BIBLIOTHEKE

In the latest Cites & Insights, Joy Weese Moll put together a nice overview of a presentation on Google’s library-related endeavors given at the ACRL conference.

The latest Ars OS X review has been posted and covers a lot of details of 10.4.

Boing Boing links to a short article discussing how DRMed audiobooks shut out affordable housing tenants for whom GNU/Linux machines have been set up to use.

Another story of copyright running amok. BB links to an article discussing a new Ghanian copyright bill that aims to collect royalties on commercial uses of folklore. Creepy.

Apparently we got one of these phone calls yesterday.
Bogus publishing companies and bill-collecting operations have college librarians across the country reading up on a new subject: financial scams.

Last July, the Federal Trade Commission filed a lawsuit against Pinacle Publishing and MDSC Publishing—two lucrative scamming operations—for using illegal telemarketing maneuvers against a number of institutions, including […]

First, the links:

Knowing When to Log Off by Jeffrey Young
Chronicle of Hgher Ed 4.22.5

Donald Knuth versus email

Again, there’s all this jibber-jabber about kids today and how much info is getting pumped into their heads. Maybe this is true, but internet surfing is not all that different than channel surfing and, as I’m sure a […]

All too often I read someone hyping blogs and, particularly in the online librarian world, saying that it’s a choice between blogging and digital death. One of the great things about the past 10 years is that the world has shrunk dramatically and information is now so completely accessible. Particularly in the case […]

House OKs Family Copyright Bill by Katie Dean
Wired 4.19.5

More details on the criminal penalties from news.com.com.com:
File-swappers who distribute a single copy of a prerelease movie on the Internet can be imprisoned for up to three years, under a bill that’s slated to become the most dramatic expansion of online piracy penalties in years.

Prison terms […]

Battelle on Google Keyhole Integration Update
Memorymaps
myGmaps enables you to create, save and host custom data files and display them with Google Maps.
Google Maps Hacking and Bookmarklets
Google Maps Standalone Mode
housingmaps.com powered by craigslist and google maps

Over at IBM’s developerWorks Peter Seebach writes about Naturally occurring standards. (4.12.5)

Sanger has written a detailed history of Wikipedia in an effort to clarify how it became what it is today, and it’s a must-read for a number of reasons:

The Early History of Nupedia and Wikipedia part I
The Early History of Nupedia and Wikipedia part II

One very interesting higher-level point:
Wikipedia became what it is today because, […]

A quick pointer to two interesteing articles on the subject:

Piercing the peer–to–peer myths: An examination of the Canadian experience by Michael Geist
First Monday 10:4

Nielsen Rating System At Odds With RIAA’s Claim Of “Lost Sales” by Moses Avalon
MusicDish 4.24.4

And while I’m at it, here’s one of the most well-known articles on the RIAA:

RIAA’s Statistics Don’t Add […]

Open-Access Journals Flourish by Randy Dotinga
Wired 4.11.5

Directory of Open Access Journals

Yet another article on the disconnect between libraries and today’s youth (bugmenot probably required). Being in my late 20’s myself, it’s really difficult for me to figure out why librarians have such a problem understanding the information needs of young folks. This is a demographic that has the most mallible tastes. This […]

Steven Cohen posts critically about authors tagging their own work.
I’ve noticed that quite a few bloggers have been tagging their own blog posts on del.icio.us. My belly barometer goes off when I see this. It just doesn’t seem right to me. I find it counter-intuitive to the collective knowledge base. It also seems a bit […]

The BBC has launched a pilot project to work out the details of releasing the BBC archives DRM-free. It’s pretty nice to see the tagline “Find it. Rip it. Mix it. Share it.”
- link to site

NPR ran a story the other day on the use of comic books in the classroom. Educators are starting to look to them for help with everything from reading to science, but the old debate continues. While comic books certainly can’t fill every role, there are some jobs they do exceeding well. […]

Google has introduced a new Q&A service that puts facts related to searches in OneBox instertions. In an example noted in the Macworld article, a search for Portugal population returns the answer mined from the CIA’s World Factbook. More details on the service and how it fits into the world of search can […]

If you use Adblock with Firefox, here is a good filter set.

And it works just like the rest of the service. Zooming in, it appears to be 1m resolution and I see a couple dots that look like people. While this ability has been there with other services, integration with Maps makes it very pleasant to use. They’ve also incorporated world-wide imagery, but […]