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Friday, April 19, 2002 |
The Semantic Web: It's Whom You Know by Andy Oram
"Even though we experienced plenty of information overload before the Web, hearts were racing throughout the mid-1990s simply because the Web was making so many resources available. Now, of course, our affections have gotten a bit bruised and we've confronted the Web with the need to help us sort and organize those resources as well.
Hence the concept of the Semantic Web. Using XML and other recently developed technologies, authors and designers formally tag text and objects so that automated agents can offload some of our information overload.
If it's done right, the Semantic Web would be accompanied by widespread knowledge management. This means, for instance, that if you started a Web search with the goal of simplifying your process of computer programming, you would be directed to various design concepts such as real-world modeling, and thence to specific techniques such as inheritance and subclassing. A rather abstract overview of knowledge management can be found in the February 2002 issue of Communications of the ACM, under the term "ontology."
I used to have high hopes for knowledge management; in one article I even suggested (admittedly tongue in cheek) that library science would become the next hot job category. But there's no reason why librarians wouldn't become the next hot job category if the Semantic Web really depended on the formal organization of information. Why hasn't this happened? And why are there so few Web pages in XML or applications that handle them? Will the SOAP/Schema/XSLT/RDF syndicate succeed in transporting us safely across the ocean of information?...
What would the Semantic Web really entail to be successful? It would consist of reducing semantics to syntax. The complexities of whatever or whomever you want to know would become formalized in tags. The most subtle areas of knowledge would become subject to the syntactic experience of parsing and tree structure.
I don't think it can happen. That's why censorware, for instance (programs that claim to recognize Web pages with undesirable sexual or political content) have been, are, and always will be execrable.
In short, I think semantic tagging and Web services are useful for certain business applications and other areas where interactions can be formalized, but they aren't going to create a completely new way of using digital information." [O'Reilly Network, via Jon's Radio]
Job security for librarians! We are the transition team, and it's going to take years and years to work all of this out. Especially because so many of us don't have the tools, time, or resources to do proper work on this.
Remember that old analogy about the internet being like a library with books strewn all over the floor? More and more information is released into the world each day, and it's strewn across the ether like that messy library. Who ya gonna call? Librarians! It might take a little longer for Andy's prediction about librarians to come true, but I have every confidence that we will lead the way.
11:12:07 PM Permanent link here
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3-D, and Ditch the Glasses
"The skeleton of a foot floats around a screen in a lab at New York University. Each individual bone stands out with great clarity -- and with good reason. The monitor is an autostereoscopic display that presents three-dimensional pictures, without the need for special glasses.
In addition to NYU's Center for Advanced Technology (CAT), several other companies are developing, or in some cases already marketing, 3-D displays based on a variety of technologies. They should be widely available to professionals within two years, and to consumers within five years.
Such three-dimensional displays open up a whole new world for medicine, science and other professions that rely on complex visualizations. Doctors, for example, will be able to look at 3-D sound scans or MRIs, while molecular biologists could view simulations of structures previously too complex to see, like folded proteins that result from gene sequencing. And of course, the technology will be great for video games." [Wired News]
Imagine when we figure out visual mapping of information... what will it be like to view a 3D model of your search, see the relationships between the resources, and then move amongst them to find the one piece for which you are searching?
And you thought the present was an interesting time to be a librarian!
10:45:52 PM Permanent link here
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Who's Responsible for High Book Prices?
"Why are book prices so high? Not just new hardcovers, which are mostly hovering -- for another five minutes or so -- just below $30. But have you noticed that even paperbacks, the thing that revolutionized the book business once-upon-a-time by virtue of being affordable, are now just as over-priced as everything else?
And prices climb so steadily you can see it happening from season to season. You don't have to read trade reports to know that there's a wide-spread belief in the book industry that "consumers" don't see much difference between, say, a $25.95 book and a $26.95 book, or even a $27.95 book of that matter. As if they didn't have us over a barrel. As if there was something we could do about it. (And as if there were any logic at all to a system that believes a dollar or two means nothing, but the difference between $26.95 and $27 will send people running out the door screaming.)....
No, as any publisher large or small will tell you, just do the math to figure out why book prices are so high. Let's say the Intimate claim is high, and B&N only gets a 50 percent discount. That means the publisher is left to split the remaining half with the distributors, warehousers, printers, shippers, and oh yes the authors. In other words, B&N is making significantly more off a book than its creators." [AlterNet, via The Peanut Gallery]
Will then goes on his own riff about book prices:
"I remember fondly the days of my youth, when a mass-market paperback cost a mere $2.95. And I remember my dismay when I found that I had to mow more lawns because the price had gone up to $3.95. Last week I bought Anne McCaffrey's The Skies of Pern for $7.99 from our local bookseller. Good thing I had a $10 gift certificate."
And here's my reminiscence about book prices. From 1984 through about 1987, I worked at the fabu, independent Bookslinger Bookstore. During that time, I watched the price of paperbacks start their climb. All of the store's employees were shocked - shocked! - when Helen Hooven Santmyer's book ...And Ladies of the Club came out with a cover price of $5.95. Sure it was thick, but that price was unheard of and we were sure that the target demographic for the book (older women) wouldn't pay that much for it.
But you know what? They did, and they didn't even hesitate. Granted, we were a discount bookstore (10% off paperbacks), but the savings didn't even put the book at the previous high price of $4.95. All the thick bestsellers started selling at $5.95 after that.
On a side note, I own Bookslinger Bookstore on Google! Awesome pawsome!
10:37:09 PM Permanent link here
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Well, the answer to my question about generating a second RSS feed for my site that's truncated seems to be that it's doable, but it would involve hacking some scripts (thanks for responding, Jon!). Writing that sentence is about as far as I'll get on that one because I don't know enough to be a hacker. At least, not on purpose. Accidentally is a whole other story, of course.
I was bemoaning this state of affairs, when Bitworking Joe wrote to tell me that he's solved the problem himself on the client side:
"Jenny is polling if she should produce two RSS feeds, one a headline only feed and the other with full content. I solved this problem a while ago with my skin for AmphetaDesk. Here are some screenshots of how it works, specifically with her news feed."
To which I say, BRAVO! If you view the screenshots, you'll see that his skin for AD displays a truncated version of the post by default, but that clicking on it will uncompress it to full length. This is an even better solution, although it is applicable to AmphetaDesk only at this point. I wonder if something similar could be done in Radio's news aggregator or a third-party version such as Marc Paschal's kit. Couldn't you use CSS and X-HTML to create divs and layers and such to produce the same effect? I sure wish I could program this stuff myself....
9:59:40 PM Permanent link here
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I've just finished reading Matt Trump's op/ed piece What Americans Think about Gasoline [via Doc Searls]. It's quite interesting and most likely true, but what caught my eye was the following paragraph at the bottom of the page.
"Your Blog Here: Send us your web log, and we may consider it for Foxnews.com's Blog of the Week. Some Guidelines: We don't want to hear about your cat or your favorite foods, but if you've got something different and interesting to say about the news, politics, culture, technology, science, education, etc., we'd like to hear from you. We're looking for new voices; if you're already pretty famous in or out of blogland, we'll probably pass. And we'll also probably pass if you're talking about the same big headlines and issues as everybody else. And the big rule: The e-mail must say "guest blog" in the subject line."
So here's your big chance, bloggers! Hey, what happens to the long bet if both Dave and Martin are right and blogs and professional journalists end up co-existing peacefully side-by-side? What if the top five stories are covered by newspapers and bloggers? That's my bet.
9:17:13 PM Permanent link here
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"After a multiyear effort among dozens of companies to develop the technology and figure out how to use it, and also after years of hype and misunderstanding by consumers, Bluetooth, the short-range wireless technology for transmitting data between a multitude of devices, has finally arrived in a way that can be useful and even fun. And it took Palm, the company that popularized the handheld computer, and a software firm called Colligo, plus a pair of printer vendors, to demonstrate Bluetooth's powerful potential with a collection of real-world products you can buy now.
The centerpiece is Palm's Bluetooth card, which inserts into the most recent models of Palm handhelds and is approximately the size of a stick of chewing gum. The cards have recently started showing up at U.S. retailers for a price of about $130 each....
Bluetooth is the technology created to replace the annoying mess of cables that so often accompany a myriad of devices meant to operate in unison. By using short-range radio signals, those same devices can do nearly anything that once used to require a cord or cable of some kind.
With its Bluetooth package, Palm has included two software applications that will either improve your productivity or help you waste a lot of time. The one we had the most fun with is BlueBoard. It turns two or more Palm devices into real-time virtual whiteboards. When two Bluetooth-ready Palm devices are connected to each other, a sketch done on BlueBoard on one handheld shows up in real time on the screen of the other. Our first test involved playing tic-tac-toe with a distance of 30 feet between players....
The second Bluetooth-enabled application we tried is BlueChat, which allows its users to send text messages back and forth over a Bluetooth connection. Again, potentially great fun, but any addict of instant messaging on the PC will find BlueChat use difficult unless a keyboard is attached to the Palm. Palm's Graffiti input system for chatting in real time proved to be frustratingly slow, though it could be manageable if you're accustomed to using lots of abbreviations and shorthand. The onscreen virtual keyboard didn't speed things up considerably. Still, it could turn out to be useful during meetings for sharing thoughts across the conference table that would be better left unspoken to the whole room.
Finally, we tried an application that undoubtedly will prove productive. BTPrint enables Palm devices to use a Bluetooth connection to print documents over a wireless connection to any Bluetooth-aware printer. So far, certain printers from Hewlett-Packard and Epson can do this. We used an Epson Stylus C80 modified with a Bluetooth cartridge, and found printing easy and effective. This is one potential application that road warriors who live by the schedules they keep on their Palm devices will love....
After many false starts it seems that, at long last, Bluetooth is for real. One remaining obstacle is the public learning curve. Too many people still confuse Bluetooth with Wi-Fi wireless networking technology, and fail to understand the fundamental differences between them. Wi-Fi is for connecting a PC, typically a laptop, to the world via the Internet, without the need for an Ethernet cord. Bluetooth's target is far less ambitious, though no less interesting, and just as potentially useful. [Forbes.com, via 80211b News]
Last fall, I was gave my Information Shifting presentation at the Chicago Public Library. I noted Bluetooth on a slide, and someone in the audience asked if I thought it would ever actually materialize. I responded that Bluetooth had indeed been on the "Next Level of Technologies" slide for quite some time, but that I thought in 2002 it might finally take off. Let's hope this is the sound of the approaching avalanche!
9:01:41 PM Permanent link here
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"Gates demonstrated use of a PC to make and receive phone calls, with the PC taking actions based on caller ID that ordinary phones can't manage. In addition, he showed music playback, with 22 hours of music stored on a single CD that can be played in a car stereo, PC, home stereo or portable CD player....
Bluetooth advocates say that the radio-frequency communication standard will eliminate cable clutter, make it easier to synchronize handheld computers and PCs, connect microphones and headsets to computers, let a person use a next-generation cell phone as a modem, and lead to the arrival of "personal area networks" of interconnected gadgets.
Research firm In-Stat/MDR projects that 100 million personal area networks will be installed this year, rising to more than 900 million in 2005. However, the firm has had to lower its estimates before....
Microsoft hopes the PC will take over phone capabilities, a step that's closer with the ability of Windows XP to initiate phone calls. The company envisions PCs placing calls by name, not number, and the ability to log and record calls through Microsoft's Outlook software.
But the PC will have to work better if people routinely rely on it for phone use. 'If you use your PC as an end point for voice, we need to improve the reliability and availability of the PC,' said Mark Van Flandern, a lead program manager for Windows hardware platforms. And Gates said it's important that good microphones become a standard part of PCs." [News.com]
Yes, someday soon you yourself will be an IP address. I don't know that I trust Microsoft to do all of this, though. The problem is that I want a setup like this, but with Microsoft, the words security and privacy spring immediately to mind.
8:29:13 PM Permanent link here
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"In Tokyo, so many kids are pounding at new electronic gadgets with their thumbs they’re known as “oyayubi sedai” — the “thumb generation.” Nokia Corp. sponsored a contest for the fastest Finnish thumbs, where 2,700 players competed to thumb tap the highest score in the “Snake” game included on Nokia phones....
Being “all thumbs ” used to mean you were clumsy. But phones, wireless e-mail devices, and all the other hand-held gadgets featuring “thumb boards” are turning thumbs into universal index fingers for a generation of teenagers, young adults and high-tech businesspeople.
Some young people now point and ring doorbells with their thumbs. Thumbs are growing more muscled and dexterous, according to a new cross-cultural study conducted by Sadie Plant, a free-lance British culture and technology researcher. 'The relationship between technology and the users of technology is mutual,' Ms. Plant says. 'We are changing each other....'
Thumbs began their quest for technological supremacy over index fingers in the late 1980s and early 1990s on the joysticks and hand-held controllers of video-game systems. Jim Joseph, an administrator at an early-childhood center in Manhattan, remembers playing the original “Legend of Zelda” back in 1988 on his Nintendo for so long he would develop what was came to be dubbed “Nintendo thumb “: a sore, burning pain at the base of the poor digit. “I would play up to three hours, but would need a break at some point because it would get really frustrating,” says Mr. Joseph, now 22. In 1990, cases of what is known as “Nintendinitis” were described in the New England Journal of Medicine....
But thumb typing involves some growing pains. Working on keys half the size of an average thumb tip, the user must cultivate a delicate touch. For those whose thumbs aren’t petite, there is this “splat problem,” says Michael Ryan, a New York lawyer who uses his BlackBerry during down-time on conference calls. A “splat” occurs when a big old thumb hits two or more keys by mistake. Mark Guibert, vice president of Research In Motion, the company that makes the BlackBerry, says the oblong shape of the BlackBerry key was designed to maximize the surface area for the thumb to hit the key. The key to avoiding splat is to use only the very tip of the thumb , an acquired knack....
In response to a host of RSI complaints, U.K. telecom network Virgin Mobile recently undertook a campaign called “How to Practice Safe Text” in concert with the British Chiropractic Association. To avoid injury, it recommends a series of hand-squeeze exercises with a “texterciser,” a foam rectangle that looks just like a cellphone. There are also shoulder shrugs, wrist and neck stretches. Mr. Barrett says his thumb pain has diminished somewhat since he started doing the exercises and cut down his text messaging-to around 300 a month." [MSNBC, via PDABuzz.com]
Fascinating article! I tried typing with my thumbs when I was playing with the Sharp Zaurus, and I can see how it would take some type for someone my age to get used to it, although it was definitely usable. The kids on the other hand....
And now you have a new slang term to throw around: the splat. Searching for an appropriate link for the word "splat" brought me to Thumbing Headquarters, a site devoted to text gaming on cell phones. It has sections for Text Games, WAP Games, and Chat & Flirt. If I could, I'd sign up for cell phone games in a heartbeat. Well, not the game Splat, but probably Vampire Slayer, Thunderbirds (yes, that Thunderbirds!) and of course, M-Trivia. And speaking of trivia, they even provide a TH Thumb Facts & Trivia page!
Such games are pretty simplistic now, but these are the baby steps into the future of wireless gaming.
5:50:52 PM Permanent link here
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Will was reading Moby Lives when he came across a link to an article called Revolution in the Stacks. He knew it would infuriate me, and he was right.
"The library is among our most revered institutions. Librarians in turn are known for their personal integrity, their loyalty to the collections in their care, their passionate love for their profession and their sense of responsibility to society at large. These qualities were also implicit in the challenges addressed by the 92nd Conference of German Librarians, which took place last week in Augsburg.
As a result, the library's responsibility as a source of informational skills, as a provider of multimedia teaching materials and as a propagator of electronic publications was a key part of the conference's agenda. Libraries aim to compete with commercial publishers so as to lower the exorbitant price of obtaining scientific information and ameliorate, in the interests of science, the "library crisis" these skyrocketing prices have triggered.
Germany's librarians are worried about how they will cope with all these new tasks and are calling for more money not only to buy more journals and books, but also to set up digital infrastructure and train additional staff. What they really want, however, is to retain custody of a child that is ready to leave home. Yet if they want this youngster to remain theirs, the nation's libraries will first have to learn to let go....
It says a lot for the librarians' sense of civic duty when they offer to help kindergartens, schools and universities improve their "information competence." But it is still a case of the lame leading the blind. After all, the creation of "information competence" is a responsibility of the educational institutions themselves and not archives. Politicians must grant Germany's schools and universities greater autonomy, while at the same time encouraging competition for the best methods among private educational establishments.
Technology drives not only politics, but business, too. Digital technology has split the confluence of medium and content hitherto known as the book. While information's infrastructure is public domain, information itself is a private commodity. Intermediaries such as booksellers and librarians have now become superfluous in certain areas of the information market. This is especially true in the realm of scientific, medical and technical literature, which by trying to combine two incompatible functions is both expensive and inefficient....
One of the yardsticks often used to measure academic prowess is the number of papers published in scientific journals and the frequency with which a person is cited. This dual purpose is not only having an inflationary impact on the price of scientific journals, but it is also reducing libraries to the status of parking lots used for the exchange of cash-stuffed briefcases. One solution to this problem would be to make certain individual papers available directly, with authors contributing financially to some degree. Librarians, as a result, would become superfluous....
What about the humanities? Surely they, too, are being left behind in much the same way as are the libraries themselves, with their mandate of promoting arts and culture. A distinction is necessary here between virtualized collections of teaching materials and specialized libraries based on specific archives or subject matter. The Internet could serve in the national reorganization and concentration of Germany's humanities libraries as an exchange, through which long-term loans could be arranged, adding them to temporary collections. For this to be possible, however, librarians themselves will first have to rid themselves of their fixation on ever-larger holdings and learn to appreciate the difference between inherent property rights and the joys of temporarily loaning one's charges to the wider world." [F.A.Z.]
This piece was obviously written by someone that doesn't use public, school, or special libraries and only interacts with academic libraries in one specific way. Who does the author expect to teach "information competence" to kids? The teachers? Those teachers that are already overworked and underpaid? And how will they know indexing, searching, cataloging, and cross-referencing well enough to teach it? That's not their job, although it is the school librarian's job.
Not to mention the fact that we need librarians more than ever to mediate information specifically because there is so much of it. Who's going to catalog and index all of this stuff the author thinks he'll find so easily now. Is that working well for you on the web now? Do you always find what you need on the web? And if information is a private commodity, how will most folks have access to it? Not everyone can afford subscriptions, not everyone wants subscriptions, and most folks don't even know what they need to subscribe to in order to get the one piece of information they want!
I could go on, but I'll just end this with a loud "AARGH!"
2:20:53 PM Permanent link here
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kottke:
"What would happen if you split MeFi into two "teams", each a community of its own? This isn't a serious suggestion, but it's a fun possibility to entertain.
The basic idea here is that you randomly split the MeFi membership into two equal parts, about 7,000 members to a team. The front page would be split down the middle, with one team's posts on the left and the other's on the right. Each team could recruit new members, but no one could be a member of both communities (a system for dealing with this would have to be concocted). Few other new guidelines or changes would be needed. Each team would act like its own community under the existing MeFi rules....
Would the competition between the two teams raise the level of posts and discussion? Or would the teams use up too much energy calling each other names...or at least become so preoccupied with the competition that little else would be discussed? How would the identity of each team evolve? Would MeFiA become NewsFilter, while MeFiB, trying to differentiate itself, becomes TechFilter? Or would they both remain diverse, with a little bit of everything? (Are there any real world analogues that would be useful to examine in thinking about this?)"
9:23:36 AM Permanent link here
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Point: Rep. Goodlatte Calls For 'War' Against Digital Piracy
"At a digital music conference today, Rep. Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., said that legislators and law enforcers would have to fight and win a "war" against online piracy in order for the digital marketplace to have any chance of realizing its full potential....
'Only when the war against piracy is effectively waged and won, will businesses and consumers move in significant numbers to the online marketplace,' he added....
Goodlatte, who co-chairs the Congressional Internet Caucus, said that lawmakers should also look into ways to encourage industry leaders to help stem the tide of online piracy.
Specifically in the area of digital music, Goodlatte said that copyright piracy is 'growing exponentially with billions of unauthorized music downloads per month.'
'Until we can stop the growth of piracy online, it will be difficult to truly create a marketplace that will work for digital online content," Goodlatte said.' [NewsBytes]
8:38:39 AM Permanent link here
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Counterpoint: 'Legitimate' Music Losing Ground Online In Europe - Report
"Analysts at the European offices of Jupiter Media Metrix - known as Jupiter MMXI there - say that some 10.7 million Web surfers in Western Europe visited the Web sites of such peer-to-peer companies as Kazaa, MusicCity (Morpheus) and Audiogalaxy in January. By the end of March, that number had risen to 11.3 million.
Meanwhile, the analysts said in a report published Thursday, the number of unique visitors at "legitimate" music-download sites such as MP3.com, Peoplesound.com and Vitaminic.com slid from 2.5 million in January to 2 million in March.
"The music industry's attempts to regain control of this market through the courts, as seen with Napster, have not only failed to check the growth of file sharing but have also proved unpopular with consumers," Jupiter MMXI said in its report. "The record industry will need to offer compelling alternative options to the gray market that are worth paying for."
But Jupiter's Mark Mulligan said his firm is recommending that music companies also take action to make sure consumers are aware their file-swapping activity might be illegal.
"The record industry needs to crack down hard and fast on the software companies behind file sharing networks and at the same time get serious about licensing content so that legitimate services can offer compelling alternatives," he said. "If they fail to do this, the free music mindset will become permanently embedded in the new generation of music listeners and paid-for music services in Europe will never get off the ground."
Jupiter MMXI said its surveys found that more than half of peer-to- peer music-swappers are under 25 years of age, suggesting that it could be tricky for record companies to get tough on file-sharing technology without alienating the next generation of music buyers." [NewsBytes]
8:35:04 AM Permanent link here
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I know some of the posts I write are pretty long. Question: hypothetically, if my white-on-orange XML button was working, could I modify my RSS feed to display shorter descriptions (2 sentences?), save it as "rss-short.xml" and put a second XML button for it on my page? Then someone could choose between the abridged or unabridged version. Does that sound right?
7:28:47 AM Permanent link here
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Interesting Use of Index Terms in News Site
"InfoWorld has begun tagging/linking each term used in indexing their stories. Clicking on one of the terms spawns a window with other stories indexed by that term. Nice.
See for example this story. All of the linked terms -- Windows, operating system, software development, programming -- are index terms apparently.
This is only interesting in that I haven't seen popular news sites expose their indexing much. Of course, only terms that appear in the text are linked at InfoWorld. Other terms or concepts that don't appear in the text that can be used to represent what the story is about are not shown/linked anywhere." [ia/]
PC World and some others that I can't think of off the top of my head have been linking to a specific article on their site for further information, but this is the first time I've seen a list of related articles.
What I don't understand is how they choose which terms get links. For example, in the InfoWorld article above, the first paragraph includes the phrase "extreme programming" (it's even in quotes), but only the word "programming" is a tagged link, not the whole phrase. Their software needs to be modified to fix this and pick up other less obvious terms ("virtual teams," CFO).
7:19:22 AM Permanent link here
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Google Answers: Live Researchers answer your questions on any topic for a fee.
"Google's search engine is a great way to find information online. But sometimes even experienced users need help finding exactly the answer they want to a question. Google Answers is a way to get that help from Researchers with expertise in online searching. When you post a question to Google Answers, you specify how much you're willing to pay for an answer and how quickly you need that information. A Researcher will search for the answer and send you the information you're seeking, as well as useful links to web pages on the topic. If you're satisfied with that answer, you pay the amount you specified."
I checked this site a few times today, always looking at the Questions Currently Being Asked. When the RIAA and MPAA tell you that consumers won't pay for content they can get for free, don't believe them. This site is living proof, because every question I saw could have been answered for free by simply contacting the local public library. Sigh.
Free answers @ your library should be a major cornerstone of ALA's campaign.
1:02:17 AM Permanent link here
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I'm very impressed with all of the new toys on Raelity Bytes. On the right-hand side, check out the What's Related section that uses the new Google API to find similar pages, the list of Amazon's top books, and the list of Amazon's top titles for "Apples." I'll have to try to add the related box to my site one of these days. Has anyone seen that spare time I lost? (Thanks to Will for pointing this out.)
12:53:30 AM Permanent link here
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Key Case Restores Copyright Balance
"Writing for the majority of the Court, Justice Ian Binnie stated that "the proper balance among these and other public policy objectives lies not only in recognizing the creator's rights but in giving due weight to their limited nature . . . Once an authorized copy of a work is sold to a member of the public, it is generally for the purchaser, not the author, to determine what happens to it."
Justice Binnie then continued to emphasize the dangers of copyright that veers too far toward copyright creators at the expense of the public. He noted that "excessive control by holders of copyrights and other forms of intellectual property may unduly limit the ability of the public domain to incorporate and embellish creative innovation in the long-term interests of society as a whole, or create practical obstacles to proper utilization." [The Globe and Mail, via Matt Goyer]
Take a second to breathe deeply and enjoy this interjection of sanity back into the world. We can only hope the U.S. Supreme Court sees the light, too.
12:45:53 AM Permanent link here
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Here's a whole article on that patenting how to swing on a swing controversy: Patent Turns Playtime into Pay Time
"St. Paul attorney Peter Olson said he filed the application two years ago to teach his son Steven about the patent process. One rejection and $1,000 in fees later, Steven is a certified inventor.
"It's kind of the best invention a 5-year-old could come up with," said Olson, who handles patent work for 3M. "I can't say I had seen anybody doing it."
Intellectual-property experts said the patent clearly should have not been issued, but that such mistakes were inevitable from an underfunded government agency that issues 3,000 patents each week." [News.com]
12:42:01 AM Permanent link here
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New Musical Acts Get Lift from Internet: Downloading Levels Field, Study Finds
"Thanks to the Internet and its digital supply of free music, it's a nerve-racking time to be a pop music superstar. But it may be the best time ever for new performers who want to turn their music into gold.
That's what a research team from the University of Connecticut and the State University of New York at Buffalo found when it analyzed technology's effects on Billboard's top 200 list from 1991 to 2000....
These researchers analyzed weekly album sales as reported by Billboard. They found that the number of artists who appeared each year on the charts increased by 31.5 percent from 1991 to 2000, suggesting that more new artists are hitting the charts, at the expense of established musical acts, they claimed in a research paper on their findings....
They also tracked Internet usage and, in a separate survey, the buying habits of college students. They found that downloading or "sampling" songs from the Internet (called piracy by its critics) encourages people to buy CDs of lesser-known groups. At the same time, cyberswiping from established stars may have hurt their sales or had no positive effect, reported Bhattacharjee, his colleague Ram Gopal of the University of Connecticut and Lawrence Sanders of SUNY at Buffalo." [SF Gate, via Library Stuff]
Paging Hilary Rosen... you have an urgent telephone call from your customers... Ms. Rosen, line one.
12:34:24 AM Permanent link here
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After Oprah
"While Winfrey wasn't immune to the notion of reading as an elevating activity -- she favored inspiring books about women who overcome hardships, of course -- she presented books first and foremost as a source of pleasure. One reason Winfrey was so much more persuasive than those city-wide reading groups currently in vogue is that she said 'I loved this book and I think you will too,' not 'You should read this book because it's good for you.' In a society where most authority figures treat books like broccoli, she treats them like chocolate cake." [Salon.com]
Which would make libraries chocoholic central. :-)
12:28:58 AM Permanent link here
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"John Lennon's 1966 assertion that "The Beatles are bigger than Jesus," may have been true then, but not now. At Google, roughly 170,000 people a month search for "The Beatles," while 850,000 a month search for Jesus. (830,000 search for "Beatles.")
I found these numbers using Google's Adwords program, which uses historical data to estimate how many times a "keyword" is sought in a day, week and month. Joanne Jacobs notes that many people have not used Adwords yet, so here's the crib sheet: a) configure an ad and press "continue" b) insert the name of your favorite pop icon in the "Keyword Matching" field and press "Update Keyword Estimates" button c) note the result and start again....
Ogling Google, or, for short, Oogling, could make a great new bar game. With some imaginative programming, Oogling could put marketing research and polling companies out of business.
The Oogle's absolute data is much more engaging than the zeitgeist "hit list" numbers that make relative comparisons among popular searches. With the raw numbers, we can peel back the consumer's skull and watch the synapses fire.
Yes, Jesus (850,000) beats The Beatles. But even "cheese" gets 750,100. Harry Potter gets 920,000. Clinton gets 1,030,100. Jennifer Lopez gets 1,135,100. Eminem gets 1,235,100. And Britney Spears gets 2,540,200.
Britney is nearly twice as big as God, who gets just 1,295,100 searches. But she's smaller than football, which gets 2,605,200. (All these numbers were researched in early April.)
Beyond celebrity watching, there are brands. Who would have guessed that Adobe gets 2,570,200 searches a month compared to 3,590,300 for Oracle and 6,495,600 for Microsoft. Coke pulls only 216,800 requests....
Proving that many people still don't understand the Internet, the word "Google" itself gets searched for on Google 1,685,200 times a month and www.google.com gets 140,000 searches. That compares to 4,785,400 searches for Yahoo and 350,000 for www.yahoo.com.
If you were BMW (2,305,100) and had just spent $10 million on an adblitz, wouldn't you like to see how much your Oogle jumped relative to Mercedes (1,303,900) or Porsche (927,700) and relative to the Oogle of other premium words like champagne(195,800)?
If you're really ambitious marketeer, you'll want to know how your word measures against the world's hottest. But chances are you aren't within an order of magnitude of sex, which pulls 32,657,300 searches a month." [Pressflex, via Scripting News]
12:13:10 AM Permanent link here
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© Copyright 2004 Jenny Levine.
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