Project Gutenberg's 32nd Birthday

"July 4th marks the 32nd anniversary of that day in 1971 when Michael Hart first sped an all-caps version of the Declaration of Independence to anyone and everyone then on what later became the web, thus founding Project Gutenberg. Thanks to an army of volunteers and the Distributed Proofreaders, this is the last year PG will have fewer than 10,000 titles. Strangely, Microsoft picked this dual anniversary of literacy and freedom to re-launch their Reader product, with three free bestsellers a week, if you activate the new version with Passport, sign a EULA, etc. Real reason for the upgrade might be that the DRM on MS's old Reader was cracked. If you're not into giving away data, or are running a system other than Windows, maybe you could take the time to tell a friend about free books online, or even help out by visiting the Distributed Proofers and editing one page per day." [Slashdot]

So a happy belated birthday to PG, even while Darci Chapman quotes Jacek Artymiak discussing ebooks:

"Today's eBook efforts are missing the point. They make reading books harder, not easier. A book that cannot be read once the batteries run out or when you forget your password is pretty useless to me. Technology ought to make our lives easier, after all."

Amen and hallelujah.

declaration of independence -- copyrighted

"JD Lasica has a nice catch. Apparently, the Boston Globe has copyrighted the Declaration of Independence. But see 17 USC §506(c)." [Lessig Blog]

For those folks using Movable Type to blog, including SLS staff and those at our member libraries, Steven points us to Zempt, a graphical interface that works on disparate platforms to post to MT blogs. Some features:

• "Intuitive, easy-to-use interface
• Post entries to your Movable Type blog
• Full support for Movable Type entry fields including:
  • Title
  • Body
  • Extended Entry
  • Excpert
  • Keywords
  • Multiple categories
  • Comment Status
  • TrackBack status
  • Send TrackBack pings
  • Edit entry date and time
• Easy text and paragraph markup. Add bold, links, blockquotes, and paragraph alignment quickly and easily.
• Preview your posts
• Save posts as draft
• Manage multiple blogs on multiple sites"

"Adds a spell checker" should be added to that list, and that list bit about managing multiple blogs on multiple sites could be especially handy. Remember, though, that this is a separate download that installs to your local hard drive, so you won't be able to access it from multiple places. I also wish it created a WYSIWYG environment, but hey it's free (although if you use it you should consider donating money to the project). Still, it could make life much easier.

SLS folks, let me know if you need help configuring the settings.

At the NEASIS&T program at MIT back in April, I said that one of the great things about blogging is that it's fun. More proof: Blogstop [via Popdex]

"Form a sentence from the acronym of the last word found on the latest post. Quirky, funny, nasty, silly, serious, whatever your post may be, the words are yours. Every correct entry gives you 1 point."

I haven't tried it out yet, but BlogLines is a free, server-based news aggregator for those that want to be able to access their news from any web browser. Beware that these types of services often bog down once they become popular, but they're good for folks experimenting with aggregators or for when you're away from home.

Some of BlogLines features:

• "Two-pane interface for easy viewing
• Grouping of subscriptions in folders
• Expandable outline of subscriptions
• RSS auto discovery of feeds
• Notification window tells you when blogs you're subscribed to have been updated
• Bookmark function lets you bookmark entries "

Blog authors can also add a BlogLines icon to make it easier for their readers to one-click subscribe to their sites in BL. [via the Aggregators Yahoo Group]

It's also worth noting that Dave Winer and others are working on Subscriptions Harmonizers that will synchronize the list of feeds you read across multiple computers and platforms. This is a great step forward, although personally I find it more important to access my aggregator remotely in order to read and delete posts more efficiently. Bill Kearney points out that Syndic8 has offered this service for some time, so if this feature is important for you, make sure you take advantage of it!

RSS Killed the Infoglut Star

"When I started using an RSS newsreader daily, some remarkable things happened that I didn't necessarily expect: I began to spend almost no time surfing to keep up with current technology information, and I was suddenly able to manage a large body of incoming information with incredible efficiency. My newsreader has become so integral that it's now sitting in my Windows startup folder along with my e-mail client and contact manager. I'm humming 'RSS Killed the Infoglut Star' when I fire up my RSS newsreader in the morning....

...On a very simple level, leveraging RSS means getting the information I want when I want it, and even the stuff I'm not interested in can be dispensed in record time. In an age of spam and cold calls, this is just what the information-overload doctor ordered....

In the end, however, explaining to the uninitiated why RSS newsreaders are so compelling can be a little frustrating. There's a certain jene sais quoi about RSS that reminds me of how it felt to describe the Web to people who hadn't yet experienced it. All I know is that I can't go back to my old inefficient ways of consuming information. As the Buggles sang in the first MTV video: 'We can't rewind / We've gone too far.' And that's a good thing." [InfoWorld, via Daypop Top 40]

Let me emphasize yet again how invaluable RSS news aggregators can be for information professionals (read: librarians), and their day is coming for the average person. Does AOL realize this?

AOL be Blogging

"Jeff Jarvis: 'Yesterday, I was one of a privileged council of blogging elders -- Meg Hourihan, Nick Denton, Anil Dash, Clay Shirky -- invited to see AOL's new blogging tools, which will be released later this year.

They've done a good job.'

• You'll be able to blog from IM
• Every weblog will have a RSS/XML feed
• The want to feeds to be indexed by Technorati" [Micah's Weblog]

I think this is huge because now the people at SLS and our member libraries who use AOL will have a second blogging model to help them understand where we are headed with our NEWS grant project. Even better, people like Sheree's mother will be able to blog and automatically generate RSS feeds for the rest of the family in order to stay in touch.

You see, her mother just moved to Arizona, and while she mostly likes playing games on her computer and using email, if AOL has truly made blogging easy enough for her, we just reached the mythical promise of the internet - easy publishing for all. I've maintained all along that blogging will become incorporated into other tools that do other things, and it looks like this is starting to happen. Here's the thing, though.

Kudos to AOL for giving their bloggers RSS feeds, but I'll be most excited when they start providing integrated RSS news aggregators for their subscribers. That, to me, is really the future for delivery of current content. Imagine all these AOL users having aggregators that pop up when they first sign in. Imagine them being notified  on their smartphones of content updates via RSS in AOL Instant Messenger. Imagine they get RSS updates when the AOL Time Warner publications like People, Time, etc., publish new articles and their aggregators takes them directly to the full story.

It's huge, especially if you add in one-click subscriptions to your fellow AOL bloggers, specifically the ones that are relatives and friends. The trick is to hide the technical back-end of RSS and make it all seamless to AOL users. What a coup that would be if they could collaborate on "family journals!" You could track your entire family via RSS and visit the archive to remember exactly when your brother claimed to catch that 50-pound fish that was "this big."

And if there's no picture from his cameraphone, you could pretty well guess he was lying.