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Day and night, there's always something for the curious at
knowbodies.blogspot.com

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.

Wix

Wix - to borrow Crunchbase's profile- "...is a free flash design tool. It enables users to create Flash-based websites without any programing skills, and publish those sites anywhere on the web. The output can also be widgetized and published on social networks. There are many other site design tools that take the need for programming skills out of the picture such as Synthasite, Weebly, Jimdo and Google Page Creator. However, none of these allow for easy creation of Flash-based content; for that, one must look at Sprout."

Trendpedia

Trendpedia searches blogs and presents the search results in an electro cardiogram called a trendline. From the "about" page:

Search blogs — discover who’s discussing what, where, when and how. Trendpedia finds trends in social media. You choose the topics, enter the keywords, and click “Search Trend”. Trendpedia finds the articles online that talk about your topics. Trendpedia organizes the articles in a trendline that shows the popularity of the topic over time — you can track a topic’s trendline from three months ago up to today. Trendpedia collects posts about your topic per day. Click on the trendlines to find the articles about your topic posted on the date of choice. Watch the articles appear in the tabs below, organised according to topic and date.

The 100 top Web apps for 2008

The webware.com site (Cool web2.0 tools apps for everyone) announces the 100 best Web 2.0 applications for 2008, chosen by "Webware readers and Internet users across the globe. Over 1.9 million votes were cast to select these Webware 100 winners"

2008 State of America's Libraries

U.S. libraries play a key role in learning and development, and public libraries are engines of economic growth, according to ALA's 2008 State of American Libraries report. While school libraries are acknowledged to be particularly important and effective, funding for them continues to drop. Other findings:

• Ebooks continued to emerge as a regular feature of libraries of all types.
• library supporters won an important victory in 2007 when the Environmental Protection Agency was ordered to re-open many of the libraries it had closed in the past year.
• College and research libraries continue to find innovative new ways to meet the rapidly evolving needs of the academy.
• Libraries and librarians of all stripes continue to stand up for the First Amendment rights of all Americans, responding in public discourse and in court to unconstitutional snooping and aspiring book-banners. The right to read — freely and in private — remains a core value of the profession.

Topical widgets from EB

Below are two of some twenty topic widgets available at the Encyclopedia Britannica Webshare site. Here is the blurb...
"Quickly and easily explore key people, places and topics via widgets based on the Encyclopædia Britannica, one of the world’s most trusted sources of information. Widgets (also known as gadgets) are miniature objects or applications that contain dynamic content, which can be easily embedded on your own Web site or a customizable homepage, such as iGoogle."



And note that if you're a blogger, or web publisher of some other kind, you can get free access to Britannica online...read all about it at TechCrunch.

New blogger search feature

Throngs, have you tried the new "Search this blog" feature over there on the right? Do, it's really cool (and ignore the search box at the very top of the page, which this new feature renders redundant...unfortunately I can't remove that yet, since the new feature is still in Beta) Search for something, Einstein for example, and you'll see that "Search this blog" not only finds occurrences in this blog, but also in blogs and websites that this blog links to, and in the web in general. And if you click on "more results" at the bottom of the tabbed results box, and then proceed to the bottom of the subsequent page, you'll be presented with three options for staying up to date on these results. (There is a bug here however, and I've reported it to Blogger/Google...if you search for "why Italian men grab their crotches" in the old navbar search box at the top of the page, you'll find the post about the Explainer. But if you do the same search in the new "Search this blog window", you won't find anything...I have no idea why.)

• Create an email alert for search blogurl:http://knowbodies.blogspot.com/
• Add a blog search gadget for search blogurl:http://knowbodies.blogspot.com/ to your Google homepage
• Subscribe to a blog search feed for search blogurl:http://knowbodies.blogspot.com/ in Google Reader ^New!

Inspiration Across the Nation

I was perhaps overly harsh in my assessment of the Library of Congress Experience below. LC can endure a little criticism from a knowbody, but I'd like to make amends nonetheless. While Topical (below) represents a useful application of web2.0, useful is not the first descriptor that comes to mind for LC's Inspiration Across the Nation. Not everything has to be useful however, and something that is inspirational, and celebrates humanity, is arguably better than useful! Inspiration Across the Nation invites anyone over 13 years of age to submit their creative impressions in the form of a photo, videos, songs, artwork, essays, along with a description of what inspired the work. The submissions - due by May 30 - will form a mosaic of "inspiration across the nation." Far be it from me to say bah humbug to a web2.0 project as noble as this! And best of all, LC requires submitters to list their local library branch! Why? Because "The Library of Congress Experience is also a celebration of libraries. Because our local libraries play such critical roles in providing open access to knowledge-and thus inspire and foster imagination-we ask that you recognize the creative power of your local branch by listing its name here." God bless the Library of Congress!

Topicle

Topicle is a community of customized search engines, where users can submit - and edit - Google custom search engines using Topicle's interface. The real power of Topicle is that it harnesses crowd wisdom to select appropriate urls for its custom searches. There are currently 1151 custom search engines at Topicle, including one that searches sites that have CRS reports. That custom search engine includes 5 urls, but I added some wisdom of my own - the FPC and U.S. Embassy Rome sites! Those two nominations are currently in the "Suggested URLs" column on the right, but will be moved over to the left column once a sufficient number of people have deemed them worthy - and then the Web will be even better! Like the Wikipedia, this is - in my curmudgeonly opinion - an example of web2.0 democracy at its most useful!

LOC

Kathy Dempsey's article in Information Today ("The Library of Congress Delivers a Whole New Experience), does a brave job of describing the new Library of Congress Experience website, which to me is indescribably confusing. My advice is to banish any thought of navigation and just click on links and let them take you where they may - there are plenty of nice and interesting things to see at LC (and don't be discouraged if some links just take you back to where you came from). The Inside the Experience page itemizes the various exhibits that make up the LOC experience, and they look very attractive indeed. But only one of the items - labeled "now open" - links to anything. Two others read "available in April 2008" and 4 others are "scheduled to open in April 2008" (any difference?). One of them (MyLOC, available in April 2008) is demonstrably open (I stumbled upon it via another page), but no link from this page. I spent some time keyword-searching the site to see if some of the other exhibits might also secretly be open, but gave up after a while. There are apparently two new sites, then, The Library of Congress Experience, and MyLOC. Curiously, it's the latter site that sports the "Library of Congress Experience Video", perhaps one of the most annoying video presentations ever made. Scholarly custodians of the library's treasures talk about their particular favorites with the Miami Vice (or something) soundtrack blaring LOUDLY in the background. The presentation - which would be interesting were it not for the music and the hell-bent effort by scholars to avoid sounding scholarly - commences and concludes with 7 or 8 of them extolling the virtues of LC in the every-other-word locution of Huey, Louie and Dewey. (Huey) "This is a place that houses more fantastic (Louie) and inspiring ideas (Dewey) than have ever been assembled (HueyII) in one location. There are billions of words (LouieII) and hundreds of languages," etc. etc. You get the idea. At the end they all bark "Check it out!" God help us all.

searchme

Search Me is a search engine that returns images of retrieved websites, and arranges them for browsing like pages of a book. Neat!

Britannica's Newspapers and the Net forum

Britannica has many interesting blogs, including this new (last week) forum on Newspapers and the Net.

Blog til you drop

Let this article from yesterday's NYT be a warning to us all!

What I'm doing right now?

Well it's about time, I thought you'd never ask! Actually, right now I'm writing a post on my blog about another instructional video from Commoncraft, this one explaining Twitter. As usual, they do an excellent job of demonstrating what the thing is. And also, inadvertently I fear, what an absolutely preposterous thing it is. The presenter laments that "Real life happens between blogposts and emails" - but that was before, now Twitter can help remedy that regrettable situation. Check out the video. Now I'm going to change the band-aid on my heel, and then take the dog for a walk. But stay tuned, I'll be back soon! (Unfortunately, soon after that I have to vacuum..)

p.s. - I'm an old fuddy-duddy, and Twitter may well deserve a second opinion

Another list for booklovers

Here's yet another list for booklovers...lots of interesting stuff!

Simple English Wikipedia

I had no idea there was such a thing as Simple English Wikipedia until I read about it in Research Buzz, nor did I know about Charles Ogden's principles of basic English , published in 1930. Ogden found that "if one were to take the 25,000 word Oxford Pocket English Dictionary and take away the redundancies of our rich language and eliminate the words that can be made by putting together simpler words, we find that 90% of the concepts in that dictionary can be achieved with 850 words." Those words are known as the BE850.

Googles "Comments by people in the news"

User comments are eagerly solicited all over the web, and are an expression of the "participatory architecture" that defines web2.0. It would be hard to deny that the wealth of informative and insightful commentary one finds on the web is valuable; and equally hard to deny that the vast quantities of astonishingly moronic, hateful and misinformed commentary dumb the web down to a lowest common denominator. Comments and thumbs up/thumbs down ratings attached to controversial stories on news sites often strike me as a particularly mindless use of comments, and it's depressing to think that this kind of feedback will impact what editors decide is newsworthy. About a year ago, Google News implemented comments, but with a twist; only those mentioned in the news story, or affiliated with organizations in the story, are entitled to comment. This strikes me as a new and constructive use of comments, and if it catches on could raise the quality of news on the net and be a useful corrective to irresponsible journalism. Here's an example. You can see all the Google News comments by clicking on the "Comments by people in the news" link at the bottom of the "Edit this personalized page" section in the upper right part of the screen. You can also search for comments on particular topics using the "source:google_news searchword" syntax.

U. Michigan Election site

The University of Michigan Document Center's Election 2008 website favors a 199os web aesthetic, replete with stars and stripes wallpaper, but it sure does have - and organize - a lot of useful information. And, a concise table of contents (below) that will lead you to just about anything you need to know about the election.

BACKGROUND INFORMATION
Comprehensive Web Sites | Election Process

PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATES
Comprehensive | Candidate Matching | Candidate Web Sites and Comparison
Debates | Endorsements | Michigan Presidential Primary | Primaries | Primary Results

CONGRESSIONAL CANDIDATES
Congressional Candidates | Congressional Districts

STATE CANDIDATES
Michigan Candidates/Proposals | Michigan Presidential Primary | State Candidates/Proposals

CAMPAIGN
Advertising | Campaign Finances | Campaign Schedules | Candidate Resources | Conventions | Debates
Fact Checkers | Gaming | Humor | Internet Use | Legal Issues | Lobby Groups
Lobby Group Ratings | Media Coverage | Platforms | Political Parties | Public Opinion Polls

POLICY ISSUES

Comprehensive | Candidate/Voter Issue Matching | Abortion | Carbon Tax | Economics | Education
Energy | Federal Budget and Debt | Gay Marriage | Global Warming | Health Insurance Coverage
Immigration | Iran | Iraq | Medicare Prescription Drugs | Mortgage Crisis | Presidential Primary Competition
State Children's Health Insurance Program | Social Security | Stem Cell Research | Terrorism

ELECTIONS AND VOTING
General Election Results - 2008 | Presidential Primaries | Pres Primary Results | State Primaries
Election Laws | Electoral College | Voter Registration & Participation

HISTORICAL ELECTIONS
Historical Campaigns | Historical Election Results

AFTER THE ELECTION
Plum Book | Prune Book

ACADEMIC RESEARCH
Books | Periodicals | News Sources

More on running web applications from the desktop

This post from Makeuseof.com elaborates on running web applications from the desktop. In addition to Prism, which I posted about below, it discusses Adobe Air, Bubbles, and Google Gears.

Read the Words

What an amazing service this is, and hours and hours of fun! Just type or paste in a text, and readthewords.com reads them back to you. You can choose from a selection of readers - male or female, English (UK or US accents), Spanish or French. There's even Nina, a U.S. female with an Indian accent! You can submit the name/url of a website, pdf or word document for reading, and you can embed the readings on your blog or website. This makes it very easy to provide audio of texts on your website for visitors with reading disabilities. The readings are perfectly intelligible, albeit with an unmistakable non-human lilt that is merely charming. For the endorsement of knowbodies in the sample below, I chose the insufferable British snob Charles.
(if the audio plays back at very high "chipmunk" frequency, you need to download the newest vision of Flash Player)

Powered By ReadTheWords.com

80 sites for booklovers

Visit Zigmas Bigelis list of booksites...here's the referring post from iLibrarian

80 Online Resources for Book Lovers...

Zigmas Bigelis creates a mega-list of 80 tools and applications sure to be of interest to librarians and other book lovers. I knew quite a few of these, but was pleased to find some that were new to me such as Paperback Swap and Free Tech Books. The list is categorized into the following sections:

• Social Networking for Book Lovers
• E-books
• Online Bookstores
• Find the Best Prices for Books
• Audiobooks
• Study Guides and Summaries
• Library Resources
• Bibliography and Research
• Book Exchanges/Swapping
• Online Documents
• What to Read
• Miscellaneous

Advertisement - Pocket Britannica/Oxford Dictionary

When I was issued a shiny new PDA a few years ago, I was saddened to realize I didn't have any to-do items to enter into the gadget - and no completed tasks either. My life is evidently too unimportant and lacking in note-down worthy contacts, appointments, and events to populate even the most basic Palm Pilot; the occasional post-it note will do. A second disappointment was that a good electronic encyclopedia/dictionary for a PDA was much harder to find than I had anticipated. There were plenty of basic student dictionaries and bilingual dictionaries, but none that contained the more obscure words that one really needs a dictionary for. And for me, it's essential to look up an unfamiliar word immediately when I come across it, reading on the train, for example, otherwise I forget about it. So, after a few failed attempts to find some use for it, I put the PDA in a drawer where it has languished ever since. Two years ago I was at Marks and Spencer in London and discovered - with a great cry of "Eureka" - the Seiko ER8000 electronic Concise Britannica and Oxford Concise Dictionary. Just £99, and I've carried it with me ever since, and have had the definitions and facts I need at hand. Rarely do I look up a word without finding it - though I admit, today I looked in vain for "rudas" (The Unspeakable Skipton), but I did find "peridot" (same book). The ER8000 runs (for years) on two AAA batteris, and is decidedly low-tech. With portable gadgets nowadays boasting gigs of memory and internet connectivity - the ER8000 is fast becoming an obsolete artifact, like an electronic typewriter. But for someone as easily distracted as me, having the internet with me at all times would be completely debilitating. In addition to the dictionary and encyclopedia, the ER8000 has synonyms, phrases, and 9000 quotations. And even some edifying games - last summer in Florence, I contentedly sat on a bench and played jumble while my wife and daughter went shopping. Buy your ER8000 today, it will soon be a thing of the past!