New Google Labs!

"Google Labs has two new projects:

Google Viewer lets you view the web pages of your search results, in a slideshow fashion.

Google Webquotes annotates results with quotes from other sites." [Google Weblog]

Both of these are pretty fun (I especially like the slideshow), as well as innovative. Imagine a slideshow as a way to browse through titles in a library catalog. Not searching, mind you, but browsing (bestseller lists, new mysteries about chefs, etc.).

Oh, and the 2002 Year-End Google Zeitgeist is out!

Another School Using Manila and RSS

"Here we go...very cool concept using, guess what...Manila (check out the yearbook link). Note the high school site and the news site: 'Who maintains this site? Volunteer editors. Each dynamic site is constructed and maintained by one or more editors. Look in the about area of each site to find the names of the editors.' AND 'Why are we using a content management system? It requires far less technical knowledge to publish a good looking site. The value of our network will grow as more and more people use it. Publishing is a simple way to start the ball rolling.'

Definitely an addition to the rolls!" [weblogged News]

I followed the link to the news site and came upon the following entry for December 5:

"WSAZ is reporting that Eastern (along with most other local schools) is closed today.

Yea Baby, it’s the first snow day of 2002. This is a friendly reminder to drive safely and watch this page for the posting of snowdance lessons to be offered in the elementary cafetorium. Dates and costs to be posted at a later date. – Chad Griffith - goto"

This is exactly what I want from the kids' school - a current news page that I can go to in the morning to see if school has been cancelled. I shouldn't have to wade through the scrolling ticker on TV, and while there are web sites out there that are aggregating closings, it would be far easier for the principal or the secretary to post a quick message to the school's site. Even better if it appears in my morning aggregator read.

Morgan Wilson (another blogging librarian) has posted online his current article on blogs and aggregators that appears in the Nov/Dec 2002 issue of the Minnesota Association of Law Libraries (MALL) newsletter. It's called Blogs and News Aggregators without the Aggravation (and Only a Little Serendipity). Another great link or handout (in addition to Steven Cohen's RSS for Non-Techie Librarians).

BusinessWeek has a ton of good articles right now, some of which comes from a special report examining Tinseltown, Hollywood, and Tech. A sampling:

Hollywood's Digital Love/Hate Story
While today's technologies of production and distribution threaten old powers and create new opportunities, the final scene is sure to be rendered in ones and zeros

Web Radio's Personal Edge
Stripping off the Top 40 straightjacket, online listeners enjoy their own playlists while hearing new music -- and many are buying what they hear

The Video-Game Wars Explode Online
Its Microsoft's deep pockets and Xbox' built-in capabilities vs. Sony's and Nintendo's add-ons. The prize: Potentially millions of new users

The Best Products of 2002
Their list includes the Lodis Sculptured Zipoff Overnighter, the OnKey Karaoke Microphone, and the Digibino DB 100 (binoculars with a built-in digital camera).

The Podunk Post on Sale at the Eiffel Tower
This article isn't available online for free, but it discusses PEPC's Presspoint newspaper kiosk. Here's the description of it from the PEPC web site.

"PEPC has developed a self-contained, fully automated newspaper-vending unit, the PRESSPOiNT™. The PRESSPOiNT™ is capable of receiving files, processing payments and on demand printing of newspapers. As the point-of-sales unit, the PRESSPOiNT™ continuously receives publisher files through PEPC's Multicast Satellite Network.

Each PRESSPOiNT™ is equipped with a user-friendly touch screen. Customers are prompted through the menu in their native language....

The PRESSPOiNT™ prints the same-day edition - High Quality, 40 pages, stapled, unedited, black and white edition.

During print-idle time the screen displays commercial video content, to inform and entertain the customer."

If I remember correctly from the print version of the article, PEPC is putting these in hotels, and they use Adobe Acrobat PDF files to replicate the newspapers. The site says there are already 38 kiosks installed in the Americas, offering newspapers from 112 publishers in 28 different languages from 47 different countries.

Even in its currently somewhat foggy state, little mind bombs are going off in my head over Jon Udell's Library Services Experiment.

"Jenny's comment about my library adventure got me thinking. In particular, I was curious about the Innovative system used both by her library and mine. For North America, I found 538 unique instances of the service....

The general idea, which I may or may not pursue further, is to create some kind of microcontent companion in various contexts -- on the Amazon site, or at All Consuming, or in any other Web context where ISBNs are available -- so you can know what's available in your local library.

For now, here's a simple looker-upper."

Another "too damn cool" moment! More later as I wrap my mind around it....

"RSS feeds for online library technology journals:

Ed Summers has recently created RSS feeds for D-Lib and Ariadne. The RSS feeds are available at:
http://www.inkdroid.org/rss/ariadne.xml
http://www.inkdroid.org/rss/dlib.xml (Thanks, Ed!)" [Chi Lib Rocks!]

And check out this very cool script that Devon Smith created to display various RSS feeds on a web page. To view the contents of a feed, click on its name. On the client side, it does require Javascript, while on the server side it requires XML::RSS, CGI and LWP::Simple. Devon even provides a link to download the source code.

This is a very basic version of the aggregation of Library System headlines I want to implement in our forthcoming grant software. You can see something a bit closer to what I want at ReadingEd.com. To view it in action, click on any link in the right-hand column that has an exclamation point after the name. [first spotted by Phil Ringnalda, via Too Much News]

Sterling's decade-ahead-of-its-time librarian talk

"Bruce Sterling's 1992 speech to the Library Information Technology Association is eerily prescient -- the "Information Economy" is bankrupt, and it's taking the public domain down with it.

'Ladies and gentlemen, there's a problem with showing Mr Franklin the door. The problem is that Mr Franklin was right in 1731 and Mr Franklin is still right! Information is not something you can successfully peddle like Coca-Cola. If it were a genuine commodity, then information would cost nothing when you had a glut of it. God knows we've got enough data! We're drowning in data. Nevertheless we're only gonna make more. Money just does not map the world of information at all well. How much is the Bible worth? You can get a Bible in any hotel room. They're worthless as commodities, but not valueless to humankind. Money and value are not identical.

What's information really about? It seems to me there's something direly wrong with the 'Information Economy.' It's not about data, it's about attention. In a few years you may be able to carry the Library of Congress around in your hip pocket. So? You're never gonna read the Library of Congress. You'll die long before you access one tenth of one percent of it. What's important --- increasingly important --- is the process by which you figure out what to look at. This is the beginning of the real and true economics of information. Not who owns the books, who prints the books, who has the holdings. The crux here is access, not holdings. And not even access itself, but the signposts that tell you what to access --- what to pay attention to. In the Information Economy everything is plentiful --- except attention.' " [Boing Boing Blog]