PD bibliography

A 15 page bibliography on public diplomacy (May 08) from the Clingendael library of the Netherlands Institute of International Relations.

Collaborative search

One (small) drawback of the librarian profession is that one rarely gets to be a part of those exciting search parties and posses that one sometimes sees on television and in films. However, as Greg Notess points out in a recent Infotoday article (SearchTogether: A Tech Preview of Social Search Programs), librarians may soon be able to get a taste of that excitement without leaving their terminals. Notess focuses primarily on Microsoft's Search Together, which requires IE and a plugin and Live Messenger accounts on both the searcher and collaborator side. Collaborative search seems to me to be a very interesting concept for any consortium of librarians, and though I'm not ready to migrate from Firefox to IE, I'm looking forward to other download-free applications of the concept. Three products that incorporate aspects of social searching are Yoople (human ranking of search results), Delver (refines results according who the searcher is - e.g. teenager or senior citizen - and what social group has created and referenced the information), and Wikia Search (allows you to add sites, related terms, and images to search results)

100 useful niche search engines

Laura Milligan at College@Home offers a  list of 100 niche search engines. Particularly useful for college students, as the name of the site suggests. She organizes the search engines sorted in the following niches:
Extracurricular|Quick Answer Guides|City Guides and Travel|Shopping Search Engines|Business|Academic and Reference|Social Media and People|Multisearch|TV, Video and Radio|Medical Students and Health Search|Law Students|Metasearch and Megasearch Engines|Photos, Images and Visual Search Engines|News Searches|Jobs and Real Estate

Genealogy resources by state

Genealogists and family historians, see USA.gov's list of links to state genealogy resources.

Open ended ratchet wrench

You might think Knowbodies is my only "get rich quick" scheme, but that would be wrong. I also devote quite some time to pondering inventions that might propel me upwards in life. For instance, recently I was wondering why nobody sells an open-ended ratchet wrench or snow tires with retractable studs. I went to Google Patents, and ended up spending the day; not only do they  have multiple versions of open-ended ratchet wrenches and retractable stud tires, they have lots of other stuff that you wouldn't even suspect existed. And illustrations galore!!! A particular pleasure is the clarity of language that is typical of inventors. In 1933, for example, the optimistic Joseph De Merolis and Alexander di Lizio, probably struggling to contain their excitement, introduced their illuminated shoe with this pithy preamble: "Our invention relates to improvements in electrically illuminated shoes, and particularly to dancing shoes." Google Patents is truly an amazing site. (and if this particular shoe is not to your liking, there are many other illuminated shoes to choose from)

World Wide Science

From DOE

June 12, 2008

DOE Announces International Agreement on Global Science Online Gateway

WASHINGTON, DC - The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) today announced the establishment of a multilateral alliance to govern the rapidly growing online gateway to international scientific research information--WorldWideScience.org. Officials from organizations representing 38 countries formalized their commitment today in Seoul, Korea, by signing a WorldWideScience Alliance agreement to sustain and build upon joint efforts to provide a single, sophisticated point of access for diverse scientific resources and expertise from nations around the world.

"WorldWideScience.org is already a wonderful tool for communication, bringing scientific databases from many countries to the fingertips of those advancing the frontiers of knowledge across the globe. It is well on its way towards becoming a complete, comprehensive, international source for scientific inquiry," DOE Under Secretary for Science Dr. Raymond L. Orbach said. "Unleashing global scientific discovery, through WorldWideScience.org, will accelerate scientific progress. That is why we are so excited about this alliance and the global access to science it will provide."

WorldWideScience.org is the result of an agreement—signed in January 2007 by Dr. Orbach and Chief Executive of the British Library Dame Lynne Brindley—to partner on the development of a global science gateway to accelerate scientific discovery by giving people faster and more convenient access to online scientific databases.

Arrested for blogging

(from beSpacific)
"The World Information Access 2008 Report presents important trends in the distribution of information and communication technologies around the world. The 2008 WIA Report explores information access by looking at trends in the blogger arrests worldwide, diversity in the ownership of media assets in the 15 largest media markets in the Muslim world, and the ideological diversity of political content online in 74 countries with large Muslim populations." Howard, Philip N, and World Information Access Project. World Information Access Report - 2008. 3. Seattle: University of Washington, 2008.

Wordle

For the modern reader, there is wordle. Paste in the old-fashioned linear text, and out comes a word cloud. The foregoing post is rendered thus:

7 things you should know

A few months ago I posted about Common Craft, where you can find short pithy videos about things you might be wondering about...or struggling to explain to others (rss, wikis, Twitter, etc.) Common Craft's style is - how shall I put it - lighthearted. For the bilious, who do not suffer breeziness gladly and perhaps prefer reading to watching, an excellent alternative is Educause's "7 Things You Should Know" series. Here is how they present themselves: 7 Things You Should Know About pieces provide quick, no-jargon overviews of emerging technologies and related practices that have demonstrated or may demonstrate positive learning impacts. Any time you need to explain a new learning technology or practice quickly and clearly, look for a 7 Things You Should Know About... brief from ELI. The briefs are professional looking 2 page pdfs, and make a very nice 1 sheet handout. Check it out! (and many other valuable resources at www.educause.edu too!)

Is Google making us stupid?

In this article from the Atlantic Monthly, Nicholas Carr ponders how the internet may be affecting our brains. Sven Birkerts - much reviled and dismissed as a luddite by the digerati - covered some of the same ground more than a decade ago in his Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age. Perhaps a rebellious slow reading movement, prodded forward by technology, is finally gathering spee..momentum; for testimonies from readers about how hard it is to read these days, see Carr's blog Fortunately, even those of us with hardly any attention span left can still enjoy a good picture, if it's not too big.

(Sign next to reader being ticketed reads Minimum Speed, 186 282 397 MPS)

Wake up and take a nap

Feedsweep

FeedSweep is yet another rss feed aggregator. It's very easy to use, requires no programming, and provides many options for customizing the layout and appearance of your feeds. Below is an aggregate of feeds from some library/technology sites. The aggregate uses the "peach melba" color theme, is set to show the 5 most recent posts from the aggregated blogs, and to display them in 600px width.

Firefox 3

Firefox 3 is due for release tomorrow, June 17. I've been using the beta for a couple of weeks, and really like it - it's noticeably faster than Firefox 2.x, and has some nice new features. Naturally, not all of the add-ons I've come to rely on have been upgraded for Firefox 3 compatibility, but I expect that will come with the official release. For a preview of new features, see Walt Mossberg's review.

Google Ajax API feed

Over on the right, where it says "Google Dynamic Feed - Libraries & Technology", you see an example of an rss feed courtesy of Google's "Dynamic Feed Wizard." To create a feed, you enter the names of some feeds, or type in some search terms (in this case, "libraries and technology"), and the Dynamic Feed Wizard makes an RSS feed of the search results, then generates some javascript so you can channel the feed to your website or blog. The default is 4 results, but if you sign up for a Google API key, have some programming ability, and do a little tweaking with the code, you can change that and many other parameters by following the instructions in the Dynamic Feed Control Programming Guide. For an example of an rss aggregator built with the Google Ajax API, see Smashing Feeds.

Interesting Pile

How CharlieRB manages to compile his mighty interesting pile I do not know (and would like to), but if you like lists, and enjoy being distracted, this is a great place to spend some time.

Open Government Guide

The Reporter's Committee for Freedom of the Press (which is itself a very interesting site!) has created the Open Government Guide, "a complete compendium of information on every state's open records and open meetings laws. Each state's section is arranged according to a standard outline, making it easy to compare laws in various states." This a good place to check whether something is even worth looking for!

Good news

The pleasure of reading news is sometimes tainted by a) the news being bad and b) the news being true. Here, at last, is a site that provides news that is at least good, if not true.

Confessions of a bibliophile

Luc Sante in the Wall Street Journal on "The Book Collection That Devoured My Life"

Government Data and the Invisible Hand

This is a draft of an article that will appear in the Yale Journal of Law and Technology in Fall 2008. (it kindly asks us not to cite the draft, but - since it's out there for everyone to read - I assume a little quoting in a blog post like this is in order) The article argues that federal agencies should stop dabbling in webmastery, and leave to the pros the important job of providing government information to the people. The authors make some very resonant points; e.g., "Today government bodies consider their own websites to be a higher priority than technical infrastructures that open up their data for others to use...It would be preferable for government to understand providing reusable data, rather than providing websites, as the core of its online publishing responsibility." This reminds me, with a piercing scream, of our age-old pleas for re-purposable information. The authors also argue that "the federal government has shown itself consistently unable to keep pace with the fast-evolving power of the Internet" - couldn't help thinking wistfully of bleeding edge technology like the Google toolbar when I read that. And a third point - and I don't think any article has ever made me nod furiously and smile grimly quite so much - is that "an online compliance checklist for designers of government websites identifies no fewer than 24 different regulatory regimes with which all public government web sites must comply...But the stultifying cumulative effect of these rules has not been, and probably would not be, endorsed by anyone." (a bit of touching naivete there...) And finally, "as long as government has a special role in the presentation and formatting of raw government data, certain desirable limits on what the government can do become undesirable limits on how the data can be presented or handled." Yes! And, I would add, "retrieved." The authors are David Robinson, Harlan Yu, William Zeller, and Edward W. Felten of Princeton University. God preserve them.

Paper Cuts, a NYT blog about books

Paper Cuts describes itself as "a blog about books and other forms of printed matter, written by the editors of The Book Review. Look here for book news and opinion, interviews with writers, regular raids on the Book Review's archives, and other special features."
(Paper Cuts rss feed)

Nicholson Baker and indecency

I'm not talking about his book Human Smoke, for which he's taking such a terrible, terrible beating (Anne Applebaum in The New Republic is just one example of the fury Baker's pacifist revision of WWII history hath wrought - among some very heavy hitters!), but of his delightful review of The Flash Press: Sporting Male Weeklies in 1840s New York, by Patricia Cline Cohen, Timothy J. Gilfoyle and Helen Lekfkowitz Horowitz. There's a fundamental decency about Baker that I see in all his books and reviews, including Human Smoke, though I'm not sure I accept his (implied) argument there. I believe it springs from his respectful wonderment about the world - that's what enables him to be a scholar and a Wikipedia enthusiast - and I'm so glad he hasn't lost the spirit, despite the roasting Human Smoke has occasioned. Nothing like a Baker review to march me off to the library... "thanks to the meticulous research of these three scholars, we once again have a way of looking through a tiny, smudged window into New York's long-past illicit life." Keep up the good work, Nick!

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Magazine Roundup

Sign and Sight's Magazine Roundup is a nice way to scan current hot items in the periodical literature. It's a useful supplement to another great site, Brijit, which appears to be in financial straits, but is still accessible. (earlier post on Signandsight)

Darnton on libraries

Information is exploding so furiously around us and information technology is changing at such bewildering speed that we face a fundamental problem: How to orient ourselves in the new landscape? How to make sense of it all? I have no answer to that problem, but I can suggest an approach to it: look at the history of the ways information has been communicated.

Robert Darnton, director of the Harvard University Library, shares his thoughts on The Library in the New Age in the NYRB.

Speaker program candidates...

Here is a list of the world's top 100 intellectuals, "the thinkers who are shaping the tenor of our time," according to Foreign Policy(U.S.) and Prospect (UK) magazines. The list is rather US-centric, with 37 of the candidates from the U.S. Results of a public poll to determine the top 5 candidates will be published on June 23. Compilations like this are always fun to pore over, but are really little more than celebrity ratings, according to Arno Widman's review of the 2005 poll.

SEO Rapper on web design

Here is a modern training video on web design from the inimitable Search Engine Optimization Rapper. Make it real.

Bad reviews

There's something petty and contemptible about people who take pleasure in reading - or writing - snarky, malicious book reviews, and something equally noble and commendable about the editorial policy of The Believer: "We will focus on writers and books we like. We will give people and books the benefit of the doubt." Nick Hornby manages to adhere to those admirable principles AND be entertaining/interesting in his Stuff I've Been Reading column, a year's worth of which are collected in the Polysyllabic Spree. So, it can be done. That said, I confess there are few things that give me more pleasure than a withering review of a book I really dislike. Indeed, for a while now I've been looking for a site that collects only bad reviews (talk about contemptible!) but the closest I've come is the Believer's now retired "Snarkwatch" page. There too the intent was noble: "This is a place to record enthusiasms, mystifications, as well as disgruntled reactions to critical activity.' If you think a book was reviewed unfairly, or if someone missed the point; if you think a reviewer did a splendid job worth praising; if you know of a worthy book receiving no review coverage" - a "sort of the suburban Neighborhood Watch program of the literary world" as one snarky critic put it. (more about all of this in Laura William's NYT article "The Hunting of the Snark" - or, to sample selected retired pages, enter http://www.believermag.com/snarkwatch/ at the Wayback Machine). The good thing about Snarkwatch, for bad people, was that it linked to the original, offending reviews. And let's be honest, no amount of praise is as fun to read as a good line like Dorothy Parker's "This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force" or Robert Porson (on Robert Southey's poems) 'They will be read when Homer and Virgil are forgotten, but -- not till then.'' (the conoisseur will know that Dale Peck has made something of a name for himself with his consistently nasty reviews, but I detect a meanness for meanness's sake in his reviews that, I'm relieved to say, gives me no pleasure (read John Leonard on Dale Peck Anyway, to get to the point of all this rambling, I was looking the other day for a review that would give eloquent expression to the inarticulate grunts of fury that reading D.B. Pierre's Vernon God Little inspired in me. I didn't find it, but I did find reviews.summize.com which aggregates reviews, and let's you pick out only the ones that agree with you. Not exactly a perspective-broadening exercise, but sometimes - after being infuriated by a book or film that everyone else has been raving about- a little meanness does wonders.

What is everybody doing?

Following up on some recent cautionary posts about our activities these days, here's a source of information about collective doings that goes beyond mere opinionating; the Department of Labor's American Time Use website is chock full of of hard to argue with statistics on how Americans spend their time. The pie chart above shows what Americans do with their leisure time on an average day; 19 minutes relaxing and thinking, and 2.6 hours watching TV. I believe the activities represented in the chart are considered to be mutually exclusive.

Precydent

Precydent is a new service that searches free U.S. legal documents. Still in beta, this version contains only U.S.Supreme Court and U.S Court of Appeals cases, but the ambitions it has set for itself are impressive (see nuggets from blurb, below). The focus is U.S. law, but curiously, 6 of the 8 members of the Precydent team are in Italy...in Como and Catania.

(from the "about" info:) We have heard law students ask, as perhaps you have, about online legal research: "Why can't I just do my search with a few search words, like I do on Google?" PreCYdent has an answer to that question: Now you can. ...We believe judicial opinions and statutes must be in the public domain, in practice as well as in theory. To us this means that effective legal research in all of these materials should be free to the user -- not expensive, not inexpensive. Free. We believe this principle is of vital importance not only to the United States, but to all nations that practice or aspire to practice the rule of law....
...we want to go further the simple search. You can contribute and participate directly in our effort and our campaign. On our web site you can register and upload any kind of legal document, including judicial opinions that are in the public domain."

Here Comes Everybody

Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody, shares some interesting perspectives on "Gin, Television and Social Surplus" Shirkey asks the metaphysical question, where does all the time we waste on blogging and surfing come from? The metaphysical answer, in our day and age, is sitcoms. Back in the early days of the industrial revolution, the social surplus represented by television today was to be found in gin - not the cotton gin, which is the one I always associated with the industrial revolution, but the kind that comes in bottles. At the height of the Gin Craze, the spirit of which is nicely captured in Hogarth's painting, gin was ladled out from stalls and wheelbarrows in the streets of London. Shirky argues that only after "society woke up from that collective bender" that was the gin craze, did it set about developing the institutional structures that we today associate with the industrial revolution - public libraries and museums, increasingly broad education for children, elected leaders..."a lot of things we like--didn't happen until having all of those people together stopped seeming like a crisis and started seeming like an asset." It sounds like an endorsement of web2.0, but I'm not sure I get it. Undoubtedly, I now waste less time on television and more in front of my computer - perhaps that's a small step forward. To my mind web2.0 prophets too often see participation and interaction as a virtue rather than mere diversion, which is what it is most of the time. Shirky says "It's better to do something than to do nothing. Even lolcats, even cute pictures of kittens made even cuter with the addition of cute captions, hold out an invitation to participation." I think not - time is better spent reading, or just thinking, and drinking gin. Jonathan Franzen's wonderfully titled collection of essays "How to be alone" provides some balance for the web2.0 mindset. The NYT article "A Newer Lonelier Crowd Emerges in New Internet Study" cites a report that shows an emerging lonely crowd on the internet, but that was in 2000 - it would be interesting to see something that addresses web2.0. (and follows classic studies like Riesman's Lonely Crowd and Putnam's Bowling Alone) Throngs? One at a time...use the comments feature.