Google the year in review & the future

In 2009 the web as we knew it changed dramatically. Twitter graduated to become a media darling and a mainstream communication staple. Facebook became the most significant social network of this day and age. And Google changed the way we search.

Lots of reflection on google including gmail, google apps, chrome & android/mobile.

To the future:
google wave(?)

more at mashable

85 reasons to love your librarian

heh heh... some of these are actually well thought, while others are clearly humorous...


1. Librarians take care of libraries, which are still invaluable today.
2. Not all information is on the internet.
3. Older books still hold great cultural significance.
4. Libraries are still repositories for some of the most valuable works of literature in the world.
5. Even with the internet, the library is still the best place to do research.
6. Girls with glasses can still rock the “sexy librarian” look.
7. “Sexy Librarian” is still a popular costume at Halloween.
8. You can’t exactly find periodicals like The New England Journal of Medicine in Barnes and Noble.
9. For that matter, looking at turn-of-the-century National Geographics is still pretty entertaining.

Love LOVE no. 15: Somebody has to help lazy people find what they want.
...and wait, there is more!

scrubbing your identity from facebook accounts

Alot has been written about how hard it is to really get rid of your facebook life should you so want to (just google -- lol), but facebook does say that you can do it in one shot, which this fb group explains. Deleting an account is supposed to scrub facebook of all of your posts, comments, tags, your virtual footprints... You can go directly to the link, here.

Of course, you can always manually delete each tag, post, video, photo, comment,etc. (which was the original way to do it, and then your account just moved to inactive at some point); but deleting your account (in theory) should scrub the site.


Another option is Seppukoo which allows you to not only erase your fb info, but to do it with a bit of humor, by killing off your alternate (?) virtual identity.

Facebook is now taking legal action against them. The thing with fb is that it is a COMPANY building a huge db of consumer info, which is an obvious minefield for privacy issues, both from 3rd party access (games, quizzes, linked accounts to other services like twitter, etc.).

The short answer is: WATCH YOUR BACK. The information you are giving out to a company (not just facebook, but any company including google) is not only available on the web, but on their servers, and anywhere else they store your data. Just because you might be able to delete info from a publicly available website, does not mean that it still does not exist, either in a backup file or in a cache somewhere.

Who owns the digital version of books?

Interesting article about licensing of older works (print) and ownership...

But the question of exactly who owns the electronic rights to such older titles is in dispute, making it a rising source of conflict in one of the publishing industry’s last remaining areas of growth.

bookbinding and strange things you find in youtube

This is actually pretty well done....
the infamous uga "book bound in human skin"

Call for papers (Intellectual Property conference)

Call for papers: Conference on Intellectual Property, Iona College, New Rochelle, NY

April 30-May 1, 2010; (cfp deadline: Feb. 5, 2010)

Iona College announces the Second Conference on Intellectual Property to be held at Iona College in New Rochelle, NY, April 30 – May 1, 2010. The keynote address will be presented by James Boyle.*

In our second year, the Conference on Intellectual Property will continue to explore intellectual property in a cross-disciplinary context. What is it, how has it evolved as a concept, and in what ways do we feel its practical and theoretical impact upon academic, economic, legal and technological fields? From plagiarism, to patent law, to the Creative Commons and beyond, the conference is sure to offer a remarkable breadth and depth of insights and approaches to what may well be the defining issue of our time. Come join the conversation!

Selected essays will be published in a proposed collection for a peer-reviewed press.

500-word Papers/Panel abstracts or complete papers should be submitted by February 5th, 2010 to Shannon Donlon at sdonlon@iona.edu. Questions can be directed to Dr. Amy Stackhouse at: astackhouse@iona.edu.

2010 Conference Information will soon be available at: www.iona.edu/cip

*James Boyle is William Neal Reynolds Professor of Law at Duke Law School and co-founder of the Center for the Study of the Public Domain. He is the author of The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind and Shamans, Software and Spleens: Law and the Construction of the Information Society. He writes widely on issues of intellectual property, internet regulation and legal theory. He was one of the founding board members of Creative Commons (www.creativecommons.org), which works to facilitate the free availability of art, scholarship, and cultural materials by developing innovative, machine-readable licenses that individuals and institutions can attach to their work. He served as a board member from 2002 until 2009, the last year as Chairman of the board. He was also a co-founder of Science Commons (www.sciencecommons.org), which aims to expand the Creative Commons mission into the realm of scientific and technical data, and of ccLearn (learn.creativecommons.org), which works to promote the development and use of open educational resources. Professor Boyle is also a member of the academic advisory boards of the Electronic Privacy and Information Center (www.epic.org), the Connexions (cnx.rice.edu) open-source courseware project, and of Public Knowledge (www.publicknowledge.org). In addition, he continues to write an online column for the Financial Times' New Economy Policy Forum (news.ft.com/comment/columnists/neweconomy).

Everything I know about work life, I learned in Dungeons & Dragons

Interesting post about Dungeons & Dragon play and how it relates to work:

One spell, used well, can be more powerful than an entire book full of spells. I first met Ivan when he showed up for a game in Steve's standard D&D world. Ivan drew up a first-level wizard character who had almost no hit-points and only one wimpy spell: cast an illusion. Whereupon Ivan's character cast an illusion of a 5th-level illusionist... and proceeded to run that powerful "5th level illusionist" through the rest of the game. Years later, Ivan played in a play-by-mail dungeon (yes, children, we did those things before e-mail) in which the DM permitted custom spells. Ivan's "swap" spell seemed Mostly Harmless: Transpose a 1" cube of anything with another 1" cube of anything. Whereupon Ivan set up a magical FedEx business (for very short messages) and a sideline of an assassin-business (swap a square inch of heart muscle with anything else; who could tell that murder was done?). This taught me to get everything possible out of the tools at my disposal. It also taught me to expand my notion of "What do I have, and what can I do with it?"

National Historical Park database with Edison-era sound recordings

Sounds interesting....
---------------
The National Park Service (NPS) Library Program recently loaded the Thomas Edison National Historical Park (TENHP) MARC-format database of recorded sound holdings into the NPS Voyager catalog.  The NPS
Voyager catalog is available for public searches on-line at http://www.library.nps.gov/ .

The TENHP database in Voyager includes MARC-format data for the 10,000 cylinder records and 28,000 disc records preserved at Edison’s Laboratory in West Orange, New Jersey.  The majority of the phonograph records in the collection are Edison recordings made between 1888 and 1929.  The collection also includes some Edison-era
recordings made by competing companies.  The project to create the MARC-format database began in 1995 and completed in 2005.

To limit a search in Voyager to the TENHP records only, follow these
steps:
- Go to the NPS Library Information center, on-line at
http://www.library.nps.gov/
- Under "NPS Voyager Catalog", click on "search."
- Choose "Basic Search".
- Click on the list titled "Optionally limit to major NPS library."
- Choose TENHP, listed under "Major Park Libraries."

For more information, please contact:
Jerry Fabris, Museum Curator
Thomas Edison National Historical Park
National Park Service
United States Department of the Interior
211 Main Street
West Orange, New Jersey 07052
tel:  (973) 736-0550, ext. 48
fax: (973) 736-8496
website: http://www.nps.gov/edis/index.htm
email:  gerald_fabris@nps.gov

Google Policy Fellowship for Librarians

Apply for 2010 Google Policy Fellowship with ALA Washington Office

The ALA Washington Office will be participating in the Google Policy Fellowship program for the summer of 2010. Google Policy Fellows work for ten weeks during the summer at ALA Washington or at other public interest organizations involved in debates on broadband and access policy, copyright reform, online privacy, and open government. In particular, ALA encourages master’s and doctoral students in library and information studies with an interest in national public policy to apply for this fellowship.

This year’s host organizations include: American Library Association, Cato Institute, Center for Democracy and Technology, Competitive Enterprise Institute, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Internet Education Foundation, Media Access Project, New America Foundation, Public Knowledge, Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic, The Citizen Lab, Creative Commons, Future of Music Coalition, Progress and Freedom Foundation, Technology Policy Institute. Host organizations new in 2010 are The Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies and National Hispanic Media Coalition.

Check out the Google Policy Fellow website for pertinent details.

Applications are due Monday, December 28, 2009.

Call for Papers (Web apps conference)

I'm writing to remind you that the submission deadline for the USENIX Conference on Web Application Development (WebApps '10) is approaching.
Please submit your paper titles and abstracts by January 4, 2010, and your complete papers by January 11, 2010.

The Call for Papers, with submission guidelines, can be found at http://www.usenix.org/webapps10/cfpb/

WebApps '10 is a new technical conference designed to bring together experts in all aspects of developing and deploying Web applications.

Suggested topics related to Web application development include but are not limited to:

* Computing substrates and deployment technologies ("cloud computing")
* Frameworks for developing Web applications
* Client-side toolkits, libraries, and plug-ins
* Storage systems
* Security issues for Web applications
* Management techniques for large-scale Web applications
* Languages for Web applications
* Scalability issues and techniques
* Techniques for creating highly interactive Web applications
* Software as a service
* Applications that illustrate interesting new features or
implementation techniques
* Performance measurements of Web applications
* Real-time data delivery over the Web
* Web services

WebApps '10 will take place June 23–25, 2010, in Boston, MA.

I look forward to receiving your submissions!

Sincerely,

John Ousterhout, Stanford University
WebApps '10 Program Chair
webapps10chair@usenix.org

Game dynamics in the real world

I read this post about game dynamics in "real life" (aka not a game), which started a thought chain... In a nutshell, game dynamics in social media and in IRL (in real life, whatever that really means, I live mostly online... lol) appear in:

• Rewards and points to play, such as frequent flyer programs and Las Vegas casinos/resorts
  
• Facebook is a game because of its immediacy and real time updating
  
• Multilevel & local marketing on facebook and elsewhere
  
• Time management & productivity tools (facebook, lifehacker, etc.)
  

I would add:

• Networking/building alliances (linkedin, facebook, twitter, also, IRL, etc.)
  
• Task oriented duties / completion of a task (I see this as different from a tangible reward, because sometimes the reward is just a completed profile or a thank you)
• Learning
  
• Chance and probability (I know the Google "I'm feeling lucky" is not completely random, nor is the suggested friends on facebook)
  
• Exploration/Creative play

..and if I think long enough, I will come up with some more, I am sure.

How many people on the 'net doing what?

I'm always leery of statistics as I have a hard time believing they are ever accurate... but whoa is this kind of cool:


You can read more about it here, including where the numbers come from.

Apps vs. maps (Verizon vs. AT&T)

In case you didn't hear, AT&T (iphone, among others) dropped the lawsuit against Verizon's ad campaign (playing on the " an app for that" by comparing the 3G coverage of AT&T to Verizon with a visual map). Read more at mashable and elsewhere.

I thought it was a really clever and hardhitting ad campaign, which is saying alot in the sea of ads we all see everyday.

Drupal 7 news

The Drupal community is eagerly anticipating the unwrapping of its newest version 7 release. While there is speculation on when the official release date will happen, the end result will be a number of significant enhancements. The underlying focus has been on improving usability. In fact, an internationally renowned design firm was engaged to spearhead the efforts and facilitate community based suggestions. Drupal has long been accused as more of a "developer friendly" platform when stacked against its counterparts in the CMS world. However, one can expect to see a number of differences in Drupal 7.

More here:
http://www.mediacurrent.com/blogs/drupal-7-preview

on web standards and accessibility

To me, true accessibility is building one site that works for everybody, disabled or not, and whatever user agent or operating system they prefer. And that is the web I want to build and use.

Yup. A good post on web standards and accessibility.

rainy day haiku

I do not think my
umbrella is big enough
to tackle this rain

--funny, how facebook status updates turn out... I had no clue that a created a haiku until a literary friend pointed it out.