Wednesday, February 27, 2008

Can't remember the 11 planets? 4th-grader offers help - CNN.com

i have, apparently, been out of school too long...there are 11 planets! 3 are dwarf planets! what does that even mean?!?! pretty exciting...
Can't remember the 11 planets? 4th-grader offers help - CNN.com: "Maryn Smith, the winner of the National Geographic planetary mnemonic contest, has created a handy way to remember the planets and their order in distance from the sun.

Her award-winning phrase is: My Very Exciting Magic Carpet Just Sailed Under Nine Palace Elephants.

The 11 recognized planets are Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Ceres, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto and Eris."

Tuesday, February 26, 2008

Tame The Web - Txt a Librarian

Tame The Web � Blog Archive � Txt a Librarian: "As instant message reference freed patrons from having to come to the library, text messaging reference frees them from their desks or laptops. Yale Science Librarians offer a text messaging reference service to meet this preference for mobility: patrons can text a librarian from study halls, classes, laboratories, dorms, offices, or even from the stacks without having to approach a librarian."

Fix Your Grainy, Dark, Low Resolution Videos for Free--High-Tech Video Enhancement Service for Cameraphones, Digital Cameras, and Webcams

Fix Your Grainy, Dark, Low Resolution Videos for Free--High-Tech Video Enhancement Service for Cameraphones, Digital Cameras, and Webcams: "FixMyMovie is a video
enhancement site powered by MotionDSP's patent-pending video technology. It makes movies from your mobile phone,
digital camera, or webcam look great."

TVC Alert Research News for 25 February 2008

TVC Alert Research News for 25 February 2008: "What Lawyers Should Know about Metadata

(20 Feb) The National Law Journal features an excellent article that provides an overview of legal and ethical issues concerning metadata. In addition to explaining what metadata is, the article briefly examines how one finds it as well as the ethics of mining for it."

Buzzword

Welcome to Buzzword Preview � Buzzword

google docs bulk upload

Stark County Law Library Blog: February 2008 Archives: "“For you Power Google Docs users out there, here's a nifty tool: the Documents List Uploader is a utility that lets you upload multiple documents from your computer up to Google Docs. If you want to go straight to the download, click here. Once you've installed it, all you have to do is drag and drop Word, Excel, or Powerpoint documents to the Uploader, and they'll automatically be added to your Google Docs account.”"

Monday, February 18, 2008

Cookthink

Cookthink: "What am I craving?

That's the question we always ask ourselves when thinking about what to eat. So we got to thinking: wouldn't it be cool to have a tool that could listen to what we were craving and then suggest something good to cook?"

Tuesday, February 12, 2008

Blue Organizer’s Latest Indigo Release Lets You Surf Things Instead of Web Pages

Blue Organizer’s Latest Indigo Release Lets You Surf Things Instead of Web Pages: "Semantic search applications are finally starting to gel this year. Tonight, Adaptive Blue is releasing the latest version (dubbed Indigo) of its FireFox add-on, Blue Organizer. Put simply, Blue Organizer lets you surf things instead of Web pages. It recognizes when a Webpage that you are browsing is about certain classes of things: books, movies, music, stocks, recipes, restaurants, blogs, wine, clothing, electronics, celebrities, musicians, hotels. And it creates shortcuts to other Webpges about that same “thing” (or object). If you are reading a book review on a blog, for instance, Blue Organizer will let you jump directly to the page on Amazon about that book, or AbeBooks, Alibris, Barnes & Noble, eBay, and more. You can also go to custom Google page that only searches book reviews for that book. For each different class of things it recognizes, you get a different set of options."

Friday, February 08, 2008

Digsby aims to simplify communication; we've got invites

Digsby aims to simplify communication; we've got invites: "Communicating with coworkers, social networks, and friends across the Web is getting more complicated by the week. Some friends use e-mail, your garage band members stick to Yahoo! Messenger, and you probably spend half your day keeping an eye out for your boss while you swap between an Excel spreadsheet and Facebook to stay in touch with your Web 2.0 acquaintances. Right now, keeping pace with all these groups requires some serious multitasking skills, but the developers at dotSyntax believe things can be easier. With a new cross-platform product called digsby poised as a universal communicator between IM, e-mail, and social networks, they're off to a strong start."

Note: I actually started using Digsby and it's pretty great. I think it might be crashing my system, so I dont leave it running, but it is a handy way to sign into everything at once and check on everything.

reference interview puppet show

this is so dorky but really fun. what not to do in a reference interview.

Monday, February 04, 2008

Twine

why was this in novelties? how is the future of the Internet a novelty?

NYTimes |February 3, 2008 | Novelties

An Online Organizer That Helps Connect the Dots
By ANNE EISENBERG
HOW often have you wasted time searching through page after page of
e-mail messages, Web sites, notes, news feeds and YouTube videos on your
computer, trying to find an important item?

If the answer is *too often,* a San Francisco company, Radar
Networks, is testing a free, Web-based application, called Twine, that
may provide some robotic secretarial help in organizing and retrieving
documents.

Twine (twine.com) can scan almost any electronic document for the names
of people, places, businesses and many other entities that its
algorithms recognize.

Then it does something unusual: it automatically tags or marks all of
these items in orange and transfers them to an index on the right side
of the screen. This index grows with every document you view, as the
program adds subjects that it can recognize or infer from their context.


Customers have individual accounts on Twine*s Web site, where they
save URLs or other information. They can make their collections, or
*twines,* private, share them in groups with other members having
common interests like politics or fashion, or even make the twines
public.

[snip]

Twine is based on technologies created for the developing semantic Web
- foreseen as a smarter Web where machines may someday be able to
process the meaning of words and phrases in documents and even routinely
answer direct questions.

Sarah Miller, a librarian at Illinois Wesleyan University in
Bloomington, became a member of Twine*s test group in November, partly
because she and her husband, Ethan, a doctoral candidate, needed a place
to organize all the documents they wanted to share with each other about
teaching and learning.

For More Of The Story ... Visit
http://onlinesocialnetworks.blogspot.com/2008/02/twine-semantic-web-is-here.html

Friday, February 01, 2008

rolling on the keyboard

epa-results.pdf (application/pdf Object)

epa-results.pdf (application/pdf Object)

"The GPO has released a white paper on the results of its recently completed “Web Harvesting Pilot Project” and is requesting comments from the public. They had to extend the comment period until Fri. Feb. 8 because apparently they’re not getting any response, so the folks at Free Government Information are urging people to take the time to look at the project and make comments. What is the project? Many publications being published by Federal agencies are not being included in the Federal Depository Library Program that distributes all government documents. These documents have come to be known as “fugitive publications”; with increasing frequency, federal agencies are publishing content only in electronic formats and they frequently fail to inform GPO of these new publications for inclusion in the FDLP. In light of the large number of publications that have become fugitive, GPO is seeking Web crawler and other technologies that can provide a solution for the identification and harvesting of fugitive documents and publications from agency Web sites. A summary (pdf) of the results of the pilot project (they used the EPA website as the subject of the pilot) is available at http://www.access.gpo.gov/su_docs/fdlp/harvesting/epa-results.pdf and the simple online comment form is at http://www.access.gpo.gov/su_docs/fdlp/harvesting/epa-comments.html on the GPO website."

Googlism

Googlism: "Googlism.com will find out what Google.com thinks of you, your friends or anything! Search for your name here or for a good laugh check out some of the popular Googlisms below."