CourseSmart offers e-textbooks for iPhone

CourseSmart has confirmed plans to offer 7,000 e-textbooks for the iPhone and iPod Touch. The academic textbooks - free for CourseSmart subscribers - will allow students to access digital notes and search for specific words or phrases.

Frank Lyman, CourseSmart's executive VP told the Wall Street Journal,

"Nobody is going to use their iPhone to do their homework, but this does provide real mobile learning. If you're in a study group and you have a question, you can immediately access your text."

According to Lyman, the digital books will be priced approximately 50 percent less than their physical counterparts.

Although CourseSmart texts are not available on Amazon's Kindle or Kindle DX, Lyman noted that he would like to see the books available "wherever college students want them."

Pick your apocalypse!

Pondering the possible ways America and its inhabitants will be destroyed? Instead of worrying about apocalyptic robots or asteroids, pick one for yourself over at Slate with Choose Your Own Apocalypse.

Slate has come up with 144 potential scenarios, and the interactive site allows you to choose up to five favorites. Some are fairly obvious like nuclear war or some form of pestilence, but there are new ones to consider like that asteroid that could crash into the earth in 2036 . Then there are the totally unexpected possibilities like: “Vermont Independence,” “Gray Goo” or an “Alien Species” that devours everything and everyone it encounters. Pick your favorite and find out what your apocalyptic choices say about you, and then compare your answers with the results of more than 60,000 other readers.

Should you "friend" your employees?

Several times in recent weeks we have posted here about the increasing importance of social networking as a component of one's "hireability". More and more employers are recognizing the value of the sociosphere to marketing, sales and customer relations, and more value is being revealed every day. When Twitter was off the air for a few hours last week the very real costs to marketers, wired corporations and connected entrepreneurs could probably be measured in millions of dollars – very real dollars. Social sites like Facebook and MySpace give businesses unique insight into client and customer psyches and provide a medium, when well managed, that can be of great value. But, what about the internal value of social media to an organization. What can an employer learn about his employees and vice-versa.

The Proverbial Lone Wolf Librarian references an interesting article at Mashable (via American Express Open Forum), where author Ben Parr says:

"While social media for business has clearer, more tangible benefits to the success of your company, social media for personal use can be a little tricky. On the one hand, it helps you become closer with friends, co-workers, and customers. On the other hand, it can lead to awkward tensions and embarrassing disasters."

"One area where there still isn’t a lot of definition is the relationship between employees, bosses, and employers on the web. Is there a problem with friending your subordinates? Does it help build cohesion among staff, or is it just strange? Do you even want to? I’m hoping to provide some clarity and answers to these questions."

So, Should you friend your employees?

What benefits could there be from friending employees? Social media’s great strength is building connections and sharing information, no matter where you are. By knowing more about each other, you and your employees may become more comfortable with one another and become a more cohesive team. It’s also a faster way to disseminate information to others.

What drawbacks could there be from friending employees? You could quickly learn about things you never wanted to know, and vice-versa. Many people, especially young and starry-eyed college graduates, still put up pictures of themselves drinking or in less-than-flattering situations. You or a friend could also say something that you’d never want employees to learn about.

What’s considered “safe”? It’s fine to interact with employees (and bosses, board members, and potential clients) on professional social networks, primarily LinkedIn

And Twitter? Should I follow my employees? Unless the person has a private Twitter account, it’s not generally a problem. In fact, this may be the best way to get to know an employee outside of work without violating his or her privacy. And your tweets will hopefully provide some insight or even lessons to your team. Yes, there have been incidents like “Cisco Fatty,” where a 22 year old lost a job offer via Twitter, but these instances are very rare.

How about Facebook and MySpace? These are the tricky ones. For many, these are personal and private accounts that provide a looking glass into aspects close to him or her. Because of that, my personal suggestion is to ask before friending on these social networks. There are benefits to a closer relationship with your staff, but don’t invade their privacy or make them feel uncomfortable by friending out of the blue. If you’re still unsure, I highly recommend a CNN/CareerBuilder article on the subject.

So what should my ground rule be? Have a point to your social media friending. Following on Twitter will help you learn more about the insights of your employees, but you may want to consider friending on Facebook only if you’ve turned into fast friends with members of your team. Be respectful of privacy, don’t say anything you wouldn’t want your mom to hear, and ask when you’re unsure, and you should navigate the waters of personal social media use just fine.

Design Management Application - funny.

Much more at Flickr

Spacelocker: Just don't do it!

Spacelocker is a social network where you can go to “meet friends and connect to online stuff” and offers an “evocative experience that is fun, free and functional”. Wait.....what? Nevermind.

What I wanted to alert you to is this post over at TechCrunch that describes in detail the misadventures of an innocent patron who decided to give Spacelocker a try. Son Lee failed to notice the small print in the sign up form which states:

"Note if you sign up on the left side form with a web based email account and existing password, Spacelocker will invite your friends to join you by sending invitations automatically to the contacts in your email account. If you do not want your contacts invited, use the right side form with any email account, including web based, and create a new password."

Well, Son didn't notice that and used her Gmail account to sign up. When all of her Gmail contacts were contacted by Spacelocker she wrote to complain. They not only wiped out her account, but sent along this response:

Hi Son,

You obviously can write English. However I think you have a problem reading English; or are careless when you read. The sign up page has 2 forms on it. One form is to be used by those who want spacelocker to automatically invite their friends. The other form is to be used if you do not want to invite your friends. There are big red letters on the left side form that tells you to read the note on the sign up page before you sign up. The note on the sign up page tells you about the sign up procedures. There is a link to a blog on the sign up page which further explains the sign up procedures in detail. The terms of service and privacy policy of Spacelocker clearly set out what you have agreed to by signing up. You obviously failed to read any of that before you signed up and now you want to blame us for your carelessness!!! Incredible!!!

Her is a link to the sign up: http://www.spacelocker.com/signUp.php Read it and think if you can! (emphasis mine)

Spacelocker Ltd
www.spacelocker.com
the happiest space on earth

To quote TechCrunch:

"...Spacelocker is purposely trying to trick new users so they can get some extra e-mail addresses to spam. And to add insult to injury, they feel the need to behave so rudely when a user files a formal complaint.

I totally agree and am sure the social ether will make quick work of this stupidly rude startup.

The "winner" of the Microsoft Bing Jingle contest.... sigh

Microsoft has announced the winner of their "Bing Jingle" contest. It would be totally appropriate for you to listen to this on your brown Zune.

Is "Focus" Groups misspelled?

focus group n. /fŭkūs/gɹuːp/

1. A way of giving power to people who are highly motivated by: a.) a free lunch, b.) a small fee, or c.) hearing themselves speak.

2. A means of wasting countless design and strategy hours, and negating years of expertise by depending upon the opinion of people who either don't know or don't care.

3. A way of removing or shifting responsibility for the economic success or failure of any product, marketing strategy, or promotional campaign because the "focus group preferred it." See also: scapegoat

4. A highly effective way of killing any type of innovation, intuition, or creativity in a formal, costly setting versus an equally accurate alternative known as the dartboard.

5. A quick means to making a product, strategy or marketing project bland (or in some cases, worse) in order to appease all who attended or participated.

And to quote Steve Jobs (you gonna argue with Apple's business model?!)

“We do no market research. We don’t hire consultants. The only consultants I’ve ever hired in my 10 years is one firm to analyze Gateway’s retail strategy so I would not make some of the same mistakes they made [when launching Apple's retail stores]. But we never hire consultants, per se. We just want to make great products.”

“It’s not about pop culture, and it’s not about fooling people, and it’s not about convincing people that they want something they don’t. We figure out what we want. And I think we’re pretty good at having the right discipline to think through whether a lot of other people are going to want it, too. That’s what we get paid to do.”

Finally, Apple design guru Jonathan Ive says

“Apple’s goal isn’t to make money. Our goal is to design and develop and bring to market good products…We trust as a consequence of that, people will like them, and as another consequence we’ll make some money. But we’re really clear about what our goals are.”

The definition is from Fast Company

The quotes are from an interview in Fortune Magazine.

Grant Hamilton: Amazingly simple but profound Polaroids

More here.

The Survey of American College Students: Student Library Research Practices & Skills

This report ($100 to download!!) looks closely at the research practices and skills of a sample of 400 U.S. college students. I can't justify the money, but there are a few findings summarized in the abstract:

- Only about 47% of students are sure that they have ever been required to turn in a research paper exceeding 10 double spaced typed pages in length for any of their classes.

- More than 86% of students say that they understand the concept of plagiarism 'well' or 'very well'.

- 64% of students sampled say that they know how to contact a librarian online.

- 55.2% of the students in the sample had not asked for help from a librarian within the past year.

- Nearly 29% of students say that Google, Yahoo and other major search engine searches were the most important information source for their last research assignment.

- More than 9% of information needed for research papers was sourced from Wikipedia or other wickis.

- The higher the grade point average the less information for research papers was obtained from search engines such as Google or Yahoo.

Building the workplace of the future: A Guide.

This may be the single most important document I have ever read online. OK, it is 128 slides long, but every one is a gem:

Culture

View more presentations from reed2001.

The behavior you’re seeing is the behavior you’ve designed for

Short, but valuable lesson from over at bokardo Social Web Design:

It’s a simple statement, really. All it means is that what is happening on your web site or in your web application is a result of the current design you’ve created. If people are gaming the system, then your design allows for that. If people aren’t returning, then your design hasn’t given them reason to (or reminded them to). If people are signing up but aren’t getting started, then your design isn’t communicating the value of doing so or the way to do it.

The idea also subversively leads to a much closer monitoring of the behavior in question. If you start thinking in this way, you’ll find yourself asking “what, exactly, is the behavior we’re seeing?”. This alone is worth the price of admission…anything that gets designers more focused on the actual behaviors of their users is a good thing.

This idea can also change the mindset of design teams:

• It sharpens focus on the design of the product, not some other distracting thing
  
  So many teams suffer from political infighting, unclear design goals, no vision for success, and many other things that simply stating that behavior is a result of current efforts really helps to bring focus to the situation. Instead of seeing design as something that certain people in the company do, we might recognize design as a response to the market and the behaviors that are happening there.


• It puts responsibility on the design team
  
  This idea puts the responsibility of what happens on a site squarely on the shoulders of design teams. This produces changes in the design team: they start investigating behavior to make sure that things are going well. Unfortunately, many designers don’t do this yet, usually because they are judged not by what’s happening but by one of two other ways: by how beautiful their work is or by how much they get done. Neither of these criteria is good from an interaction-design standpoint. The only thing that matters is what’s happening on the web site!


• It elevates design in the discussion
  
  Because this idea places responsibility square on the shoulders of the design team, it also elevates design in the discussion. All of a sudden we know where to go when the behavior isn’t what we want: the design team. Who do you call when things aren’t working right? The design team. Designers always seem to want a place at the table. By accepting that the behavior you’re seeing is the behavior you’ve designed for you might just get that seat…

The next time you’re in a meeting or a discussion with the folks you work with, try out this idea on them and see what happens. It might just change the way you work. I know it has for me.

Apple censors English dictionary

As an admitted Apple fanboy, even I am getting pretty tired of Apple's incomprehensible and puritanical method of approving/disapproving iPhone applications for its iTunes Store. Enough already, as they are now censoring the English Dictionary! According to Ninjawords developer,Phil Crosby, via TGDaily, Apple rejected the application only two days after it was submitted.

"We were rejected for objectionable content. They provided screenshots of the words 's***' and 'f***' showing up in our dictionary's search results," Crosby told Fireball's John Gruber. "What's interesting is that we spent a good deal of time making it so that you must type vulgar words in their entirety, and only then will we show you suggestions in the search results. For instance, if you type 'fuc,' you will not see 'f***' as a suggestion."

The application was rejected two more times before:

"Someone from Apple called to say we were being rejected again for illicit content, and no matter what we did to our dictionary, it will have to be 17+ to make it to the App Store. We gave in and said fine, hoping that we could get on the App Store immediately since the solution to their rejection was a simple metadata change. However, the App Store reviewer would have none of that. We would have to resubmit an entirely new binary and get to the back of the queue before they would look at it again," said Crosby.

A very edited version was finally approved for sale last week.

How we spend our time

The American Time Use Survey asks thousands of American residents to recall every minute of a day. The data is aggregated by age, employment status, ethnicity, education level and number of children. The results are fascinatingly displayed in an interactive format that allows a ready and visual comparison between groups.



Found at TYWKIWDBI

Google quadruples newspaper offerings

Google has updated its index, quadrupling the number of articles included in News Archive Search. It now includes articles from several new publications, including the Halifax Gazette, Sydney Morning Herald, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, and the Village Voice. They have also added new international publications such as the Manila Standard, The Nation from Thailand, and many others.

To showcase their offerings Google points us to the complete June 2, 1753 edition of the Halifax Gazette, one of the oldest newspapers digitized to date.

tags and findability

Here's a detailed and convincing study by Cathy Marshall at Tekka.Net on the effectiveness of user tagging. Summary: Tags don't work well. Narratives are better.

Augmented Reality and TwitAround

Take a look at the video below. It very effectively demonstrates the concept of Augmented Reality on a mobile device.



TwitAround is a proposed iPhone 3GS application utilizes an augmented reality Twitter viewer that displays real-time tweets around your physical location.

Hold your iPhone at eye level and the iPhone camera, GPS, compass and accelerometer are utilized by the app to produce a video see-through effect allowing you to see where the tweet comes from and how far it is away.

The principle barrier to implementing AG apps on the iPhone is Apple, itself. Developers are currently unable to publish these apps to the app store because the iPhone SDK lacks public APIs for manipulating live video.


Amazing stuff, and just the tip of the iceberg as far as augmented reality goes. Just think of the implications for libraries, museums, health care, travel, games! There is an open letter to Apple re: AG, and several examples of how the technology might be implemented here.

Awful Library Books

From the site:

Welcome to Awfullibrarybooks.wordpress.com! Librarians, bibliophiles and lovers of nostalgia are all welcome here.

This site is a collection of public library holdings that we find amusing and maybe questionable for public libraries trying to maintain a current and relevant collection. Contained in this site are actual library holdings. No libraries are specifically mentioned to protect our submitters who might disagree with a particular collection policy. (A good librarian would probably be able to track down the holding libraries without too much trouble anyway…)

Have fun!

If you quote yourself, do you have to pay the AP?

We blogged in a recent post about the Associated Press and their attempt to restrict their articles from being linked to or appearing in search results.

The Associated Press is now selling "quotation licenses" that allow bloggers and, I guess, people who forward quotations from articles to co-workers to quote their articles. The licenses start at $12.50 for quotations of 5-25 words. They are also encouraging you to turn in people who publish without paying the blood-money, offering up to $1 million in blood money. Incidentally, they also reserve the right to "terminate this Agreement at any time if Publisher or its agents finds Your use of the licensed Content to be offensive and/or damaging to Publisher's reputation."

James Grimmelmann over at The Laboratorium points out that the Associated Press has become so deranged, so disconnected from reality, that it will sell you a “license” to quote words it didn’t write and doesn’t own. Witness:

He paid $12 for that “license" and those words don’t even come from the article they charged him 46 cents a word to quote from (and that’s with the educational discount). The quote is from Thomas Jefferson’s letter to Isaac McPherson, in which Jefferson argues that copyright has no basis in natural law. (oh, the irony!)

Posting in Making Light, Patrick Nielsen Hayden says:

"Welcome to a world in which you won’t be able to effectively criticize the press, because you’ll be required to pay to quote as few as five words from what they publish."

"Welcome to a world in which you won’t own any of your technology or your music or your books, because ensuring that someone makes their profit margins will justify depriving you of the even the most basic, commonsensical rights in your personal, hand-level household goods."

"The people pushing for this stuff are not well-meaning, and they are not interested in making life better for artists, writers, or any other kind of individual creators. They are would-be aristocrats who fully intend to return us to a society of orders and classes, and they’re using so-called “intellectual property” law as a tool with which to do it. Whether or not you have ever personally taped a TV show or written a blog post, if you think you’re going to wind up on top in the sort of world these people are working to build, you are out of your mind."

I have no idea how the AP thinks this will end well for them. The AP itself says of itself on their site: "The Associated Press is the bastion of the people’s right to know around the world." Right. I guess I owe them $12.50 for that. Sue me.

Seinfeld summarized in one image...

click to enlarge

And the "Cheat Sheet"

My Kindle ate my homework....

To paraphrase some comedian, "If my dog ate as much homework as I said he did he'd be passing firelogs." Times change and I noticed an article over at TG Daily about a poor kid who says his Kindle ate his homework when Amazon removed George Orwell's 1984 from all Kindles. He is now filing a class action lawsuit against the online retailer for the loss of the notes he made on the device for a school. The 17 year old claims he was almost halfway through the book when Amazon pulled the plug.

There is some legal analysis at the link.