Updated: 10/2/2004; 9:00:21 AM.
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Wednesday, September 22, 2004

Business Networking Systems, Dead Already?. The death knell has sounded for social networking systems, and I have to agree, because they don't do what they are supposed to do, which is to link people together. My analysis - and I have talked about this before - is that because these systems are centralized and isolated from each other, and because they allow only the exchange of messages, they do not provide very good connectivity at all. A social networking system must be, like society, distributed. By John C. Dvorak, PC Magazine, September 20, 2004 [Refer][Research][Reflect] [OLDaily]
8:47:43 PM      Google It!.

How Blog and Wiki Fit Together (For Me). I've been talking a lot over the last week about blogs and wikis. This item looks at how the two technologies fit together. My plan is to put together (or convince someone to put together) a small addition to wiki software that allows a wiki page to import an RSS feed - preferably a topic-specific RSS feed that aggregates a number of blogs, and to place that feed inside a wiki page. Via Owrede Log. By Julian, Synthesia, September 20, 2004 [Refer][Research][Reflect] [OLDaily]
8:44:22 PM      Google It!.

Emusic Relaunches - Cheap, DRM-Free Downloads [Slashdot:]
8:41:58 PM      Google It!.

They Are Sleuths Who Weigh Prose. Trying to authenticate documents or uncover forgeries is an increasingly technical pursuit. By By TOM McNICHOL. [The New York Times > Technology]
8:36:00 PM      Google It!.

Flexible Sensors Make Robot Skin [Slashdot:]
8:33:46 PM      Google It!.

More on the Google-Elsevier deal. A blog posting on paidContent.org offers this interpretation of the Google-Elsevier deal: Google is indexing ScienceDirect content for the Google Print project and placing Google AdSense advertisements on the Google Print return pages. The only payments that Google will make to Elsevier are for click-throughs on the ads, the same deal that Google makes with every other host of AdSense ads. (Thanks to Jan Velterop. This reading makes sense of the original story and supports the suspicions I voiced yesterday.) [Open Access News]
1:31:45 PM      Google It!.

Sony Adopts Blu-ray Disc PlayStation 3 [Slashdot:]
1:30:01 PM      Google It!.

IM's Broader Social Implications for Libraries.

IMing Revolution Suggests Broader Social Implications

"This generation is one of multitaskers who believe they can and are getting more things done simultaneously. It's hard to believe that multitaskers can do all those tasks well, as anybody who has driven behind someone on a cell phone will tell you. But that issue aside, maybe we are slowly wiring future generations in a new way. Maybe 40 years from now, we'll drive and yak as easily as we walk and chew gum today. Maybe we're turning ourselves into what our newest cell phones are: portable units capable of communicating in multiple formats.

Parents are seeing their high school teens rewiring their brains now. When the kids aren't talking on the phone, they're texting on it, and when they get home, they're IMing on the computer. Wary of this form of communication, many schools restrict cell phone use to prevent in-class chatting -- and cheating. But if the use of instant messaging is an indication, there are signs that these communication habits will stick with teens even beyond their college years....

So if this isn't a group of successful multitaskers, they think they are, and their skills will evolve along with the cell phones that already can surf the Web, play games, text-message, show television and download and play music.

But that evolution also means a whole group of children is being left behind because there's still no bridge across the digital divide. Chances are most of the respondents in the Pew studies were neither minorities nor from lower economic backgrounds. Low-income families are less likely to have a computer at home, and minorities are less likely to start using a computer at an early age, according to recent findings of the Kaiser Family Foundation.

The foundation's study of Internet access and use by children ages 8 to 18 found that because of this class-race gap, technological literacy -- understanding the language of icons and knowing how to find information online -- was lacking among many minority children from lower-income homes, which were unlikely to have a computer or Internet connection." [Chicago Tribune, via textually.org]

Which, of course, is where libraries come in. Back in the 1990s, libraries debated whether email was a valid use of public computers, and now we're having that same discussion about instant messaging.

And you know what? The answer is the same - patrons using the internet to communicate, connect, exchange information, or just plain chat is indeed a valid use of public terminals. We have to get over this issue now because when we don't let them IM in the library, we're telling them that we don't value their preferred method of communication, whether it's with their friends or with librarians. We're telling them that the library is not a place for instant messaging, so go somewhere else to do it.

Except that they are going to go somewhere else and do it (at least, those that can), and they're not going to come back and they're not going to think of the library when they think of instant messaging. Would your library find that attitude acceptable if we replace IM with "email?" How about if we replace IM with "telephone?"

[The Shifted Librarian]
8:49:22 AM      Google It!.

Activists Find More E-Vote Flaws. More weaknesses appear in the Diebold electronic voting system that activists say could be used to rig the November election. The company says auditing procedures would catch any vote fraud. By Kim Zetter. [Wired News]
8:45:34 AM      Google It!.

Tritone Launches OSX e-Learning Applications for Music Education - New Cross Platform Performance Evaluation Engine, Javatrax 1.2. Javatrax 1.2 is a Java music evaluation engine that simultaneously evaluates played music for pitch, timing and expressional elements from a midi musical instrument keyboard and returns an immediate graphical response where the user made errors. A teac [Online Learning Update]
8:42:45 AM      Google It!.

Samsung Demos Future Memory Chips [Slashdot:] 8 gigabits

8:39:32 AM      Google It!.

SpamAssassin 3.0 Released [Slashdot:]
8:35:57 AM      Google It!.

Open source opportunity, open source risk. I've been traveling more than usual lately, and while on the road I've been working my way through the ITConversations audio archive. It's full of gems, and one of them is Doug Kaye's interview with Philip Greenspun. While discussing the ArsDigita flameout, Greenspun offers insightful perspectives on the opportunity, and the risk, of open source as a business model. ... [Jon's Radio]
8:33:12 AM      Google It!.

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