"As the volume of information rapidly expands, the time to read this information remains relatively static. There are only twenty-four hours in the day; only so much attention to go around. How are you going to get people to read your content? Understanding and planning for how people scan read on the Web is a good start.

A Sunday edition of The New York Times contains more information than was published in the entire 15th Century. Every year, there are 60,000 books and 18,000 magazines published in the United States alone. The Web contains some 600 billion documents.

To survive information overload, people have become incredibly selective in how they consume information. The Web is the ultimate information overload environment and to be effective on the Web, people have developed 'scan reading' behavior." [Gerry McGovern, via LucDesk]

This is very true, and it's one reason I'm so high on news aggregators. So in that spirit, I've set up a poll on OpinionPower asking Should I Truncate My RSS Feed? I know the point of a news aggregator is to scan, but I personally like not having to go to each site to read a whole post.

Which do you prefer? Now's your chance to be heard! As we say in Chicago, vote early and vote often! I'll give it a few days and then announce the results.

"Create a googlebox on your website without having to know a single bit of code." [via ...useless miscellany]

Cool - so now any library could put one on its site! I suggest using related searches in webliographies and author searches in reader's advisory pages for starters.

"Aaron of Aaronland tells me his site-search engine will return results in RSS too: Try it here..." [Content Syndication with XML and RSS]

This is definitely an idea whose time has come. I hope there's a way to build this into our portal at SLS.

"Burlington, N.J.-based Franklin, known for its eBookMan handheld device, said it will disseminate books by authors from Warner Books and Little Brown and Co. Featured authors will include Nicholas Sparks, Brad Meltzer, Anita Shreve and Larry King.

The deal comes five months after AOL Time Warner ended its own short-lived e-book publishing effort dubbed iPublish, citing a weak market for the technology, and moved sale of digital reprints to its book group....

Such moves have had their affect on the fledgling industry, with several companies attempting to offer e-book text and devices going out of business. Last month, Digital Goods, formerly known as Softlock.com, which worked with Simon & Schuster as a distributor for King's Internet-only book "Riding the Bullet," filed for bankruptcy....

Publishing companies also haven't written off the digital format entirely. Earlier this week, Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster said it would release 23 Ernest Hemingway books in an electronic format.

Chris Strano, director of marketing at Franklin, said it is continuing to work with publishers to provide a viable way for them to produce digital works. In addition to AOL Time Warner's book division, Franklin says it has distribution deals with Vivendi Universal, Houghton Mifflin, McGraw-Hill, Columbia University, Collins U.K. and Merriam Webster, among others." [News.com]

The technology still needs to get easier to user, the players have to agree on open standards, and prices have to drop. They'll never get a mass market while the price of an ebook is still equal to that of the print edition. I'm glad Franklin is still moving forward, but there's a wall I don't think they'll get past until some of these things occur.

More great news for blogging fools: ieSpell is at its own domain now, so you can re-commence downloading it. Windows-only folks need apply (sorry to others).

"ieSpell is a freeware Internet Explorer browser extension that spell checks text input boxes on a webpage. It should come in particularly handy for heavy web mail and/or forum users. Even if your web mail or forum already includes spell checking functionality, you might still want to install this utility because it is definitely much faster than a server-side solution. Plus you get to store and use your personal word list across all your web mails and/or forums, instead of maintaining separate ones on each application."

Steven made my day by informing me that Bloglet now works with Radio! I've already signed up for an account, so if you want to receive my posts via email, use the box at the bottom of the column on the left. Just give it your email address and presto-chango!

If you're running a Radio, Blogger, Movable Type, Big Blog Tool, or Nucleus blog, you, too, can take advantage of the following services:

• offer email subscriptions to your blog that keep your users coming back
• simple and seamless integration into your existing blog
• easy setup and hands-free maintenance
• receive daily stats of total new subscribers
• (optional) receive stats on how many sites link to you and a list of the top 10, as tabulated by Google

Oh, and it's free. Let the stampede begin!

"PDAs are great for storing contacts, managing your schedule, and keeping to-do lists. But can they also help fight obesity among Singaporean teenagers? Armed with specially equipped Sony CLIE S360s, teens in the tiny wired country can view nutritional information about the foods they eat and find out how much they have to exercise to burn off a particular meal. They also use their PDAs to record their moods, from sad to stressed. The information will be uploaded into a database, with the goal of giving educators some idea why obesity is so prevalent in Singapore--and how it can be stopped." [ZDNet AnchorDesk]

"MAGpie is a free application for creating captions and audio descriptions for rich media. In order to provide feedback to funding organizations, we request that you provide some information regarding your plans for the use of MAGpie." [MAGpie]

The new version, 2.01 is out. I'll be trying to learn it as we add video files to LibraryU, because it adds closed-captioning, which is important for accessibility.

"I love libraries and applaud every step they make into the digital age. But I wish they knew something about interface design and human-computer interaction....

The standard library catalog interface dates way back; I used to see it running on Vax/VMS systems. Everything about it is counter-intuitive, unforgiving, and obstructive. At some times you need to use the keyboard, at other times the keypad. The interface apparantly predated (or was designed by someone ignorant of) simple conventions such as "Space key moves forward" or "Return key selects current item." Authors have to be looked up by last name only, and heaven help you if something you want begins with a letter late in the alphabet: there's no way to sort entries differently or skip past the several dozen you don't want." [O'Reilly Network]

Gary was kind enough to tip me off to this article and as you might imagine, I have very definite opinions on this topic. The only thing that Andy gets wrong in this article is that librarians have nothing what-so-ever to do with the interfaces for their catalogs. Other than that, he's dead-on.

Instead, we are severely limited by what is foisted on us by the database vendors. I know because I've had to deal with this first-hand on many an occasion. Close to home, SWAN decided to re-design the Innovative Webpac because it was horrible to use. By default, a detailed record for a book used three frames to display the information. When we wanted to change the font, bold certain pieces. remove parts of it, etc., we found out we couldn't do a damn thing. Eventually, they modified it to its current form, which is better than it used to be, but it's still not ideal. We still can't touch anything in the tables of results. Most of the options simply can't be changed by the library.

I've watched this type of situation play out repeatedly, which is why most library catalogs use the default installation and they all look the same (other than maybe a logo). There are almost no public libraries and only a handful of academic libraries that have the resources to either build their own system (which is pretty insane in this day and age) or to delve into the programming behind these systems in order to modify them. (Contractually, we're not allowed to modify the Innovative code, even if we knew how to.) In the Virtual Illinois Catalog, everything is based on "session IDs," and if you use the back button, it will screw up your results. It's horrible, but there isn't a thing we can do about it. We're investigating other vendors, but even then it's a short list. We've had to push ILS vendors to implement Z39.50 in a way we can actually use, and most have resisted working with us. And you wouldn't believe how incredibly difficult it is (not to mention resource-draining) to switch to a new catalog vendor.

The vendors are the ones responsible for the poor author searching, not the librarians. In fact, we have whole round tables and discussion groups dedicated to beating the vendors over the head with usability issues. On WEB4LIB, there was a recent debate about what to name a link on your library page to a third-party database. Some vendors require that we use the name of the database, even though it means nothing to 95% of the users. It's insane the boxes we're forced into.

Apparently we as librarians just don't have enough clout to get them to make the necessary changes, because they rarely listen. Some vendors are adapting, but it's the newer products that aren't based on the old catalog - Epixtech, iBistro, etc. -that have better interfaces because they've been designed with the web in mind. So if you run into problems like this, it's best to take your issues to the database vendor, not your library. Or, send your concerns to the library and ask that they be forwarded to the vendor.

Don't forget, we're the ones that have to work with these catalogs day-in and day-out. We feel your pain, Andy, but you're going to have to take a number and have a seat.  :-

"Even I, your loyal columnist, am tired. I used to write about hardware and software that changed lives. These days I spend as much time trying to understand social and legal issues as I do technology. My God, I've gone from geek to wonk!...

Also, I know that we're in a transitional period. We're waiting for technologies like wireless, broadband, home entertainment, Web applications/services, and real electronic commerce to take hold. The Internet still hasn't made nearly the contribution it's going to make to the economy; new companies will appear to develop the applications necessary to make that contribution real.

Telecommunications and computing capacity continue to increase. Eventually, they'll cross a threshold that will make possible new, smarter, and more useful applications than those we use today. And we're still waiting for computers that can actually be used by the vast majority of people around the world.

All of this creates a tremendous upside for technology....

Technology has always been cyclical, subject to booms and busts, periods of rapid development and times of retrenchment. And while we are in the latter right now, the real future of technology (as opposed to the fake future of the dot.com era) looks better to me than it has in years. While I am tired, I am also very bullish on the future.

I just wish we could get on with it." [ZDNet AnchorDesk]

While I agree somewhat with the above sentiments, I don't agree with the article overall. At SLS, my in-joke is that we do everything three times. Either the software changes, the projects I'm working on have to change, or some other monkeywrench forces us to re-do things repeatedly. Yes, I'm tired of this, but I'm getting used to it.

Mostly though, this is still exciting for me. We'll be diving into new software to build an intranet/extranet this summer, we'll be using new software to improve the Virtual Illinois Catalog, and we'll start investigating a better back-end for LibraryU. Combine that with my enthusiasm for blogging, RSS, PDAs, WLAN, Bluetooth, and news aggregators, and I've got plenty to keep me going.

So don't miss the forest for the trees. Sure we're waiting for a lot of things to converge and go mainstream, but sitting around watching the paint dry isn't going to help. Unless, of course, it's LCD Paint!

"A federal magistrate in Los Angeles has ordered SonicBlue to spy on thousands of digital video recorder users -- monitoring every show they record, every commercial they skip and every program they send electronically to a friend.

Central District Court Magistrate Charles F. Eick told SonicBlue to gather 'all available information' about how consumers use the Santa Clara company's latest generation ReplayTV 4000 video recorders, and turn the information over to the film studios and television networks suing it for contributing to copyright infringement.

'We've been ordered to invade the privacy of our customers,'' said Ken Potashner, SonicBlue's chairman and chief executive. 'This is something that we find personally very troubling.''

Privacy advocates condemned the ruling which came during the pre-trial discovery process of a series of lawsuits against SonicBlue....

The plaintiffs asked SonicBlue to turn over information on how individuals use the recording devices. SonicBlue said it does not track that information. The magistrate, who is supervising discovery, ordered the company to write software in the next 60 days that would record every 'click' from every customer's remote control.

Four separate lawsuits focus on a pair of features on the ReplayTV 4000: an 'AutoSkip' function that allows the device to bypass commercials while recording a program and a high-speed Internet port that allows users to download programs from the Internet or send them to other ReplayTV 4000 users....

Attorneys for the studios say they need this information to determine the extent to which the ReplayTV 4000 allows consumers to steal copyrighted movies and television shows....

The court ruling also requires SonicBlue to track individual users -- not by name, but through 'unique identification numbers....'

Privacy advocates said the ruling is a more egregious invasion of privacy than TiVo committed. In that case, TiVo collected aggregated data that was purposefully separated from personal details about the viewer. And consumers could opt-out, keeping their viewing habits from being collected.

ReplayTV users won't have that choice.

'It's an incredible invasion of privacy,' said Fred von Lohmann, an intellectual property expert for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. 'But second -- and equally important -- is what the Electronic Frontier Foundation and others have been saying was going to happen now for some time. Basically, under the guise of copyright laws, courts are going to be put in a position of telling technology companies how to build their products.'' " [Mercury News, via Slashdot]

I'm glad SonicBlue is going to fight this order. This is unbelievable, and the last paragraph above really brings home the old adage "if you them an inch, they take a mile." This is why you can't believe Congress when they say the DMCA couldn't be used for inappropriate purposes, and it illustrates perfectly why we need to fight the CBDTPA.

And when you get down to the technical level, how are they gonig to count all of these missed commercials and sent shows? How will they distinguish between someone sending a TV show to a different room in order to watch it and someone sending it to a friend? Are they going to count if someone watches a commercial twice (after all, Replays have a button that lets you back up seven seconds). I catch the end of commercials all the time, so do those count?

And what about the fact that someone is storing more shows than they ever could before in order to actually watch them. If you put PVRs out of business and people start watching less television overall (as the whole Napster fiasco indicates could easily happen), can the production companies then sue the networks for destroying their industry? Where does it end? At what point do we equate SonicBlue's livelihood with NBC's? After all, if I'm paying extra for cable and the majority of programs I tape are on cable, why am I obligated to watch commercials on those stations? I've already paid my premium, three times if you count what I shelled out for the ReplayTV because its price included a lifetime subscription fee for their channel guide. Nobody's complaining that consumers aren't watching commercials during HBO's Six Feet Under, so how is this different?

Can you tell I'm upset about this? Something is really wrong when a company can be forced to spy on its customers for the sake of saving an industry that refuses to provide the very services the customers turn to the company for in the first place.