19 July 2002

Apple Sync for your Phone APPLE.com -- Apple software allows multiple, simultaneous syncs. And the software works with Sony Ericsson mobile phones.

Cyberactivisim WIRED.com -- Julia Scheeres writes about Abortioniscybersquatting.com. It's a story about one man with a history of trying to make companies pay to get their good names back. Another man is an anti-abortion activist. Together, they are making people very unhappy. We have a similar story brewing in Ireland, with the Treasury Holdings website.

Resource: FeedRoom FEEDROOM.com -- The FeedRoom has surpassed CNN.com and MSNBC as the top online destination for streaming news.

Bookshelf: Ontologies Come of Age DEBORAH McGUINNESS -- Ontologies Come of Age will appear in Spinning the Semantic Web from MIT Press, 2002.

You own your biography until you become famous.

Telecommuting Improves Life ITAA.org -- Surveys indicate that a large number of employees like the idea of telecommuting, and Internet broadband supporters say it could help the industry as well as workers. Harris Miller, president of the Information Technology Association of America in Arlington, Va., said telework "will cause a major bump" in the number of people signing up for broadband. "E-work is widely seen to have it all: career, life and family." This philosophy resonates importunately in comments made by techies in Ireland.

JPEG Patent Grab The Register -- JPEGs are not free. A video conferencing company based in Austin, Texas says it's going to pursue royalties on the transmission of JPEG images. And it's already found a licensee: Sony Corporation. Formerly known as VTEL, Forgent Networks acquired Compression Labs in 1997, acquiring this patent into the bargain.

Getting Information Retrieval Right FIRST MONDAY -- Marcia J. Bates recalls the dot-com rush of the 1990's when many Web sites were developed that provided information retrieval capabilities poorly or sub-optimally. She reviews suggestions for improvements in the design of Web information retrieval in seven areas. She discusses classifications, ontologies, indexing vocabularies, statistical properties of databases (including the Bradford Distribution), and staff indexing support systems.