Tuesday, March 23, 2004

Opera Promises Voice-Operated Web Browser [Slashdot] 11:06:21 PM      Google It!.

Wal-Mart Launches Online Music Store. Wal-Mart's new online store will undercut competitors' prices as the world's largest retailer officially launched a venture today designed to boost its Web businesses. By Reuters. [New York Times: Technology] 12:29:35 PM      Google It!.

Game for Messaging. InfocomBot for AOL Instant Messenger "If you have an AOL Instant Messenger account, send an IM to InfocomBot or InfocomBot2. I set up an automated bot to play classic Infocom text adventure games from your favorite IM client, T-Mobile Sidekick, or any other device that connects to AIM. It supports "save" and "restore" commands, so you don't need to lose your place. If you've never played a text adventure game before, Brass Lantern has a great introduction to basic gameplay. There are hints for all of these games on the InvisiClues website." [Waxy.org, via MetaFilter] So I can query Google via AIM, talk to SmarterChild via AIM, and now play text games via AIM, but I still can't search a library's catalog. Are there any ILS vendors working on this type of open functionality? [The Shifted Librarian] 8:38:33 AM      Google It!.

Raising the Bar for Toolbars. "Dogpile Toolbar has launched its newest toolbar, which comes with an an RSS Tool for grabbing RSS and Atom-syndicated content. The Toolbar can display feeds constructed in RSS .91, .92, and 2.0 formats. The Toolbar also supports the Atom feed format." [Lockergnome’s RSS Resource] Index and Search Your Computer, RSS Feeds, and the Web With New Desktop From an overview article that that I've co-authored with Barbara Quint, 'Lycos has launched a free toolbar search product [IE, Windows 98, ME, 2000 or XP] from HotBot, their search service,which is 'the first product to integrate traditional desktop search with Web search within the browser.' The same search tool can now reach the Internet, e-mail folders for Outlook or Outlook Express, and user documents stored on a hard drive. The free application does not even require registration. It also incorporates a blocker for pop-up ads and an RSS News Reader syndication. Searching reaches six file types: MS Office, PDF, RTF, and text. Indexes created to track e-mail and user files remain stored locally to protect user privacy.' " [Resourceshelf] So toolbars are continuing to evolve, with library services nowhere in sight. I'm more intrigued by the Hotbot toolbar, with its ability to index my hard drive. I love the Lookout search toolbar for Outlook, so combining that functionality with searching my RSS feeds could be incredibly efficient. I'm confused as to what list of RSS subscriptions the toolbar indexes, though. Hopefully it's not a second list that needs to be maintained separately from any existing user aggregator. I'll have to find time to give it a whirl, especially to see if I can add SWAN to its list of search engines. Oh, and an important note from Gary's article: "Indexes created to track e-mail and user files remain stored locally to protect user privacy," and it's Windows only. [The Shifted Librarian] 8:31:23 AM      Google It!.

Audio Format Shifting To Be OK'd In New Zealand [Slashdot] 8:28:42 AM      Google It!.

“ChalkBoxâ€� Project Launched to Integrate Publishers’ Learning Applications with the Blackboard Learning System. Blackboard Inc. announced that it has joined three of the world’s leading academic publishers in a development project to integrate the companies’ most popular e-Learning applications into the Blackboard Learning System.... The development project, ti [Online Learning Update] 8:16:58 AM      .

Archives seek to nullify "effectively perpetual" copyright term. Yesterday Brewster Kahle and Richard Prelinger filed a suit in a federal district court in California claiming that the Berne Convention Implement Act (BCIA) and Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA) together create an "effectively perpetual" copyright term for a certain category of works, and therefore violate the U.S. constitution. The affected works were published after January 1, 1964, and before January 1, 1978. Kahle, Chairman of the Internet Archive, and Prelinger, President of the Prelinger Archives, are represented by three attorneys, including Lawrence Lessig, from the Stanford Center for Internet and Society. (Thanks to BNA's Internet Law News.) [Open Access News] 8:09:01 AM      Google It!.