Wednesday, July 14, 2004

DHS Says Cellular Outage Reporting is Terrorist Blueprint [Slashdot] 10:41:56 PM      Google It!.

Toshiba Unveils Laptop With Instant-On TV & DVR [Slashdot] convergence is portable 10:38:21 AM      Google It!.

Mark Pesce: Open Source Television [Slashdot] 10:34:20 AM      Google It!.

Kidnap-wary Mexicans get chipped. Shot in the arm for RFID? [The Register] 10:30:01 AM      Google It!.

46,000 take eArmyU courses online - Courtney Hickson, Army News Service. More than 46,000 Soldiers have been able to continue their education by taking online classes through eArmyU, including many of the Soldiers deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Since its creation in July of 2000, eArmyU has been part of the Army’s e-lear [Online Learning Update] 10:28:54 AM      Google It!.

Dare Obasanjo: Is the W3C Becoming Irrelevant? [Scripting News] 10:27:27 AM      Google It!.

How Can We Help Patrons with their Notebooks?. Weblogs and Wikis as Work Arounds "The Internet really has become my notebook in a big way. Used to be a pretty much just a research tool, but now it's the warehousing and organizing tool as well. I can almost picture what a personal, interactive portal on the Internet might look and feel like...almost. Tom quotes Tim Berners-Lee whose original vision for the Internet was 'to connect every person to every other person.' We're getting there..." [Weblogg-ed News] [The Shifted Librarian] 10:26:01 AM      Google It!.

Libraries Have Nothing to Fear [about RSS] but Fear Itself. Fear of RSS "However, whether or not to use RSS on your site should no longer be an option. I believe it has become a necessity if you wish to compete with others in your industry.... For many users today, bookmarks have become useless since we have too many of them. Bookmarks allow for information overload just as easily as RSS does, but the difference is that RSS allows updates through all that information overload. A bookmark gets hidden, but if you update your site then the RSS feed will reflect that and tell the reader its time to view the content.... With the plethora of sites around fighting for the mindshare of your readers becomes essential. Why lessen your chances by not including a RSS feed? That opens the gates for everyone else to increase their readership. RSS feeds create more opportunities and the advantages outweigh the disadvantages." [BusinessLogs, via del.icio.us/tag/rss] [The Shifted Librarian] 10:23:32 AM      Google It!.

Bloglines : RSS as Blogger : Blogging. IE's Failings Point Way to RSS "Opinion: When Microsoft abandoned Internet Explorer development to concentrate on fixing the browser's security vulnerabilities, it opened the door to the emerging RSS revolution. .... Pluck's Trojan horse strategy underlines the profoundly disruptive nature of the RSS transformation. The synchronization genie, once out of the bottle, will act as an accelerant for RSS client market share as a percentage of overall browser usage. At some point, perhaps as early as Inauguration Day, IE—and the Web—will be subsumed by the RSS platform. " [eWeek, via Scripting News] One of the major catalysts of the RSS revolution was the introduction of Bloglines. Free and web-based, it's far and away the best choice for newbies, and it's easy to center a class or tutorial around it. What innovations will we see in the next six months that will be the next great leap? And will your library be able to participate in the revolution? I am happy to report that my home library will be. More when I can show it! [The Shifted Librarian] 10:22:04 AM      Google It!.

The archiving option is here now and costs less. Stevan Harnad, Les Carr, and Steve Hitchcock, Letter to the Editor on Open Access, The Independent, July 14, 2004. Excerpt: "Publishers could convert their journals to an OA business model, so that rather than the user-institution paying the publication costs per journal subscribed to, they are paid by the author-institution, per article published. However, out of the 24,000 journals published today, only 5 per cent have so far made the transition to become open access journals, whereas around 80 per cent allow authors to make OA copies of their own articles. The only difference between the publishers therefore is that Springer offers authors the choice of paying for OA, and Reed Elsevier does not. But authors who want the benefits of OA now do not have to wait until they can pay their publishers to provide it for them. They can already do it themselves with a few keystrokes, for free, today." [Open Access News] 9:44:34 AM      Google It!.

Gender split in science attitudes. A survey suggests girls and boys view science very differently - though both regard it as important. [BBC News | Science/Nature | UK Edition] 9:42:48 AM      Google It!.