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Sunday, April 21, 2002 |
Syndic8 Launches Directory of News Headlines
"Syndic8 (http://www.syndic8.com/) has announced their directory of over 4500 syndicated news headline sources. These are those RSS sources I won't shut up about. I haven't talked about RSS in a while, so now's as good a time as any.
There are several ways to find headline on Syndic8. If you want to just jump into headlines, use the feed page at http://www.syndic8.com/feedlist.php. Here you can search by keyword, generator (Movable Type, Squishdot, etc) date of addition, etc. You can also browse the listings alphabetically.
Clicking on the name of the feed will take you straight to the feed site. Clicking on the feed number, on the other hand, will give you information about the feed, including URL and most recent headlines. This is not really a site where you want to read the headlines; instead, use the headlines to determine if you want to save the feed URL for a headline reader, like AmphetaDesk ( http://www.disobey.com/amphetadesk/.)
If you're more interested in feeds organized by subject, you can check out the subject index at http://www.syndic8.com/feedcat.php, which offers feeds in DMOZ categories, News Is Free, and Headline Viewer. There aren't as many feeds here (I wonder why not? Not enough time to manually categorize incoming feeds?) but the subject headers are easy to "drill down," and you'll get headlines in addition to feed information you'll get from the larger directory." [ResearchBuzz News]
I actually referred to this last week, but I didn't provide an explanation, which Tara helps me remedy. If you like NewsIsFree, you'll like Syndic8, too. It's one-stop shopping for RSS feeds, and the categorization is definitely a big help. In fact, I'm actually kind of scared to go back to the site because I know I'll find a wealth of feeds to which I will immediately subscribe! You should definitely check it out, though (especially, Steve).
11:47:32 PM Permanent link here
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If he hasn't already seen it, Ernie will be glad to hear about the following: Louisiana Colleges and Universities Start Intellectual Property Site
"Fifteen institutions across Louisiana have started The Louisiana IP Directory at http://louisianaip.org/. This site contains a directory of intellectual property managers at institutions in Louisiana as well as a directory of patents held by Louisiana institutions.
The patents can be browsed or searched. Browsing patents can be viewed in several categories including agriculture, optics, and sugar technology. Patents can be searched by abstract, inventor name, patent number, or title.
The site is still in the process of being constructed and will eventually include names of key researchers and labs and equipment available for use." [ResearchBuzz News]
11:39:11 PM Permanent link here
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Google: Reigning Champ of the Online Search
"In the rarefied world of online searches, it looks like Google remains the engine of choice.
At least that's what we found in an unscientific test that pit Google's powers against the tools of Teoma, an industry upstart claiming that it has developed a better way to explore unfamiliar turf on the Web.
The duel consisted of seven widely divergent questions provided by Michael Bass, the director of the Associated Press' News and Information Research Center.
The questions have either recently come up in AP stories or in an investigative reporting class that Bass teaches at New York University. I posed them as well to two other highly touted search engines, alltheweb.com and wisenut.com, as well as AltaVista, a pioneer that lost its way a few years ago during the dot-com boom....
While all the engines fared reasonably well on most questions, none approached Google's processing speed or ability to provide relevant links to the answers. What's more, Google was the only engine to guide us in each case to the requested information on its first page of results....
Teoma looks especially promising as it continues to develop a new format it unveiled along with souped-up search tools this month. An easy-to-use "refine" button helps focus search requests, which helped with some of our queries but not with others.
The refine tool appears especially useful if you are entering a broad search term such as "lincoln" that could be interpreted in various ways. Enter that word into Teoma's engine and the "refine" feature will provide several subcategories, including Abraham Lincoln, Lincoln Benefit Life and Lincoln, Neb." [USA Today, via Library Stuff]
When I do searches in the future, I'm going to run concurrent ones in Google and Teoma and see how they fare. I know Gary really likes Teoma, and he says that they would like to work with librarians, which is always a big plus in my book. ;-)
On a side note, why is USA Today still showing a link to a web site without making it live. I just don't get it....
11:35:28 PM Permanent link here
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E-books Bad, Audible Books Good
"But my reading habits have changed lately, thanks to audio books I've been downloading from a service called Audible. For $15.95 a month, I can download two books of my choice; for $12.95, I can get a single book plus a subscription to a magazine, newspaper, or radio program....
You can listen to the books as an audio stream over the Net, but I don't recommend it. Better to downloaded them and listen using your PDA, MP3 player, or a special device called Otis that Audible sells (or gives away with a one-year subscription)....
Audible is also a good model for how content publishing on the Internet ought to work--the music industry should pay attention to what Audible is doing. I like Audible's take on digital rights management: The books I download are mine to listen to and keep forever. I can download them again if I need to. I tried that with some e-books I bought at Amazon without success, which feels like flushing money down the drain.
Better, many Audible books can be burned onto compact discs, making them easier to listen to in the car and other places where a CD player is the best choice. Yes, that means you can loan your discs to someone else. But I do that with the books I own already, so what's the big difference? And I still buy a lot of books." [ZDNet AnchorDesk, via Library Stuff]
Steven then goes on to ask: "Are there any librarians out there that loan audio books via Mp3 format?"
To answer his question, yes there are a few libraries doing this now and if I have my way, libraries in SLS will be added to the list in the near future (I've only been trying since September). The most well-known implementations are at Kalamazoo Public Library, King County Library System, Highland Community College Library, and NOLA. At this time though, there is no way to lend just the content without the player, although Audible is working on a solution for this.
And just to add yet another ringing endorsement for Audible, I'm not just a cheerleader, I'm a subscriber. I really need to upgrade to a better MP3 player to work with their service, though. I'd like an Audible Otis because the Rio 500 only handles Audible formats 1 or 4. One doesn't sound good enough to me, and four tends not to fit on the device. Librarians please take that as a recommendation should you begin offering this service to your patrons.
I really wish more publishers would work with Audible to expand their collection even further. In the article cited above, the author says they have around 6,000 titles, but I'm pretty sure it's much higher than that. I can't find a cite for it right now, but I'll keep looking.
10:37:24 PM Permanent link here
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"David Davies released a new version of his assetManager tool for Radio." [Scripting News]
One of these days I'll get around to playing with pictures in Radio, and I'll download assetManager. In case you're not familiar with it, here's a description.
"What does it do? When a picture is dropped into your Radio picture upstream folder it gets added to a picture gallery page in your weblog. This way you can share all your pictures with family and friends. It's also a convenient way for you to manage your pictures."
8:34:49 PM Permanent link here
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Why Yahoo Is No Longer Good
"In 1998, usability guru Jakob Nielsen wrote a refreshingly straightforward column on 'Why Yahoo Is Good.' His reasoning was that Yahoo's original model - an easy-to-navigate directory of useful links - had maintained its integrity even as Yahoo grew beyond its humble origins. Other web sites, and particularly some portals, such as Excite, moved away from this simplicity, and got mired in cluttered designs and a delusionally premature embrace of bandwidth-sucking animation, even broadcast.
Yahoo was good in 1998. But for several reasons, it no longer is. Nielsen's column title actually ended in "(But May Get Worse)." Some of his most important predictions have come to pass, including growing clutter, low-clickthrough rates, and an unsustainable business model. The latter two, sadly, have always been very predictable outcomes of the clutter problem. Yahoo has added clutter bit by bit, adding services and links to every page. But worse, it has assaulted users with ever-more-annoying, ever-larger blinking ads that make it impossible to concentrate....
But what about the debate over design simplicity? Surely it becomes more of a challenge as you get more content, and surely it's boring to just stick with the old drab Yahoo HTML links approach? Some of my colleagues have opined over the years that Yahoo has fallen behind rivals from a design standpoint precisely because its own inertia has held it back from sprucing up Yahoo's look. I don't agree. Flashier, or even prettier, design won't help any portal win consumers' allegiance for any length of time. Heinz Ketchup is better (for me) when it comes out of a Heinz Ketchup bottle, with the same old label. It's fine if Heinz wants to come out with purple and green ketchups for the kids, just as long as they don't alienate all of us regular Heinz-loving consumers. Just make sure I can find a regular Heinz ketchup bottle on the shelf.
When I use Yahoo these days, by the end of my session it's as if I'm walking away spattered from head to toe in purple and green ketchup. (Yet, if I want to customize my start page, they never seem to have the shade of taupe ketchup I'm looking for.)...
Well, what kind of optics did Yahoo think it would create by letting it be known that it's "loosening up" its definition of spam? Spam, as Seth Godin writes in The Big Red Fez: How to Make Any Website Better , is not "like the plague, it is the plague." End of story.....
Yahoo's increasing shortage of goodness now takes on a bigger meaning to its diehard fans. It's gotten beyond narrow issues of usability and into the realm of good and evil. Oops.
You know what it all means, of course. Yahoo's going to have to find itself a crop of users who are accustomed to this kind of treatment. Like other big, broadcast-model portal companies (AOL Time Warner, Microsoft), Yahoo is playing a big media game that only monopolists can win. The problem is, they're not quite big enough to pull it off. Neither was AOL, in its day. Financially, in spite of its growth, AOL was in real trouble until it merged with Time Warner. So you can see where I'm headed with this. Yahoo is being groomed for acquisition, nothing more. Let's hope it doesn't die trying." [Traffick.com, via LucDesk]
I find myself using Yahoo less and less as well, but mainly because it doesn't have what I want. Yahoo had a good idea to let me personalize their content, but they didn't take it far enough. I can't add in my own feeds/sites, I can't get rid of the annoying ads, and I can't reconfigure the screen enough for my tastes. They could have partnered with companies to pioneer bringing customized RSS news feeds to mainstream users, but instead they let it pass them by. And the Librarians' Index to the Internet is far more reliable than Yahoo's directory.
7:56:41 PM Permanent link here
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"The dispute is over two features on SonicBlue's latest digital video recorder, ReplayTV 4000. One lets the device automatically skip commercials when playing back a recorded show. (An ad's telltale boost in volume signals the machine to skip ahead.) The other allows users to send copies of movies or TV shows over the Internet to as many as 15 other people.
To Hollywood, helping customers retransmit content is the equivalent of digital theft. In their copyright infringement lawsuit, Viacom (VIA), NBC, Disney (DIS), and AOL Time Warner (AOL) (corporate parent of this magazine) also claim that SonicBlue's commercial-skipper undermines the value of their intellectual property. Hearings are set to begin in August, but for now, SonicBlue continues to sell its device....
Even the commercial-skipping feature could face tough scrutiny, Sobel says. When the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Sony Betamax in 1984, it did so in part because it believed that people would probably view the entire program they taped, commercials and all. Thus, the entertainment industry couldn't claim that VCRs harmed its ad revenues. But Hollywood has no intention of letting SonicBlue off so easy."
This is another article from Business 2.0 that ties in with the one posted below, and it illustrates how deeply the entertainment industry believes in using external forces (lawsuits and legislation) to maintain its own status quo. The claim that "SonicBlue's commercial-skipper undermines the value of their intellectual property" is absurd.
It's like magazine publishers suing the printing industry for allowing their pages to be printed on paper that can be ripped out of a magazine.
It's like radio industry suing auto makers because they include a mute button on the stereo console (which our Ford Windstar has).
It's like the movie studios suing movie theaters for allowing ticket buyers to walk into a theater after the commercials and previews. Or for letting them leave the theater to use the bathroom.
It's like the record labels suing companies that make CD players because they have a fast-forward button on them.
Like I said, it's absurd. Industries fall on hard times, changing times, and evolving models. The entertainment industry is no different than any other, in that you shouldn't be able to sue a company out of existence just because they don't follow your business model and help maintain it.
After all, you don't see libraries suing bookstores.
6:44:50 PM Permanent link here
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"The tone of the current fracas recalls earlier struggles pitting musicians against radio in the 1930s and Hollywood against the VCR 25 years ago. (See "Technophobia Over the Years.") But the stakes are higher now. This fight goes beyond any single device -- beyond entertainment, for that matter. Pleading self-defense, the movie studios and their allies are trying to construct an instrument of control out of the very technology they decry. Citing an unprecedented peril, they have embarked on a quest for unprecedented power -- over what we can do with today's technology and which devices will be allowed to exist tomorrow. What's at stake, in short, is the whole phenomenon known as the 'information revolution....'
Today, only a relative handful of academics and librarians seem to see the value in (or even remember) the limited right of the past. With help from all three branches of government, copyright law has become a sort of artistic Homestead Act: Whoever occupies a piece of territory first -- or first in the eyes of the law -- gets an all but perpetual right to develop and alter it, and keep trespassers off. (And sell action figures too.) Since 1960 the term of copyright -- originally 28 years -- has been extended 11 times, most recently from 75 to 95 years, and applied retroactively. It is ironic -- and deeply pertinent -- that when motion pictures themselves were fairly new, Hollywood dipped liberally into the public treasury it has since done so much to reduce. Many of Disney's classic children's movies were based on stories, like Pinocchio, on which any copyright claims had lapsed. Had the current law been in effect in 1939, David O. Selznick would have required permission from Emily Bronte's heirs to make his film of Wuthering Heights, a book written in 1847....
Since the 1960s, copyright holders have gone to court again and again to defend against ever newer and cheaper copying devices and transmission technologies. The Hollywood studios' unanimous belief that they had the right to stop people from taping a TV broadcast and watching it at a more convenient time was itself a measure of how far the law had come. And though the Supreme Court ruled against them in 1984 -- by a single vote -- the current suit against SonicBlue, maker of ReplayTV, which is essentially an improved VCR, shows how narrowly Hollywood interprets that defeat. (See "Erasing ReplayTV.") The movie industry, like the recording industry, continues to insist that it can send works into the home and then restrict what people do with them, even for their own personal use....
The recording industry has already alienated many of its core customers with measures of this sort. In the name of fighting piracy, certain CDs can't be played on PCs or transferred to MP3 players. Music downloaded from major-label services like Pressplay and MusicNet expires when the purchaser stops paying a subscription fee. Many home digital recorders allow only one backup copy -- whether a work is copyrighted or not. 'Think about it,' says Vijay Vaidyanathan, co-founder and chief technology officer of Yaga, an Austin-based startup that has developed a payment system for online content distribution. 'A friend of mine has a band, and I was making a mix for him, and the original got destroyed. He said, 'No problem, I've got a backup.' Well, the backup is useless, because you can't copy it....'
Many users see the ability to send content, or to recombine or customize it, as one of the basic reasons to have a PC in the first place. From Hollywood's perspective, some tech people wryly observe, the ideal PC would be a souped-up TV set, with ads and programs doled out by the same handful of media giants that control TV today, and the interactivity limited to buying things from them....
If Hollywood wants a crystal-ball view of the digital future, perhaps it should look back at its own experience with the VCR. Companies that were once unable to collect a dime without luring masses of people into theaters have now built up a huge in-home business, courtesy of an appliance they tried to outlaw. The PC and the Internet may be more of a challenge, but the possibilities are greater too, and they only begin with the allure of a low-cost, high-quality movie-viewing experience at home. A history student could put together a video report on Abe Lincoln, combining scenes from movies with Henry Fonda, Raymond Massey, and Walter Huston in the role. A disgruntled viewer could (as Mike J. Nichols of Santa Clarita, Calif., actually did, to some acclaim) excise the character of Jar Jar Binks from Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace. People could put themselves into Hollywood movies -- or extract scenery and special effects to use in works of their own. The movie industry, as Leslie Vadasz says, should look at the Internet 'not just as a download mechanism, but as an interactive environment. There are a zillion opportunities.' " [Business 2.0, via Slashdot]
A long-ish excerpt, I know, but I thought this article was an excellent summary of the situation. It's one of the handouts I'll be using at my presentations, and if you need to explain the current controversy to someone, this would be a good starting point.
Although it never uses the term heavenly jukebox, the fingerprints of the concept are in there when it discusses subscription-based services. Personally I'm against this legislation as a consumer, but ask yourself what this would mean for libraries. Sure, we can circulate DVDs now, but if the CBDTPA becomes law, a DVD might only play so many times before shutting itself down, probably only a few. Or maybe the watermark wouldn't recognize the patron's DVD player so it wouldn't play at all. Even if it did recognize it, what if it would only play once on their machine? They could never check it out and watch it ever again. Heck, they couldn't watch it twice during the first check out. How does scene selection play into this - can you back up and watch a scene again? And I'm not even touching on the future circulation of MP3s, digital video, ebooks, and information from online databases.
We have to educate our colleagues about this controversy and we have to stand up and insert ourselves into this debate. Lawmakers need to understand the ramifications of what they are proposing, and they need to be held accountable if they dismiss the impact these laws will have on libraries.
6:31:40 PM Permanent link here
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No More Free Lunch
"The answers are changing all the time as pricing strategies evolve, with some analysts predicting the paid portion of the Internet eventually will mimic the cable-TV business: Consumers will be able to sign up for subscription plans with pricing levels similar to cable's basic and premium tiers, perhaps with additional content or services equivalent to pay-per-view shows....
Salon.com charges $30 a year for access to about 30% of the articles on its site, but is still tinkering with its formula. In addition to weighing the balance between free and subscription material, it is considering allowing users to pay by the article or to sign up for different tiers of subscriptions, Mr. Hurley says. 'It's always going to be in somewhat of a dynamic state, where we're putting forth different initiatives and testing them to see where we get the biggest bang for the buck,' he says." [The Wall Street Journal Online, via The End of Free]
This is exactly what is wrong about The Heavenly Jukebox future we are facing. I'm not against it, and in many ways I look forward to it on a personal level. But for libraries, this is disastrous, and Salon is a perfect example that illustrates why.
Your local public library can get for you a copy of pretty much any article in the world. I'm not kidding about that, because I watch our interlibrary loan department find amazing things. But what happens if you request an article from Salon? You should be able to, but they don't provide a subscription service for libraries. Sure, we could cough up the money for the article on a request-by-request basis, but we'll go broke doing this on a widespread basis for all of the sites that are starting to charge. We're already facing major issues with increased prices for serials, but nickel and dime-ing isn't cost-efficient either.
So why doesn't Salon act like a real journal (online or offline) and work with libraries? We could provide a scripted login for our patrons, just like we do with other journals or databases. Is it even indexed in any of our vendors' databases? (That's an honest question because I really don't know.) Here's what Salon has to say about their fee-based Premium service:
"With corporate behemoths swallowing every media company in sight, it's more important than ever to have a source that's beholden to nobody but itself -- a source like Salon that's indefatigably independent, with original, intrepid journalism you won't find anywhere else, online or off. But independence, in-depth investigations and fearless commentary come with a price: In our case, it's about 8¢ a day. That's a small amount, we feel, to support the wide-open, uncensored range of information and ideas Salon presents every day."
Apparently it's not worth enough to offer subscriptions to libraries, though. They also offer MP3s, ebooks, and audio plays - none of which are available to libraries. Interestingly, they let you give Salon Premium to someone else as a gift. But what would happen if I gave a subscription to my local library? They do offer subscriptions to "large organizations," but I don't think it includes libraries.
5:35:55 PM Permanent link here
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Japanese Computer Is World's Fastest, as U.S. Falls Back
 "A Japanese laboratory has built the world's fastest computer, a machine so powerful that it matches the raw processing power of the 20 fastest American computers combined and far outstrips the previous leader, an I.B.M.-built machine....
The accomplishment is also a vivid statement of contrasting scientific and technology priorities in the United States and Japan. The Japanese machine was built to analyze climate change, including global warming, as well as weather and earthquake patterns. By contrast, the United States has predominantly focused its efforts on building powerful computers for simulating weapons, while its efforts have lagged in scientific areas like climate modeling.
For some American computer scientists, the arrival of the Japanese supercomputer evokes the type of alarm raised by the Soviet Union's Sputnik satellite in 1957....
Assembled from 640 specialized nodes that are in turn composed of 5,104 processors made by NEC, the new Japanese supercomputer occupies the space of four tennis courts and has achieved a computing speed of 35.6 trillion mathematical operations a second. The processors are linked in a way that allows extremely efficient operation compared with the previously fastest "massively parallel" computers, which are based on standard parts rather than custom-made chips." [NY Times: Technology]
4:43:04 PM Permanent link here
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© Copyright 2004 Jenny Levine.
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