has set up a Web 2.0 team. ...

Hgis germany

Tue, 16 Sep 2008 15:55:56 +0100

Stefan H. machte mich auf HGIS Germany aufmerksam. HGIS Germany ist ein historisch-geographisches Informationssystem, das auf Flächenbasis aufgebaut ist und die Entwicklung der Mitgliedstaaten des Deutschen Bundes (bzw. des Norddeutschen Bundes/Deutschen Reiches) von 1820 bis 1914 abbildet. Es verbindet damit Informationen zu Raum und Zeit in einem Informationssystem. [...] Den geographischen Daten sind historische Informationen, wie etwa Bevölkerungszahlen, Wirtschaftsdaten, dynastische Verbindungen oder auch multimediale Staatenbeschreibungen, zugeordnet. Ein Beispiel ist die Visualisierung der Streichgarnproduktion in Preußen: Dieses hübsche Projekt zeigt sehr schön auf, wie man historische Daten visualisieren kann. Und nun sich mir die Frage: Könnte man so etwas nicht auch mit Freebase hinbekommen? Durch Freebase Parallax bieten sich dem geübten Herumklicker schon etliche Visualisierungsmöglichkeiten. Auch wenn ich es spontan nicht hinbekommen habe: Ich sehe es als nicht unmöglich an, die Zeitleiste mit den Map-Funktionen zu kombinieren. Wenn das jetzt tatsächlich noch nicht gehen sollte, kann man eine solche Funktion sicherlich implementieren. So schnell werden wir das jedoch nicht herausfinden können. Denn: © HGIS Germany, 2006-2007. All rights reserved. Eine Nachnutzung der erstellten Datenbanken ist also offensichtlich nicht vorgesehen. Immerhin kann HGIS auch so z.B. für schulische Zwecke verwendet werden. Share This (Source: Infobib)

Personas and boxes

Tue, 16 Sep 2008 13:55:21 +0100

A friend of mine dropped an email to say that I should have been cited in this examination of IR-related Cooperesque personas. Oh, please, who cites blogs in stuffy old librarianship? I’m cool. Call it great (or at least thoughtful) minds thinking alike. The money quote from that article is this: It was assumed that the users desired an open-access archive of primarily published research materials generated by the faculty and graduate students, but the users actually desired a network where teaching and learning materials are shared, potential collaborators are identified, and participants’ research is promoted to institutional colleagues. It was assumed. “Mistakes were made.” Mm-hm. They didn’t need to cite my personas. It wouldn’t have hurt them to cite Roach Motel on the subject of faulty ideology, or faculty not using something that has no value to them, however. They get a pass, though, because Roach Motel is still only out in preprint. The article is worth reading in its entirety. They did the work I didn’t and couldn’t, pulling together enough user interviews to base their personas on something other than instinct and anecdote, and to their everlasting credit, they didn’t flinch away from conclusions that are not encouraging for IRs as they are designed and run today. The chief problem with the article is that none of their personas is a librarian. It’s impossible to understand the situation of IRs without the librarians who authorize, plan, build, and run them. Doing so leaves you with “it was assumed.” Assumed by whom, pray, and why? And to put a Harnadian spin on the matter, if we build faculty a whizbang collaboration space that doesn’t actually make any literature open access, is what we’re building really an IR? Will it achieve what we (we librarians, remember us?) wanted to achieve in the first place? Anyway. ...

Mupple - mashup personal learning environments

Fri, 12 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0100

I'm off to Maastricht next week to take part in a workshop on mashup personal learning environments (MUPPLE) as part of the EC-TEL conference. I'll be presenting a demo of some work we've been doing on integrating widgets into various platforms. (Source: JISC CETIS News)

The future of the web is ubiquity!

Thu, 11 Sep 2008 22:36:00 +0100

I am going out on a limb and will say that I think the future is Mozilla Labs' Ubiquity FireFox extension. I am really at a loss as to how to describe it. According to the Mozilla Labs it is an "experiment into connecting the Web with language in an attempt to find new user interfaces that could make it possible for everyone to do common Web tasks more quickly and easily."Its over all goals, according to Mozilla Labs, are to explore how to:Empower users to control the web browser with language-based instructions. (With search, users type what they want to find. With Ubiquity, they type what they want to do.)Enable on-demand, user-generated mashups with existing open Web APIs. (In other words, allowing everyone–not just Web developers–to remix the Web so it fits their needs, no matter what page they are on, or what they are doing.) Use Trust networks and social constructs to balance security with ease of extensibility. Extend the browser functionality easily. Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.Just give it a try. It is an experiment and could be a grand one at that!Technorati tags: FireFox, Ubiquity, Mozilla LabsPowered by ScribeFire. (Source: Baby Boomer Librarian)

Rss mixer

Wed, 10 Sep 2008 15:08:07 +0100

RSS Mixer, a recently released as an "alpha", lets you create an account, input one or more RSS feeds, and gives you a combined output. Once you've set up an account (using OpenID or a one-off account at the site), entering feeds to mix is straightforward. The user interface is available in eight languages (there's a language link in the site's footer). Choices include German, English, Spanish, French, Russian, and Chinese. Mixed feeds can be tagged and shared -- there are built-in widgets for mobile versions, creating web widgets, emailing a mixed feed to a friend, and exporting a mix as an OPML file, in addition to the version viewable on the RSS Mixer site -- for example, an ego search for RSS4Lib. One thing I noticed is that sorting in mixes is odd. In the above two-feed mix (comprised of RSS4Lib's RSS feed and a Technorati search feed for "rss4lib"), an RSS4Lib entry is sometimes followed by one or more posts discovered by Technorati about that particular entry. Other times, the Technorati post comes first. In all cases, though, the RSS4Lib entry was posted before anyone could comment on it -- sorting should be consistent, whatever the algorithm is. By further mashing up RSS Mixer's output, it is possible to create a keyword search across multiple specific feeds. FeedSifter (reviewed here in July 2008) lets you searching a feed for one or more keywords. As a test of this, I used RSS Mixer to create a combined feed out of about 55 RSS- and library-related feeds. I then used FeedSifter to limit that to anything in that mixed feed that mentions metadata. It would not surprise me if searching were on the drawing board for a future version of RSS Mixer, but there's no indication of this functionality now. Thanks to Suzanne for the tip about RSS Mixer. (Source: RSS4Lib)

On fair use, book covers, libraries and the law

Tue, 09 Sep 2008 04:00:00 +0100

Regular readers of this blog will know that I've done a few library mashups using book cover images to add to the usefulness of services provided by my library. Depending on the task, I've either used a supply of cover art provided by Syndetics (a Bowker company) or cover images provided by Amazon. LibraryThing also has a good sized supply of cover art, though it's a bit trickier to use it wholesale. For the most part I rationalized using these images either by somehow contriving that the Syndetics ones were OK to use because they were used as part of a view into the Ann Arbor District Library's catalog (and AADL uses them), or because they are within the rules as best I understood them from Amazon. Mostly though these projects were one-offs and not ongoing commercial projects for gain. And I rationalized it because it was, well, fun, and unlikely to get anyone upset. Mary Minow tackles the question of the legality of the use of cover image art by libraries in the LibraryLaw Blog. She examines the relevant bits of the law - the Fair Use bit of the Copyright Act, and the "useful article" test. Quoting now:However, there's another copyright exception that could be useful here -- the "useful article" provision at 17 USC 113(c) which states:In the case of a work lawfully reproduced in useful articles that have been offered for sale or other distribution to the public, copyright does not include any right to prevent the making, distribution, or display of pictures or photographs of such articles in connection with advertisements or commentaries related to the distribution or display of such articles, or in connection with news reports. and 17 USC 101 defines "useful article" as:A “useful article” is an article having an intrinsic utilitarian function that is not merely to portray the appearance of the article or to convey information. ...

Un mashup con biblioteche oggi

Sat, 06 Sep 2008 19:56:34 +0100

Negli ultimi tempi, come avrete notato, sono stata abbastanza silente sul fronte blog: come anticipato, ho avuto delle questioni di vita vissuta da curare e poi il lavoro sull’archivio aperto in Biblioteca e, negli ultimi tempi, anche un lavoro (importante!) sui mashup di cui vi parlerò a breve. Visto che sono in tema di auto-promozione, dirò che sta per uscire anche il volume con le relazioni al convegno CNBA 2007 “Library 2.0 intorno e oltre l’architettura” (qui il mio post sull’argomento) e in esso sarà presente un mio articolo sui mashup. Parto da questo per dire anche che ultimamente i mashup si vanno imponendo molto sulla scena delle tecnologie. Vengono visti come pilastro del Web 2.0 - e a ragione, se li si vede come strumenti in grado di mettere la creazione e il remix di informazioni anche nelle mani di coloro che non possiedono particolari skill di programmazione. Ma i mashup rivestono grande interesse anche per le società commerciali, i fondi di investimento e le realtà aziendali più grandi. Certo, non si può dire che siano giunti a un livello di maturazione compiuto, ma le strade che vengono battute lasciano ben sperare. Nell’ambito bibliotecario ovviamente (sic) le esperienze vengono soprattutto dagli USA; in Italia però è stato fatto un ottimo esperimento per dotare la piattaforma che ospita gli indici della rivista Biblioteche Oggi di una API, cioè di un’interfaccia di programmazione che consente di interrogare il database degli articoli secondo certi parametri e ottenere in risposta le informazioni rappresentate in un determinato formato. Piero Cavaleri, direttore della Biblioteca della LIUC, è molto interessato agli aspetti tecnologici del Web 2.0, e questa interfaccia, costruita da lui per Biblioteche Oggi, lo dimostra. Vediamo da vicino come funziona. ...

Following/mapping the election

Wed, 03 Sep 2008 20:25:58 +0100

If you're like me, you want to keep track of the presidential race between Barack Obama and John McCain. I thought I'd share a few sites that I've bookmarked in order to keep up to the minute. My favorite site is Electoral-vote.com. E-V collects national and state polls and shows a nice map of the current electoral vote count. As new state polls are released, the maps, spreadsheets, tables, graphs, etc. are updated. There's also a comparison for that day in the 2004 presidential race, roll-over stats for how each state voted since 1992, and tracking of Senate and House elections. Another site of interest is FiveThirtyEight "electoral projections done right." This one has lots of graphs, "tipping point" states, a return on investment index and more. 538 (the # of electors in the electoral college of course :-) ) also tracks governors' races. It's run by Nate Silver, a writer and baseball statistician. You know how crazy baseball fans are for data, so you know that this site is sucking up as much data as they can, chewing it up and serving it up in lots of different ways. Also check out RealClearPolitics. This one pulls together news, blogs, editorials, polls and electoral maps (although the mapping feature is only for presidential race). [Thanks David Weinberger/JoHo for the RealClearPolitics tip!] (Source: Free Government Information (FGI) blogs)

E-science, science 2.0, open science

Wed, 03 Sep 2008 04:00:00 +0100

Some recent posts that got me thinking about various escience/science 2.0/open science issues:First, Christina gets us rolling with some definitions:So I'm asking and proposing that e-science isgrid computing - using distributed computing power to do new computational methods in other areas of science (not in CS but in Astro, in bio, etc.)data curation - using computing power and information science to store, discribe, and provide access to scientific information for reuse while taking security and policy issues into accountsupporting scientists work using social computing technologies (SCTs) to support collaboration around data and equipment (as in collaboratories) as well as collaboration to find new research partners and to discuss sciencemaybe some sort of support for benchtop computational methods or support for workflow or electronic lab notebooks?What do you think? Is it just one of these or all or some subset?More or less, as I said on FriendFeed, I see the terms e-science, science 2.0 and open science bandied about quite a bit these days. I tend to thing of e-science as comprising grid computing and data curation issues. Science 2.0 I think of more as social software applications in science, including lab notebooks and the like. Open science is a newer term, I think, and a little more nebulous to me. It's more an overarching attitude and approach rather than a set of tools. Certainly, open science includes aspects of grid computing, data curation and web 2.0 tools but all of the above don't necessarily have to be "open." It's possible to curate large data sets that are private, for example, or for a wiki lab notebook to be for the lab members only; e-science and and science 2.0 don't have to be fully open although, of course, it's infinitely preferable that they are. ...

Collection of oa datasets and mashups

Wed, 03 Sep 2008 04:00:00 +0100

Datamob (motto: Public data put to good use.) is a site, launched earlier this year, that catalogs OA datasets and visualization interfaces. (Thanks to Olivier Charbonneau.) (Source: Open Access News)

New things, a round-up

Wed, 03 Sep 2008 04:00:00 +0100

There have been quite a few new (or new-to-me) things to experiment with lately. Of course, this directly coincided with the ramp-up for Fall term, so I haven't done very thorough explorations. But here's what I've fired up at least once lately.UbiquityThe link will take you to information about this Firefox extension. I don't normally watch videos online (I know, I know, but my connection at home isn't fast enough to make the experience pleasant), and this one started off cheesy, but it got interesting fast. I'd love to see a set of commands for libraries that I could subscribe to. Searching the catalog, proxifying stuff, citation generation, open URL resolving... and that's just the stuff that we can already do using existing tools. It seems like the possibilities for on-the-fly mashups are almost limitless.DragDropUploadThis is another Firefox extension that I just found and LOVE. It lets me drag a file onto the upload dialog box for things like my email, and it'll fill in the file path for you. None of that annoying stuff like clicking "browse" and then navigating through your computer's file structure. So Easy.EverNoteI've been using Evernote for years, but the new version is significantly different. I'm not a fan of the rate and number of upgrades it goes through (really, do you want to emulate iTunes that much?), but it works on my iPod Touch, it captures and interprets screen shots (yes, interprets, as in, reads the words in an image and lets you search them later), and is generally pretty slick.Remember the MilkOther people have been using this for a while, so it's not really "new," but I hadn't used it before, so it qualifies for this list. I have a love-hate relationship with task lists of any kind because I usually don't list out tasks in great detail, preferring to work toward an ultimate goal rather than concentrate on the bits and pieces. ...

Search: yahoo’s build your own search service (boss) touts its search site creations, august 2008

Tue, 02 Sep 2008 11:11:00 +0100

"A month after the launch of BOSS -- an application programming interface that lets developers build a customized search engine atop Yahoo’s technology -- Yahoo is showing off mashups built... (Source: Info To Go: Navigating the Internet)

Le marché du mardi, n°18

Tue, 02 Sep 2008 06:25:00 +0100

SCIENCE 2.0 - L'équipe du Journal of number theory, édité par Elsevier, propose à ses auteurs de faire le résumé de leurs articles sous la forme d'une vidéo ; c'est, selon le directeur de la revue, une façon plus vivante de contextualiser les résultats de la recherche. Peu d'auteurs ont pour l'instant choisi cette option, mais les vidéos ont été vues entre 250 et 1300 fois en 3 mois, ce qui est plutôt encourageant. - Une équipe de scientifiques de l'Université de Nottingham a imaginé une version vidéo de la table périodique des éléments : derrière chaque symbole chimique, une explication en images ou une démo des réactions possibles (voir celle sur le phosphore par exemple, ou celle sur le sodium). Les vidéos sont aussi disponibles sur le Channel YouTube. Très pédagogique, le site a enregistré plus d'1,8 millions de consultations depuis son lancement. - Moins drôle mais aussi intéressant, Physclips, de l'Université de South Wales en Australie, explique différentes notions de mécanique, d'électricité et de magnétisme, en images et animations flash. Le tout sous licence Creative Commons, démos et animations pouvant être téléchargées par les enseignants souhaitant les réutiliser. AO & OA - Archiver oui mais quoi ? La version de l'auteur ou celle (mise en page) de l'éditeur ? Contre toute attente, un certain nombre d'éditeurs (69 sur la 414 répertoriés) autorisent l'auto-archivage de la version éditeur (généralement au format pdf), nous apprend Sherpa, qui a tout de suite ajouté l'info sur Romeo. - A noter dans les agendas, le 14/10/2008 sera le premier Open Access Day : conférences et autres manifestations auront lieu sur les campus américains (principalement) et en ligne (vidéos de promotion de l'OA, webcasts des conférences). L'événement est co-organisé par SPARC, PLoS et Students for FreeCulture. ...

Denver recap and st. paul update

Tue, 02 Sep 2008 04:00:00 +0100

The general election season officially kicked off last week as delegates gathered in Denver for the Democratic National Convention - and Google and YouTube were there to enable and promote the use of the Internet to bring voters and candidates closer than ever before. People across the U.S. were able to keep up with the latest convention news and action using YouTube, Picasa and Election News - centralized and featured on our Conventions site.On the ground, delegates and attendees got a taste of Google at our Google Retreat in the Big Tent, where they could drink refreshing smoothies, enjoy free massages and sample our newest election products, including the 2008 U.S. Elections site, the Google Maps Election Gallery and Power Readers in Politics.Many of our Democratic guests took the time to post video nominations of Senator Barack Obama at YouTube booths in the Google Retreat and inside the Pepsi Center. Our goal was to allow those in attendance to express their enthusiasm for the Party on video - and allow voters at home a more robust and diverse view of the proceedings in Denver than ever before. We collected over 500 such videos from delegates on hand. In addition, party and political leaders – among them Governor Mark Warner, Senator Harry Reid, Governor Bill Richardson, Governor Brian Schweitzer, Mayor Gavin Newsom, and Congresswoman Tammy Baldwin – and celebrities like John Legend, Charles Barkley, and Louis Gossett Jr. took the opportunity to speak directly to the YouTube community and/or to talk about why they are nominating Obama (as did Congressman Dennis Kucinich, pictured here). Their videos, and a whole lot more, including Senator Obama's acceptance speech, are available on our 2008 Conventions YouTube channel.Along the 16th Street Mall, visitors stepped into our Google Maps voting booths to find how to register and where to cast their ballots with our US Voter Info Guide. ...

E-resources librarian, york university

Tue, 02 Sep 2008 04:00:00 +0100

Here's recent job posting from my institution. FYI, I'm not on the search committee, int he hiring department or anything so I don't have any specific info related to the job. If someone is interested in general information about York or the library system, that I could answer.York University offers a world-class, modern, interdisciplinary academic experience in Toronto, Canada's most multicultural city. York is at the centre of innovation, with a thriving community of almost 60,000 faculty, staff and students who challenge the ordinary and deliver the unexpected.York University Libraries are seeking an innovative and enthusiastic individual for the position of Electronic Resources Librarian in the Bibliographic Services Department. This is a tenure-track position for a librarian with up to nine years post-MLS experience.Responsibilities:The Electronic Resources Librarian will provide leadership and expertise in the effective acquisition, management and promotion of electronic collections for the Libraries. Working closely with the Associate University Librarian for Collections, the successful candidate will monitor trends and developments in electronic resources, collaborate with subject specialist/liaison librarians to identify potential new acquisitions, work with publishers and vendors to coordinate trials, and solicit and evaluate user feedback. In collaboration with library colleagues, the incumbent will develop and implement a dynamic promotion plan for the York community that raises awareness of and increases use of electronic collections. He/she will also develop and implement qualitative assessment measures, analyze and disseminate usage data, and prepare reports to assist in timely collections decision-making. The incumbent will assist in troubleshooting, responding to user inquiries and following up on access and maintenance problem resolution. ...

A few new york city libraries

Sat, 30 Aug 2008 15:00:34 +0100

Hi — I just got back from a short trip to New York City (real short, get in Wednesday and go home Friday) but I did manage to see five libraries. I know it’s been a while since I did a library recap but here’s a few links to photos and stories. NYPL has a lot going on lately in both good and bad ways. I’m always interested in the branch/main division personally and as I was on two long walks around Manhattan [1, 2] I tried to stop into as many libraries as I passed. The first thing you notice when you’re walking is that the libraries have big blue banners hanging in front of them. This means you can see them from a block or two away and know you’re in the right place. So armed with that information and this library location mashup, I ventured in to the city. Here are the libraries I went to. Jefferson Market Branch - this library is housed in a former women’s detention center and has a rich sense of history as well as an incredible building generally. Like many historic buildings that become libraries, the services are a little… smushed in there. There’s a big reference desk on the main floor that is empty and stacked with boxes and the reference librarian is actually in the basement with the reference collection. He seemed happy there. Outside there is an incredible set of gardens that were a joy to walk through. Muhlenberg Branch - this library had just opened for the day and it was totally full of people. There was some confusion about how much of the library was open [see sign] and I just wanted to sit someplace cool and check my email using my laptop but couldn’t find an easy place to do that. I kept walking and wound up at Bryant Park outside the big main NYPL research library. I ate lunch in the park and went inside to do a little work. ...

Are rock operas too weird for remixing?

Fri, 29 Aug 2008 16:57:01 +0100

I love remixes, mashups, and covers. I love it when bad songs get good covers, I love it more when it’s a bad cover. I’m a fan of Coverville and I get excited every time I find yet another version of Smells Like Teen Spirit (hey, this is just a sampling: lullaby version, Patti Smith, The Bad Plus, another jazz version, and another jazz version, a string version, no, two string versions, a tango, a damn chant version, some lounge thing, and one for the opium lounge). But I think I have yet to hear a decent cover or remix of a track from a rock opera. Take One Night In Bangkok: sexing it up doesn’t help. You just can’t out rock a rock opera. (Really, look for yourself.) It might help that Chess featured a character loosely based on eccentric chess master Bobby Fischer, but rock operas just might be too weird for remixing. Though…I’d like to be surprised. Perhaps a folk version? I can, however, appreciate the irony in a sex-laden video for a song that had criticized moral decay. Video may be NSFW. (Source: MaisonBisson.com)

Empowering users to map their worlds

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 04:00:00 +0100

In countries like India, great maps and comprehensive local data are hard to come by. And traditional mapping approaches are stretched to the limit in such environments, where infrastructure and local businesses are evolving at a furious pace.This need inspired us in Google India to design and build Google Map Maker, which enables users everywhere over to create rich, deep maps and fresh local data. People can mark their favorite spots in their cities and hometowns, add features such as roads, parks, and buildings, tag small businesses to help users find them, and collaborate to map neighborhoods of interest. This product is motivated by the spirit of information democracy, where people can create information that are moderated and consumed by their peers.Today, we are bringing home this innovation by launching Google Map Maker in India, which has already been deployed in 57 other countries.We hope Google Map Maker will result in rich local data which will benefit Google users both on the web and on mobile. The creation of base maps where there were previously none will encourage many mashups, mapplets and other cool applications that make use of this data. We're also excited to see Google Map Maker create a new breed of local map experts who bring their passion for their neighborhoods and communities into the online world, adding to local commerce, tourism and investment.I will leave you with a map of IIT Bombay, the alma mater to many of us in Google India. When I spent a few hours mapping IIT Bombay -- the place I lived in, the school I went to, and the streets I played on, it turned out to be a surprisingly satisfying experience that reconnected me to a place that is home to many of my memories. We hope you will find the Google Map Maker experience as fun and fulfilling as we do.Posted by Lalitesh Katragadda, Software Engineer and creator, Google Map Maker (Source: Official Google Blog)