WorldCat Powered Recommendation RSS

If you come to the blog to view my entries, you might have noticed a new feature in the right-hand column. It’s called “Good Reads/Views.” It’s generated from the RSS Feed of a list I’ve created on Open WorldCat called Books and More Worth a Look. Every time I add to this list over at [...]

Think Newspapers Are Dead? Think Again!

Thanks to Docuticker for pointing out this study, which shows that newspaper reading is healthy, just shifted:
Online newspaper viewership reached record in 2007
Source: Newspaper Association of America
Average monthly unique audience figures for newspaper Web sites grew by more than 3.6 million in 2007, a record year for the industry and an increase of [...]

Gaming: Even NASA is Doing It

I saw a BBC Technology article about how NASA is looking for a contractor to build an online multiplayer environment for gaming to simulate NASA missions for students. Their formal three page “Request for Information” can be found at http://ipp.gsfc.nasa.gov/mmo/.
Still think gaming is a fad? If you thought so? I’m still not much for computer [...]

Stale Google Alerts

I’m what I consider to be a moderate consumer of Google Alerts. Whisper my name, my employer, LOCKSS, or Free Government Information into the blogosphere and chances are you’ll get a visit from me. Sometimes I’ll comment and sometimes I won’t. Overall it is a useful tracking tool and you can’t beat its price.
But sometimes [...]

KTD - Junior podcasters

Fred Factor author Mark Sanborn recently spoke to first year teachers and heard about this interesting tidbit regarding elementary school children:
————–There was a video of fourth graders who created their own podcast after twenty minutes of instruction, and a teacher in the system who did a podcast using Google map technology to connect her class [...]

Face Recognition gets 3 of 10

Bruce Schneier reports on a German study that evaluated face recognition software using 200 volunteers. Over the course of a few months, the system averaged 30% recognition. And these were of people not trying to hide their identity.
Meanwhile, the city of New York is going to spend $90M dollars on a system of surveillance cameras. [...]

Immersive Virtual Environments Versus Traditional Platforms: Effects of Violent and Nonviolent Video Game Play.

You have to be an EBSCOhost subscriber (If you live in Alaska, you are!) to see the abstract to this item:
“Title: Immersive Virtual Environments Versus Traditional Platforms: Effects of Violent and Nonviolent Video Game Play.
Authors: Persky, Susan1 perskys@mail.nih.gov
Blascovich, Jim2
Source: Media Psychology; 2008, Vol. 10 Issue 1, p135-156, 22p, 2 diagrams, 2 graphs”
The abstract makes it [...]

Content Locked by Google, Freed by Marines

Brief history of the 8th marines
Originally uploaded by AlaskanLibrarian.
Find this book in a library. Read this book online. Or see how Google Book Search hides most of this public domain government document!
For all of their bravado in taking on mass digitization projects in the first place, Google really disappoints me with their over-cautious [...]

Don’t toss that book once you’ve digitized it!

Karen Coyle over at Coyle’s Information recently posted some good examples illustrating why you should not rely on Google Book Search as a backup or replacement for a paper item. It mostly boils down to problems with optical character recognition (OCR) and other scanning problems. I think it’s a worth a read.
From what I’ve [...]

Experiment with Google Pages - Share Feedback/Experience

I’ve started experimenting with Google Pages, Google’s webhosting service. I’ve started migrating my pages to http://danielcornwall.googlepages.com/. My original web site is still up, and will remain so until I’ve migrated all the pages and satisfy myself that this is really a good alternative.
Why bother? Because once you get the pages up, Google Pages seems to [...]