Giuseppe Arcimboldo - faces from objects

Giuseppe Arcimboldo was a 16th century painter who used everyday objects to portray the human face. There are many more at the link....fascinating and quite cool.

Thanks to TYWKIWDBI for the post.

eBooks from the Library of Congress

The Internet Archive is providing free access to over 60,000 full text electronic books which were scanned from the holdings of the libraries of the Library of Congress. They cover all subject areas from the humanities, social sciences and physical sciences and include many historical out of print items. According to Celia, strengths include historic American government publications, books on the economic, social and political and legal history of the United States and the American civil war. It is possible to search the website or browse. Copyright and technical information is displayed. It is possible to set up an RSS feed of new items added to the online collection.

Found over at Celia's blog.

Amazon opens Kindle store to Europe

Amazon.com announced this morning that it is expanding its self-service Kindle Digital Text Platform worldwide. This will give even more authors and publishers the chance to sell books in English, German and French to customers around the world through the Kindle Store.

Until today the service was only available to authors and publishers based in the United States. Amazon says additional language options will be added in the coming months.

New imprint from Farrar, Straus, and Giroux

Publishers Weekly just announced a new imprint for the venerable publishing house of Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. After serving extremely capably at FSG for the past three decades, most recently as the publisher and editorial director at FSG Books for Young Readers, Margaret Ferguson will be heading the new line.

Ferguson's imprint will "publish approximately 15 titles per year, across all age ranges and formats." Great news for an industry under seige and in need of a boost.

During her time at FSG, Ferguson has worked with such authors as Brock Cole, Alexandra Day, Uri Shulevitz, David Small, Sarah Stewart, and Judith Viorst. The division has won the Newbery Medal and two National Book Awards under her direction, in addition to numerous other awards and honors.

Amazing new Intel Reader

Intel has released a new text to speech reader that is absolutely amazing. It will take a photo of any print - book, newspaper, magazine...whatever, convert the image to text, and then read it to you. It also saves each piece of this process, the photo, the text file, and the audio all of which you can access through your computer.

The device is quite portable as it folds into a small satchel. It sells for about $2000, complete. I can easily see libraries acquiring these for in-house use and even possibly check-out. Below is a video demonstration:

LocalBooks iPhone Application

Library Thing has released their first iPhone application, a free application called "Local Books."

Local Books resembles popular dining apps like LocalEats or UrbanSpoon—but for book lovers. It shows you local bookstores, libraries and bookish events wherever you are or plan to be. Local Books is powered by LibraryThing Local, the LibraryThing member-created database of 51,000 bookstores and libraries around the world. Events too are drawn from LibraryThing Local. Notably, since last night we've had a four-fold increase in events, as we started pulling in events from Barnes and Noble, Borders, Waterstones and Indigo/Chapters, as well as IndieBound.

Features include:

• Search for venues (bookstores and libraries) as well as events near your current location using the iPhone's built-in location features.
• Search for venues and events at any location or by name.
• Venues can be sorted by distance, name, or type.
• Venues are color coded, following the maps on LibraryThing Local (colors correspond to the colors used on maps in LibraryThing Local).
• Each venue has a detail page with a map. Tap it to jump to the iPhone Maps application.
• Venues often sport a description, clickable website and phone number links, events, and a photo.
• You can favorite locations and events, and there's a "Favorites" list where you can find them.

2010 U.S. Statistical Abstract just released

The Statistical Abstract of the United States, published since 1878, is the authoritative and comprehensive summary of statistics on the social, political, and economic organization of the United States. Robert Samuelson of the New York Times said in a recent article that he often starts a column in the Stat Abstract because it substitutes evidence for speculation. That is a great idea and here are a few gems from the most recent issue:

Food is cheaper here than almost anywhere else. In 2007, only about 6.9 percent of U.S. consumer spending went for food at home; Germans spent more (11.4 percent), as did Italians (14.5 percent) and Mexicans (24.2 percent). Low food prices may contribute to Americans' obesity. In 2006, about 34 percent of U.S. adults were judged obese, triple France's rate (10.5 percent) and four times that of Switzerland (7.7 percent).

Three-quarters of Americans (76.1 percent in 2007, to be exact) get to work by driving alone. Only 10.4 percent carpool, while 4.9 percent use public transportation and 2.8 percent walk. On average, Americans spend 25.3 minutes commuting each way.

Americans commit suicide at fairly low rates, 10.2 for every 100,000 people in 2004, less than the 11.9 average for all industrial countries or Japan's 20.3 and France's 15.1.

Smoking has declined, from 25.3 percent of adults in 1990 to 19.7 percent in 2007. Five-year survival rates for cancer are up: from 62.4 percent in 1990-92 to 69.1 percent in 1999-2005 for whites; and from 48.2 percent to 59.4 percent for blacks.

Among young adults (18 to 29), Internet usage is almost universal: 92 percent in 2009, up from 72 percent in 2000.

Garbage per person has stabilized; it was 4.5 pounds per day in 1990 and 4.6 pounds in 2007.

In 2007, nearly two-fifths of all U.S. births were to unmarried women, double the share in 1980.

The share of children under the federal poverty line in 2007 (17.6 percent) was almost the same as in 1980 (17.9 percent).

Since 1970, the student-teacher ratio in schools has declined dramatically, from 22 to 1 to 15 to 1 in 2007, with little effect on test results.

By 2050, the U.S. population is projected at almost 440 million, up from 304 million in 2008.

Almost one-quarter of elementary and high school students are immigrants or have immigrant parents.

In 2007, the average American spent 1,613 hours watching TV, the equivalent of 67 days.

What if Shakespeare Had Written "The Big Lebowski"?

An absolutely brilliant retelling of The Dude's odyssey done as if Shakespeare had written it!

Room Atlas

So much more than bringing up a Google map and searching for hotels! Try RoomAtlas. Type in the destination city and get a map with hotel locations and color-coded pricing in USD, Euro or Pounds. You can filter for amenities and click on a link to see brief TripAdvisor reviews, or book a reservation. What a wonderful service!

Great 2010 Book Preview

The Millions has published a preview, by month, of anticipated fiction for 2010. They say, "There’s something for every lover of fiction coming in 2010, but, oddly enough, the dominant theme may be posthumous publication. Roberto Bolaño’s relentless march into the canon has inured us to the idea of the bestseller from beyond the grave (and of course, for as long as there have been literary executors, this has been nothing new), but beyond the four(!) new books by Bolaño we also have have potentially important works by the likes of Ralph Ellison and Henry Roth, intriguing new books from Robert Walser and Ernst Weiss, a guaranteed bestseller from Stieg Larsson, and, looming in 2011, the final, unfinished novel of David Foster Wallace. Perhaps, amid all this, it is a relief to hear that we have many exciting books on their way from those still with us, including Elizabeth Kostova, Joshua Ferris, David Mitchell, Jennifer Egan, Don DeLillo, Ian McEwan, Yann Martel, and many others.

A lengthy and intriguing list with comments on most every title.

Seasonal Food Chart

Click to Enlarge

Since this blog is about information delivery, I thought this graphical representation of the seasonal availability of foods worth posting. Found over at The Guardian

Ten Technology "Game Changers" for 2010

Eric Schonfeld over at TechCrunch has penned an interesting and predictive article enumerating his top ten "game changers" for 2010.

1. The Tablet: It’s the most anticipated product of the year. Why do we need yet another computer in between a laptop and an iPhone? We won’t really know until we have it. But the answer lies in the fact that increasingly the Web is all you need. As all of our apps and data and social lives move to the Web, the Tablet is the incarnation of the Web in device form, stripped down to its essentials. It will also be a superior e-reader for digital books, newspapers, and magazines, and a portable Web TV.

2. Geolocation: The combination of GPS chips in mobile phones, social networks, and increasingly innovative mobile apps means that geolocation is increasingly becoming a necessary feature for any killer app.

3. Realtime Search: After licensing realtime data streams from Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and others, Google and Bing are quickly ramping up their realtime search. But realtime search is still treated as a silo, and is not regularly surfaced in the main search results page. In 2010, I expect that to change as the search engines learn for what types of searches it makes sense to show Tweets and other realtime updates. In the meantime, a gaggle of realtime search startups such as Collecta, OneRiot, and Topsy will continue to push the ball forward on the realtime search experience. Realtime search will also become a form of navigation, especially on Twitter and Facebook. The key will be to combine realtime search with realtime filters so that people are delivered not only the most recent information but the most relevant and authoritative as well.

4. Chrome OS: In November, Google gave the world a sneak peek at its Chrome operating system, which is expected to be released later this year. The Chrome OS is Google’s most direct attack on Windows with an OS built from the ground up to run Web apps fast and furious. Already a Google is rumored to be working on a Chrome Netbook which will show the world what is possible with it a “Web OS.” It sounds like it would be perfect for Tablet computers also (see above). Chrome is a risky bet for Google, but it is also potentially disruptive.

5. HTML5: The Web is built on HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) and the next version which has been taking form for a while is HTML5. Already browsers such as Firefox and Google’s Chrome (the browser, not the OS) are HTML5-friendly. Once HTML5 becomes more widespread across the Web, it will reduce the need for Flash or Silverlight plug-ins to view videos, animations, or other rich applications. They will all just be Web-native. HTML5 also supports offline data storage, drag-and-drop, and other features which can make Web apps act more like desktop apps. A lot of Websites will be putting HTML5 under the hood in 2010.

6. Mobile Video: With video cameras integrated into the latest iPhone 3GS and other Web phones, live video streaming apps are becoming more commonplace—both streaming from phones and to them. As mobile data networks beef up their 3G bandwidth and even start to tiptoe into true broadband with 4G (which Verizon is heading towards with its next-gen LTE network), mobile video usage will take off.

7. Augmented Reality: One of the coolest ways to use the camera lens on a mobile phone is with the increasing array of augmented reality apps. They add a layer of data to reality by placing everything from photos to Tweets to business listings directly on top of the live live image captured by the camera. Tonchidot’s Sekai Camera, Layar, GraffitiGeo and even Yelp are examples of augmented reality apps.

8. Mobile Transactions: As mobile phones become full-fledged computers, they can be used for mobile commerce also. One area poised to take off in 2010 are mobile payments and transactions. Twitter founder Jack Dorsey’s latest startup Square turns the iPhone into a credit card reader. Verifone has its competing product, as does Mophie. The idea is that any mobile phone can become a point of sale, and those mobile transactions can tie into back-end accounting, CRM, and other enterprise systems.

9. Android: Last year saw the launch of nearly two dozen Android-powered phones, including the Verizon Droid. In a few days, Google’s Nexus One will launch as the first Android phone which can be unlocked from any given carrier (it is launching with T-Mobile). Android is Google’s answer to the iPhone, and as it reaches critical mass across multiple carriers and handsets it is becoming increasingly attractive to developers. There are already more than 10,000 apps on Android, next year there will be even more. And other devices running on the mobile OS are launching as well.

10. Social CRM: We’ve seen the rise of Twitter and Facebook as social communication tools. This year, those modes of realtime communication will find their way deeper into the enterprise. Salesforce.com is set to launch Chatter, it’s realtime stream of enterprise data which interfaces with Twitter and Facebook and turn them into business tools. Startups like Yammer and Bantam Live are also making business more social.

Physical Tagging for Books!

Haarlem Oost is a branch library in the Netherlands that wanted to encourage visitors to add tags to the books they read. To do this, the library didn’t create a complicated computer system or send people online. Instead, they installed more book drops and return shelves, labeled with different descriptors like “boring,” “great for kids,” “funny,” etc. (not quite like above, but a photo of the real system follows)

Physical tagging! Such a super idea, But the library has now abandoned the system because people were using the system so seriously that it took them a lot of time per book to decide where to place it. That caused some logistic problems in the (small) building, especially as they have some peak times.

Nonetheless, what a great idea and a fun concept!



Found over at Nina Simon's Blog

Graphics representation of a resumé

Having perused dozens, perhaps hundreds of resumes over the years I can truthfully say that most got about 20 seconds of attention, at best. Fast Company today offered an interesting take. Offer a clear representation of your education and experience in an attractive, easy to follow and grasp infographic. Short article here.

NYT Year in Ideas

NYT Magazine brings an eclectic look at the Year in Ideas. The attached image is the display ina bus shelter that changes by using face recognition software to make the point: domestic violence happens when no one is watching. It's a unexpected but clever use of that technology. Other ideas, like the fact that cows with names give more milk, development of weapons of moquito destruction and more are accessed by clicking on the appropriate A-Z letter at the top of the page

iPhone allows local access to Gale Databases

New from Gale, a new iPhone app, AccessMyLibrary, uses your global position to point you to libraries within a 10-mile radius of your location. You can then select a library and obtain access to all its Gale electronic resources. Among the offerings are:

• Health care - discover dependable facts


• Environment - track the latest findings


• Biographies - from history and today’s headlines


• Career choices – step-by-step


• Car repair - locate a diagram or how-to directions


• Literature – track a bestseller or write a term paper


• Science - Study current, credible research


• Hundreds of sources for Home, School or Business


• Discover dependable health care facts


• And more

H.P. Lovecraft's complete catalog online

The complete works of H.P. Lovecraft are available online at The H. P. Lovecraft Archive.

The fragility of knowledge over time

So much of the knowledge and history generated and recorded these days is "virtual" and may prove to be quite fragile over time. We are accumulating so much information so fast that it is simply impossible to catalog it all, much less assign it merit or value.

Centuries from now when our descendants are perusing our history, will they get it right? Do we really have a clear idea of what life was like 1000 years in our past, or have we been a bit too careless with "filling in the blanks?"

Offered here is a somewhat silly, but nonetheless though-provoking little film:

Google announces camera-based Web search

Google on Monday unveiled "Goggles" software that lets people search online using pictures taken with cameras in mobile phones based on its Android operating system.

"When you take a mobile phone camera and connect it to the Internet, it becomes an eye," Google mobile search vice president of engineering Vic Gundotra said while demonstrating Goggles in Mountain View, California.

"Google Goggles lets you take a picture of an item and use the picture as the query."

An experimental version of Goggles will be available for people at Google Labs website. Goggles already recognizes books, wine labels, CD covers, landmarks and more, according to Gundotra.
Story continues below...

He demonstrated by taking a picture of a wine bottle label with a smart phone and almost instantly getting reviews, pictures and other Internet data about the vintage in a Google search results Web page.

"It is our goal to visually identify any image," Gundotra said.

"It is in Google Labs because of the nascent nature of computer vision. In the future, you will be able to point (a camera phone) and we will be able to treat it as a mouse pointer for the real world."

Google on Monday also added Japanese to a voice-based search service first rolled out about a year ago.

People can now speak Google search subjects into smart phones in English, Mandarin, or Japanese.

"In addition to voice search, Google has huge investments in translation," Gundotra said. "Our goal at Google is nothing less than being able to search in all major languages of the world."

The California Internet colossus is aiming to deliver a translation service to mobile telephones some time in 2010, according to Gundotra.

People will be able to speak into a mobile telephone to have sentences translated into other languages and delivered back quickly in text and audio forms, Gundotra said while demonstrating an early version of the service.

He also showed a "near me now" feature that uses global positioning capabilities in Android-based smart phones to customize map results to show shops, attractions, restaurants or other offerings that are in easy reach.

"In the future, there will be many different ways of searching," said Marissa Mayer, Google's vice president of search products and user experience.

"We really foresee a world where you can search and find your answer where ever it exists and whatever language it is in."

Cool Google promo:


Blatantly stolen from my friend Bill and The Raw Story

outlook problem solved

I had invited people to a meeting in Outlook and wanted a list of those who had responded to the Outlook invitation and how they had responded. After poking at Outlook for a while, I realized it was not willing to tell me this information in a very useful way. A search sent me to Jazzerup. I followed the step-by-step instructions and was rewarded with a sortable Excel output. Slick!

Mplayit iPhone app directory on Facebook

Mplayit’s Facebook-based directory of iPhone and mobile apps includes all 100,000 plus iPhone apps and a few for other platforms, as well. Applications have a dedicated page displaying videos of the app, a detailed description and reviews. You can also click to buy the app from Apple’s App Store.

There is also a "Pandora-like" feature that recommends apps based on the ones you have previously viewed. The site also displays in real-time what is happening in the app stores, such as Apple’s, to show users what apps are receiving the most downloads, reviews, etc.

Cool stuff.

Google Books drops foreign texts

Bowing to powerful legal pressure, Google Books is dropping foreign texts from the archive. In concession to the numerous foreign governments and bodies that have been asking for changes to the deal Google pushed through the courts, Google Books will contain only texts published within the U.K., Australia, Canada, and those that fall under U.S. copyright. Named plaintiffs in the settlement now include authors in the U.K., Australia, and Canada, who'll gain representation by the Book Rights Registry Board in order to acquire their share of cash from Google. The Rights Registry is also required to actually seek out authors "who have not yet come forward" from now on--it's amazing that this wasn't the case beforehand. The modified deal even adds a legal representative for unclaimed or "orphan" books; the rep is charged with protecting author's rights. Also in the deal is more scope for authors who want their books to be available for free (rather than sold via Google's partner companies) and who wish to tag them with creative commons or other licenses.

Google's original plan effectively gave them the authority to do what ever they wished with millions of published texts. That it was a U.S.-based settlement that covered books published everywhere raised objections from authors and rights bodies outside the U.S. This "settlement" should appease those interests, but will also result in many useful and valuable foreign texts being excluded from Google Books.

Happy 40th Anniversary Sesame Street!

Today is the 40th Anniversary Sesame Street! Enjoy this video in which the Cookie Monster visits a library. Of course libraries offer much more than books nowadays. Perhaps the Cookie Monster could even get milk and cookies with his books.

The Florida Digital Newspaper Library

The Florida Digital Newspaper Library provides access to the news and history of Florida. All of the over 800,000 pages of historic through current Florida newspapers in the Florida Digital Newspaper Library are openly and freely available with zoomable page images and full text. The Florida Digital Newspaper Library builds on the work done in microfilm within the Florida Newspaper Project.

The Florida Digital Newspaper Library includes:

• Current Florida newspapers, digitized from 2005 - present


• Historic Florida newspapers


• Historic News Accounts of Florida
  
  With the exception of the East-Florida Gazette in the 1780s and a small press at Fernandina in 1817, Florida had no colonial newspapers. Even in the immediate aftermath of cession in 1821, only a few newspapers served Florida. Historic News Accounts of Florida consists of stories and reports about Florida gathered together by the Goza and Mickler families and donated to the P.K. Yonge Library of Florida History. All are from non-Florida newpapers and cover events in Florida from 1762 - 1885. The articles pre-dating the Territorial Period help to "fill in" the journalistic record at a time when there was no Florida press, while the articles from after 1821 both complement and supplement news published in Florida.

The Complete Guide to Google Wave: Free downloadable eBook

Google Wave is a new web-based collaboration tool that's notoriously difficult to understand. This guide will help. Learn how to use Google Wave to get things done with your group. Because Wave is such a new product that's evolving quickly, this guidebook is a work in progress that will update in concert with Wave as it grows and changes. Read it here.

You might also like 7 things you should know about Google Wave from EDUCAUSE.

Woopra: web analytics you can use

Woopra is a comprehensive, information rich, easy to use, real-time Web tracking and analysis application. It delivers a rich library of visitor statistics through an innovative desktop application. Woopra’s revolutionary server architecture, combined with its intuitively designed client software, enables seamless tracking of visitors. Webmasters can track over 40 different statistical events and analytics on multiple websites and blogs.

Woopra breaks the Web statistics mold by allowing lightning quick search functionality along any data point in the system. What information do you need to help you manage and develop your site? Specific user names, IP addresses, geographic locations, user browsing data, visitor history, visitor paths, arrival and departure points – what do you want to know?

Here is an introductory video:

In October iPhone eBook apps outpaced even games

From Flurry

In October, one out of every five new apps launching in the iPhone has been a book. Publishers of all kinds, from small ones like Your Mobile Apps to mega-publishers like Softbank, are porting existing IP into the App Store at record rates. Flurry first evaluated the iPhone as an eBook reader in its July Pulse ("You Trying to Swindle my Kindle?") where it looked at consumer demand for eBooks. In that report, we observed that during the month of August 1% of the entire U.S. population was already reading a book on the iPhone. Now, with books shipping in droves, we are seeing the supply-side explode.

The sharp rise in eBook activity on the iPhone indicates that Apple is positioned take market share from the Amazon Kindle as it did from the Nintendo DS. Despite the smaller form factor of the display, we predict that the iPhone will be a significant player in the book category of the Media & Entertainment space. Further, with Apple working on a larger tablet form factor, running on the iPhone OS, we believe Jeff Bezos and team will face significant competition.

Feature Creep

Thanks to Tom Fishburne, The Management Cartoonist

gmail addressing tips

I found two gmail tips on Everyday Loopholes. I think they're pretty clever. I found another on Google's website.

One is that you can append things to your gmail address. An email addressed to validgmailaddress+anythingyouwant@gmail.com will reach the valid google email address. Here's the link to "Gmail Address + Anything You Want" at Everyday Loopholes.

The other is called "Google Twofer" on Everyday Loopholes. It points out that signing up for gmail actually means an email address that ends in gmail.com and another that ends in googlemail.com. Both go to the same mailbox.

Lastly, dots are meaningless in Google address names so all of these emails go to the same address:
homerjsimpson@gmail.com = hom.er.j.sim.ps.on@gmail.com
homerjsimpson@gmail.com = HOMERJSIMPSON@gmail.com
homerjsimpson@gmail.com = Homer.J.Simpson@gmail.com
Google explains it here.

You can see the results of test messages by clicking on the "show details" link in the Google mail message. As Everyday Loopholes suggests, it might be useful to use some of these alternatives when signing up for email at websites and then filtering if necessary.

Deepdyve: Like iTunes for Science Papers

DeepDyve was started by two scientists who had previously worked on the Human Genome Project and in a variety of biotech companies. Their work required extensive research and access to countless data sources, yet the tools available for finding Web-based information were frustratingly limited and time-consuming. Furthermore, much of the research materials they sought were extremely expensive and beyond their companies’ budgets.

In 2005, DeepDyve was founded to make scientific, technical and medical research more easily discoverable and accessible. DeepDyve’s online research rental service delivers on this mission. Anyone interested in published research can now gain access to over 30 million articles from thousands of authoritative journals. The site, launched today, offers full-text search of scientific articles along with 99 cent downloads and a subscription service that allows fans of Clinical Chemistry to read as many stories as they’d like.

Found at TechCrunch

Does the brain like eBooks?

The New York Times has a very interesting collection of opinion pieces on the subject from a wide array of professional "readers".

From the skeptic:

"Right now, networked digital media do a poor job of balancing focal and peripheral attention. We swing between two kinds of bad reading. We suffer tunnel vision, as when reading a single page, paragraph, or even “keyword in context” without an organized sense of the whole. Or we suffer marginal distraction, as when feeds or blogrolls in the margin of a blog let the whole blogosphere in." - Alan Liu chairman and professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara

To the advocate:

"The tools (as usual) are neutral. It’s up to us to insist that onscreen reading enhance, not replace, traditional book reading. It’s up to us to remember that the medium is not the message; that the meaning and music of the words is what matters, not the glitzy vehicle they arrive in." - David Gelernter, professor of computer science at Yale University

It is an excellent read and offers 5 different points of view, each eloquently presented. Worth a read.

United States Gross National Happiness - Facebook App

Facebook has developed a new app aimed at determining "gross national happiness"--the moment-by-moment measure of glee, misery, and indifference for its 300 million daily users.

Data is collected from "public and semi-public forums" on Facebook, which is all anonymized before its analyzed. To determine if a particular status message is happy or sad (or neither), the app searches for popular phrases and words that the engineers have associated with each sentiment.

You can adjust the graph by sliding the bar at the bottom of the screen. You can also adjust the zoom by dragging the handlebars on the slider, and can actually watch happiness jump hour-to-hour, though it's a bit difficult to navigate when you're zoomed in that far. It's fun to play around with, but you aren't going to find many surprises: happiness generally hits a low on Mondays, then gradually grows up through the weekend when it drops again as the work-week begins. Peaks are all found around holidays, with Thanksgiving drawing the most happiness. Also worth nothing: this year there was an abrupt drop in happiness in late June, which is likely associated with the tragic death of Michael Jackson.

Found over at Fast Company

Academic Digital Libraries of the Future: An Environment Scan

Derek Law from the Centre for Digital Library Research at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow Scotland has written Academic Digital Libraries of the Future: An Environment Scan for the New Review of Academic Librarianship. It is available for free download for a limited time.

“Libraries are attempting to face a future in which almost every fixed point has disappeared. Users are changing; content is changing; research is taking new forms. Indeed the very need for libraries is being questioned in some quarters. This paper explores the nature of the changes and challenges facing higher education libraries and suggests key areas of strength and core activities which should be exploited to secure their future.”

Found at The Online Education Database

Gov't Printing Office drops journal prices to free and adds XML to the Federal Register

The Government Printing Office and the Office of the Federal Register just announced they're making all the "Official Journals of Government" available for free in bulk. Previous price was $17,000/year per product.

The White House, National Archives and Government Printing Office have also relaunched the online version of the Federal Register today in XML format at Data.gov.

Social.com: A list of social sites

The explosion of the number of "social" sites has prompted the creation of Social.com, an aggregation of more than a hundred sites sorted by type and alphabetically. Handy.

Thanks Celia's

iPhone App Store blows past 2 billion downloads

With more than 125,000 developers having made 85,000 applications available to over 50 million-plus iPhone/iPod Touch users worldwide and the Chinese market just opening, Apple is effectively rewriting how software developers and vendors do business. The numbers announced by Apple Monday are staggering to even normally reserved analysts, who noted that after a somewhat slower summer buying rate, App Store downloads globally have exceeded more than 10 million a day in much of September. Again, 10 million each day! Launched on my birthday on July 11, 2008, it took nine months to hit 1 billion, and only six more months to hit 2 billion downloads.
The App Store’s success is due in part to the large number of devices downloading them, but the ease with which the apps can be downloaded and the usually affordable price point - often free or costing just a few bucks - encourages purchases.

Sony’s eReader division opens to self-publishers

Sony has announced a partnership with Smashwords and Author Solutions Tuesday to allow any author to upload a book to their eBook Store, giving self-published writers unprecedented access to the ubiquitous point-of-sale marketplace that is the e-reader.

To publish your own book through Smashwords, just upload the manuscript in a specified Microsoft Word format, set a price, and select affiliates: Stanza on iPhone, Aldiko on Androi, Barnes & Nobles’ website, and now the Sony eBook Store. After that, there are no editors, publishers, copyeditors or other gatekeepers to worry about — or, for that matter, to improve your work — just readers.

"It was a dark and stormy night........."

95 Theses - The Market as a Conversation

So valuable that I have lifted it from The Cluetrain Manifesto. You can read it online here.

"A powerful global conversation has begun. Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed. As a direct result, markets are getting smarter—and getting smarter faster than most companies."

"Networked markets are beginning to self-organize faster than the companies that have traditionally served them. Thanks to the web, markets are becoming better informed, smarter, and more demanding of qualities missing from most business organizations."

95 Theses
1. Markets are conversations.

2. Markets consist of human beings, not demographic sectors.

3. Conversations among human beings sound human. They are conducted in a human voice.

4. Whether delivering information, opinions, perspectives, dissenting arguments or humorous asides, the human voice is typically open, natural, uncontrived.

5. People recognize each other as such from the sound of this voice.

6. The Internet is enabling conversations among human beings that were simply not possible in the era of mass media.

7. Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy.

8. In both internetworked markets and among intranetworked employees, people are speaking to each other in a powerful new way.

9. These networked conversations are enabling powerful new forms of social organization and knowledge exchange to emerge.

10. As a result, markets are getting smarter, more informed, more organized. Participation in a networked market changes people fundamentally.

11. People in networked markets have figured out that they get far better information and support from one another than from vendors. So much for corporate rhetoric about adding value to commoditized products.

12. There are no secrets. The networked market knows more than companies do about their own products. And whether the news is good or bad, they tell everyone.

13. What's happening to markets is also happening among employees. A metaphysical construct called "The Company" is the only thing standing between the two.

14. Corporations do not speak in the same voice as these new networked conversations. To their intended online audiences, companies sound hollow, flat, literally inhuman.

15. In just a few more years, the current homogenized "voice" of business—the sound of mission statements and brochures—will seem as contrived and artificial as the language of the 18th century French court.

16. Already, companies that speak in the language of the pitch, the dog-and-pony show, are no longer speaking to anyone.

17. Companies that assume online markets are the same markets that used to watch their ads on television are kidding themselves.

18. Companies that don't realize their markets are now networked person-to-person, getting smarter as a result and deeply joined in conversation are missing their best opportunity.

19. Companies can now communicate with their markets directly. If they blow it, it could be their last chance.

20. Companies need to realize their markets are often laughing. At them.

21. Companies need to lighten up and take themselves less seriously. They need to get a sense of humor.

22. Getting a sense of humor does not mean putting some jokes on the corporate web site. Rather, it requires big values, a little humility, straight talk, and a genuine point of view.

23. Companies attempting to "position" themselves need to take a position. Optimally, it should relate to something their market actually cares about.

24. Bombastic boasts—"We are positioned to become the preeminent provider of XYZ"—do not constitute a position.

25. Companies need to come down from their Ivory Towers and talk to the people with whom they hope to create relationships.

26. Public Relations does not relate to the public. Companies are deeply afraid of their markets.

27. By speaking in language that is distant, uninviting, arrogant, they build walls to keep markets at bay.

28. Most marketing programs are based on the fear that the market might see what's really going on inside the company.

29. Elvis said it best: "We can't go on together with suspicious minds."

30. Brand loyalty is the corporate version of going steady, but the breakup is inevitable—and coming fast. Because they are networked, smart markets are able to renegotiate relationships with blinding speed.

31. Networked markets can change suppliers overnight. Networked knowledge workers can change employers over lunch. Your own "downsizing initiatives" taught us to ask the question: "Loyalty? What's that?"

32. Smart markets will find suppliers who speak their own language.

33. Learning to speak with a human voice is not a parlor trick. It can't be "picked up" at some tony conference.

34. To speak with a human voice, companies must share the concerns of their communities.

35. But first, they must belong to a community.

36. Companies must ask themselves where their corporate cultures end.

37. If their cultures end before the community begins, they will have no market.

38. Human communities are based on discourse—on human speech about human concerns.

39. The community of discourse is the market.

40. Companies that do not belong to a community of discourse will die.

41. Companies make a religion of security, but this is largely a red herring. Most are protecting less against competitors than against their own market and workforce.

42. As with networked markets, people are also talking to each other directly inside the company—and not just about rules and regulations, boardroom directives, bottom lines.

43. Such conversations are taking place today on corporate intranets. But only when the conditions are right.

44. Companies typically install intranets top-down to distribute HR policies and other corporate information that workers are doing their best to ignore.

45. Intranets naturally tend to route around boredom. The best are built bottom-up by engaged individuals cooperating to construct something far more valuable: an intranetworked corporate conversation.

46. A healthy intranet organizes workers in many meanings of the word. Its effect is more radical than the agenda of any union.

47. While this scares companies witless, they also depend heavily on open intranets to generate and share critical knowledge. They need to resist the urge to "improve" or control these networked conversations.

48. When corporate intranets are not constrained by fear and legalistic rules, the type of conversation they encourage sounds remarkably like the conversation of the networked marketplace.

49. Org charts worked in an older economy where plans could be fully understood from atop steep management pyramids and detailed work orders could be handed down from on high.

50. Today, the org chart is hyperlinked, not hierarchical. Respect for hands-on knowledge wins over respect for abstract authority.

51. Command-and-control management styles both derive from and reinforce bureaucracy, power tripping and an overall culture of paranoia.

52. Paranoia kills conversation. That's its point. But lack of open conversation kills companies.

53. There are two conversations going on. One inside the company. One with the market.

54. In most cases, neither conversation is going very well. Almost invariably, the cause of failure can be traced to obsolete notions of command and control.

55. As policy, these notions are poisonous. As tools, they are broken. Command and control are met with hostility by intranetworked knowledge workers and generate distrust in internetworked markets.

56. These two conversations want to talk to each other. They are speaking the same language. They recognize each other's voices.

57. Smart companies will get out of the way and help the inevitable to happen sooner.

58. If willingness to get out of the way is taken as a measure of IQ, then very few companies have yet wised up.

59. However subliminally at the moment, millions of people now online perceive companies as little more than quaint legal fictions that are actively preventing these conversations from intersecting.

60. This is suicidal. Markets want to talk to companies.

61. Sadly, the part of the company a networked market wants to talk to is usually hidden behind a smokescreen of hucksterism, of language that rings false—and often is.

62. Markets do not want to talk to flacks and hucksters. They want to participate in the conversations going on behind the corporate firewall.

63. De-cloaking, getting personal: We are those markets. We want to talk to you.

64. We want access to your corporate information, to your plans and strategies, your best thinking, your genuine knowledge. We will not settle for the 4-color brochure, for web sites chock-a-block with eye candy but lacking any substance.

65. We're also the workers who make your companies go. We want to talk to customers directly in our own voices, not in platitudes written into a script.

66. As markets, as workers, both of us are sick to death of getting our information by remote control. Why do we need faceless annual reports and third-hand market research studies to introduce us to each other?

67. As markets, as workers, we wonder why you're not listening. You seem to be speaking a different language.

68. The inflated self-important jargon you sling around—in the press, at your conferences—what's that got to do with us?

69. Maybe you're impressing your investors. Maybe you're impressing Wall Street. You're not impressing us.

70. If you don't impress us, your investors are going to take a bath. Don't they understand this? If they did, they wouldn't let you talk that way.

71. Your tired notions of "the market" make our eyes glaze over. We don't recognize ourselves in your projections—perhaps because we know we're already elsewhere.

72. We like this new marketplace much better. In fact, we are creating it.

73. You're invited, but it's our world. Take your shoes off at the door. If you want to barter with us, get down off that camel!

74. We are immune to advertising. Just forget it.

75. If you want us to talk to you, tell us something. Make it something interesting for a change.

76. We've got some ideas for you too: some new tools we need, some better service. Stuff we'd be willing to pay for. Got a minute?

77. You're too busy "doing business" to answer our email? Oh gosh, sorry, gee, we'll come back later. Maybe.

78. You want us to pay? We want you to pay attention.

79. We want you to drop your trip, come out of your neurotic self-involvement, join the party.

80. Don't worry, you can still make money. That is, as long as it's not the only thing on your mind.

81. Have you noticed that, in itself, money is kind of one-dimensional and boring? What else can we talk about?

82. Your product broke. Why? We'd like to ask the guy who made it. Your corporate strategy makes no sense. We'd like to have a chat with your CEO. What do you mean she's not in?

83. We want you to take 50 million of us as seriously as you take one reporter from The Wall Street Journal.

84. We know some people from your company. They're pretty cool online. Do you have any more like that you're hiding? Can they come out and play?

85. When we have questions we turn to each other for answers. If you didn't have such a tight rein on "your people" maybe they'd be among the people we'd turn to.

86. When we're not busy being your "target market," many of us are your people. We'd rather be talking to friends online than watching the clock. That would get your name around better than your entire million dollar web site. But you tell us speaking to the market is Marketing's job.

87. We'd like it if you got what's going on here. That'd be real nice. But it would be a big mistake to think we're holding our breath.

88. We have better things to do than worry about whether you'll change in time to get our business. Business is only a part of our lives. It seems to be all of yours. Think about it: who needs whom?

89. We have real power and we know it. If you don't quite see the light, some other outfit will come along that's more attentive, more interesting, more fun to play with.

90. Even at its worst, our newfound conversation is more interesting than most trade shows, more entertaining than any TV sitcom, and certainly more true-to-life than the corporate web sites we've been seeing.

91. Our allegiance is to ourselves—our friends, our new allies and acquaintances, even our sparring partners. Companies that have no part in this world, also have no future.

92. Companies are spending billions of dollars on Y2K. Why can't they hear this market timebomb ticking? The stakes are even higher.

93. We're both inside companies and outside them. The boundaries that separate our conversations look like the Berlin Wall today, but they're really just an annoyance. We know they're coming down. We're going to work from both sides to take them down.

94. To traditional corporations, networked conversations may appear confused, may sound confusing. But we are organizing faster than they are. We have better tools, more new ideas, no rules to slow us down.

95. We are waking up and linking to each other. We are watching. But we are not waiting.

Copyright © 1999 Levine, Locke, Searls & Weinberger - used with permission.

Beautiful bookstore from a grand church

The above is a former Dominican church that was converted into a new retail location for bookseller Selexyz Dominicanen. The architecture firm was Merkx+Girod.

From Design Top News (more pics at the jump):

The store demanded 1,200 sq m of commercial area where only 750 were available.

The initial idea of the client to install a second floor within the church was rejected by the designers, because this would completely destroy the spatial qualities of the church. The solution was found in the creation of a monumental walk-in bookcase spanning several floors and situated a-symmetrically in the church. In doing so the left side of the church remained empty while on the other side customers are lead upstairs in the three- storey ‘Bookflat.’

The ground floor gives room to several different book displays, information desks, magazine-stands and cash registers, all made of standard sheet materials in different colours and surfaces.

Which sounds better: Vinyl or MP3?

John Meyer of Newform Research has computed the effective bitrates of all the major audio media, from wax cylinder to MP3. While a poorly-encoded MP3 sounds terrible, and a high-end system playing the vinyl or acetate for which it was designed sounds amazingly good, there is a broad spectrum of quality and accuracy between those two extremes. The chart below lays out the pure numbers, but there is a lot of subjectivity that goes into our personal assessment of what sounds good and what does not. Offered for enlightenment:


Click to Enlarge

Rep. Grijalva secures amendment to include ‘libraries’ in student aid bill

This is a bit of encouraging news amongst much that is not:
Rep. Raúl Grijalva (AZ-7) has introduced an amendment to pending legislation that would include “community college libraries” in the bill text of the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2009 (H.R. 3221).

Introduced by Rep. George Miller (CA-7), H.R. 3221 would establish two new competitive grant programs providing states and junior and community colleges the opportunity to apply for funds to launch initiatives to improve graduation and employment-related outcomes.

The original bill language did not explicitly include community college libraries as potential recipients of the grants, which the ALA believes is essential for highlighting the important role libraries play in preparing students to successfully obtain and retain employment and for encouraging community colleges pursuing the grants to invest in their libraries and the services and resources they offer.

“This is a great bill that will help those students and communities that depend on the community college library for assistance with entering and staying in the workforce,” Emily Sheketoff, executive director of the ALA Washington Office, said.

Job Voyager

Very cool job generator, showing trends over time of reported occupations in the Unites State Labor Force and how they have changed over the years. It's interesting to see the different percentages of males and females within these occupations.

Google Books on Demand

Google, through their Google Books, is partnering with Books on Demand to make available the more than two million out of copyright books they have scanned over the last seven years. In an interesting twist for the online search engine, they will now offer the scanned books back in print. Using the Expresso Book Machine patrons can have their own perfect bound paperback copy in less than ten minutes. Although the machine itself costs $100,000, the material cost for each copy is around three dollars.

In another ironic twist, the private Harvard Bookstore will begin offering this service on September 29th so that people who can not visit the Harvard Library can buy many of the same books nearby at the bookstore. Harvard partner shipped with Google in December 2004, offering their extensive holdings to Google scanners.

While people, from knitters finding lost heirloom designs to teachers helping subsistence farmers in Africa using old but still relevant techniques, are finding useful information it is unlikely that many new books will be added to the public domain. Because Congress modified the copyright law in 1999, most new books will not be available in the public domain for many decades.

Meet the new pres, same as the old pres.

President Obama supports extending Section 215 of the "Patriot" act, the section beloved by librarians nationwide. Section 215 undermines much of the patron privacy that librarians have protected for centuries by allowing the FBI to "request" library records and gagging the librarian from informing anyone that such a "request" was made. Section 215 was set to expire in December, but our new president is requesting that this part of the "Patriot" act be extended.

As the ALA stated when the original "Patriot" act was enacted.

Libraries provide a place to exercise intellectual freedom: a free and open exchange of knowledge and information where individuals may exercise freedom of inquiry as well as a right to privacy in regards to information sought. Privacy is essential to the exercise of free speech, free thought, and free association; and, in a library, the subject of users' interests should not be examined or scrutinized by others.

ALA considers that sections of the USA PATRIOT ACT are a present danger to the constitutional rights and privacy rights of library users.

The President promised to bring us "Change We Can Believe In" and to "revise the PATRIOT act to give law enforcement the tools it needs without jeopardizing the rights and ideas of all Americans", Section 215 must just be one of those tools.

Survery of the current state of Newspaper Media

A recent New York Review of Books artcile, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/23050, provides an excellent survery of the current state of the Newspaper Media. It maintains that, surprisingly, a main reason for the decline of print subscriptions has been the availability of free versions of newspapers on the web. The article also discusses the non-profit news sites, and the growing trend of newspapers to begin charging for online content.

$148 for near space photos

Aerial photography using balloons has been around for decades, but probably no photographs have been taken from so high for so little. Three MIT students spent $148 to get their digital camera into near space, altitude 17.5 miles/28 km. The camera took more than 4,000 photographs, even catching the balloon popping, before the returning to earth, 20 miles from the launch site.

They plan to post step by step instructions at the "Project Icarus" website, so you to can take high altitude photos for cheap.

Free Library of Philadelphia

Chilling news from the Free Library of Philadelphia:
We deeply regret to inform you that without the necessary budgetary legislation by the State Legislature in Harrisburg, the City of Philadelphia will not have the funds to operate our neighborhood branch libraries, regional libraries, or the Parkway Central Library after October 2, 2009.

Frequently asked questions about the closings here

time waster

This post from Wondermark is about mapping a perfect route. The juxtaposition of contemporary problems and text with Victorian Era illustrations can be entertaining. Perhaps this speaks to excessive planning-to-plan instead of simply getting on with the task at hand.

How many orphans?

Personanondata has this interesting post about the number of "orphans and orphan titles" in the Google Book Search Settlement. Estimate? 580,388. The post has a detailed description of how this number was reached.

New Tag Map for News Stories

Slate is now offering News Dots: displaying dots that represent news items on the web. The dots get larger as the news subjects are cited more often, and each dot is connected to other dots to show how the news stories are connected to one another. When you click the dot, you are given a list of articles to your right. You can access these articles by clicking on the citation.

Cushing Academy's strange idea

Ted Striphas, the author of the book and the blog The Late Age of Print reports today on Cushing Academy's decision to dispense with their printed books — more than 20,000 volumes in all — and switch over entirely to digital media resources. "To fill the void once occupied by its collection of printed books, Cushing is spending about a half-million dollars on large, flat-screen data displays, laptop hookups, Amazon Kindles, Sony Readers — oh, and a $12,000 cappuccino machine." They see books as outdated -like scrolls before books! Read the whole article and also this post about the beautiful cover for book, The Late Age of Print.

On vacation for 2 weeks

Perhaps some of my fellow bloggers will post while I am away. Returning on September 21.

iPhone 3G and 3G S to get MMS on September 25

AT&T posted the following comments on its Facebook page:

An Update on iPhone MMS for our Mobility Customers

We know many of our iPhone customers are eager for an update on our rollout schedule for Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS). We’ve been working for the past several months to prepare our systems and network to ensure the best possible experience with MMS when it launches – and that launch date is: September 25 for iPhone 3G and 3GS customers. MMS will be enabled through a software update on that day.

We know that iPhone users will embrace MMS. The unique capabilities and high usage of the iPhone’s multimedia capabilities required us to work on our network MMS architecture to carry the expected record volumes of MMS traffic and ensure an excellent experience from Day One. We appreciate your patience as we work toward that end.

We’re riding the leading edge of smartphone growth that’s resulted in an explosion of traffic over the AT&T network. Wireless use on our network has grown an average of 350 percent year-over-year for the past two years, and is projected to continue at a rapid pace in 2009 and beyond. The volume of smartphone data traffic the AT&T network is handling is unmatched in the wireless industry. We want you to know that we’re working relentlessly to innovate and invest in our network to anticipate this growth in usage and to stay ahead of the anticipated growth in data demand, new devices and applications for years to come.

A better moustrap - or in this case, a better bookmark.

Cool concept and allegedly produced by Propaganda, though I see no mention of it on their very annoying site.

Found at OhGizmo. More pics at the jump.

Fascinating photos of cell tower "trees"

I remember the first time I saw one of these. It was from a boat in the middle of Lake Burton in north Georgia and I remember it seeming at once oddly out of place and comfortingly familiar. Now I look for them all over and find them in the most conspicuously inconspicuous places. Offered not in judgment, just interest. Here is a link to a gallery so you can learn to see them, too.

idthis: Human powered identification of anything or anyone.

See something (or someone?!) you don't recognize? Wouldn't it be cool to upload a pic and have a team of experts examine your find, and post the best answer to your query? Well, that is what you get with idthis.

From the site:

Just snap a photo of something you’d like identified (like a breed of dog, a type of car, that weird gelatinous blob sitting on your plate, or even that celebrity sitting next to you that you can’t remember their name, etc…) and then send it to be identified.

Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll Spell Checked

Click to Enlarge
Thanks to The Futility Closet

Teens Do Tweet - but it's still lame, sorta.

At long last there appears to be a definitive examination of teens' opinions and use of Twitter. In several mainstream articles published recently (like this one) and in at least one post here (like this one) we have all been, apparently, much too quick to write off the teen Twitter market based on either flawed data or misinterpreted anecdotes.

Geoff Cook, co-founder and CEO of MyYearbook has an article over at TechCrunch that presents the results of a survey of more than 10,000 teens between the ages of 13 and 17 with an eye toward adding something new to the answer. It turns out the questions asked were flawed. Says Cook:

"To date, reasons given for the alleged aversion of teens to Twitter have ranged from the condescending “Because they have nothing to say,” to the responsible “Because it doesn’t feel safe,” to the Letterman-like “Because they can’t afford it” — at least without a mobile data plan."

"Of course, all of these reasons are predicated on the widely accepted notion that “Teens Don’t Tweet” — that there is a phenomenon that needs to be explained. As recently as last week even, the New York Times cited the fact that only 11% of Twitter is teen as evidence of Twitter’s unpopularity to that group."

Furthermore:

"As it turns out, teens actually tweet more than the general population, prompting Silicon Valley Insider to say yesterday, “Kids Don’t Hate Twitter Anymore.” According to comScore, Twitter’s unique visitor composition index in the 12 – 17 age group is 118 (a value over 100 represents a higher concentration of unique visitors from that age group as compared to the age group’s concentration across the entire web). More interestingly, Twitter’s 12 – 17 composition index of 118 is higher than its composition index in the 25 – 34 and 35 – 44 age groups. The bottom line: Twitter actually skews more teen than the average site, and much more teen than Facebook."

Much more and some cool charts at the article.