"With LibWorm, you can search over 1100 feeds, including more than 800 biblioblogs, many LIS journal TOCs, and many other information sources of interest to library people.

Any search in LibWorm can be outputted as an RSS feed, so LibWorm should be a very useful way to track mentions of your favorite subjects in the biblioblogosphere and beyond.

The latest quarterly report on the state of the blogosphere has been released by Technorati.

http://www.healia.com/healia/

A new search engine for health information. Looks promising.

Here's a great "tree" of technologies that support learners.

http://citizendium.org/

http://citizendium.org/essay.html

Lets put Wikipedia into the wall!

I came across this again recently, Stephen abram's dislike of Information Literacy practices today:

"“isn’t this a great way to reach out to our users, by telling them they’re illiterate and they need us to help them learn how to find information - something they probably already feel quite good at.”

I know where he's coming from and I can appreciate it, but...as a society, if we water everything down to its lowest common demoninator, to make it easy to use, accomplish, etc., where is that going to get us in the long term? I'm sorry but the high school kids today have less learning ability, a smaller knowledge base, and less mastery of subejct areas than 25 years ago. Graduate and retention rate targets have decimated education in North America. Instead of moving the bar to solve the problem, we should have worked on teaching practices. As consumers, yes, we want it easy to use, as researchers however, we need to acquire a knowledgebase and skills. Lets not mix work with play Stephen...

25 Technologies in 50 minutes.

Thanks Stephen...

A number of libraries are offering text messaging reference:

SIMS Memorial Library - text a Librarian

A nice overview by the Librarian in Black.

Michael Arrington writes on Techcrunch.com that it is not so difficult to listen to Podcasts on your phone. He gives a how-to. Neat!

Libraries are surprisingly absent in the phone space...

"A cyclic RSS feed has only a certain number of entries (or "episodes" or "issues" if you want to call them that) and is designed to be read in a specific order. For example, if you were to take Moby Dick and divide it into 100 parts, and publish them all in one huge RSS feed, that would be a cyclic RSS feed. Or you might use it for a 10-part tutorial on saving time searching, or how to use the library, or something like that."

ResearchBuzz.org

Quoted, from Stephen Abram, because I'm too busy to summarize myself:

"the most recent report from The Pew Internet and American Life Project tells us that the downloading of podcasts by Internet users has grown almost 75% in about 6 months. 12% of Internet users have downloaded a podcast according to their survey in Aug. 2006 compared with 7% in Jan/Feb 2006.

What does it mean for libraries?

First, we know that our Internet users have different profiles than our walk-in clients. So we might want to promote different containers for different users. For example, an audio-book users is more likely to be a commuter (highway driving, train, etc.) and might need different marketing and services.

What are the uses of podcasts in libraries?

- Library Tours (can even be downlaoded to smart phones)
- Story hours / Story Time (record your kiddy librarians)
- Information Literacy and Research Help (check out the many already in iTunes, etc.)
- Library updates and library news
- Colldecting and indexing good free podcasts (found through the podcast search engines)
- Local history (collected from veterans, pioneers, local characters, etc.)
- Teen book/DVD/Game reviews (collected by the circulation desk)
- Music collections
- Audiobook collections (ON iPods and MP3 players)
- Library events (like Science Fair help, Literacy nights, author readings)
- Library debates
- Archiving class lectures
- Library marketing podcasts (how to use RSS, databases, VR, etc.)
- Training
- Library gadget petting zoos (for staff and patrons)
- Public speaking training (partnering with groups)"

Despite this growth, most of my students, over 90% don't access or even know what Podcasts are...

Sling Media announced Thursday its first deal with a mobile phone carrier to offer subscribers access to home television on their mobile handsets using the Slingbox device.

C|NET NEWS.com

You can see the migration of content to phones, how long is it going to take for libraries to gain access to cell pnone networks? The web was open, the phone is closed. Are we going to be cut out of the next digital revolution?

Ashley Bleimes (USA Today) wrote a nice peice about 8th graders using blogs in the classroom. They are talking about Guerrilla Season, a civil war era book, and even the author is going the blog. Besides getting students to interact with material and each other, they purposely help students become better writers by organizing ideas, versioning, etc. I love it! Boring essays be gone!

"Less than 10 minutes after the news of Donald Rumsfeld's resignation hit the wires last week, the information was visible to hundreds of thousands of people via the homepage of Digg.com, a social news aggregation site that relies on readers to submit and promote interesting news stories.

According to Digg founder Kevin Rose, the Rumsfeld news was submitted to Digg three minutes after the Associated Press released it; four minutes later, the story had acquired enough "diggs" to jump to the front page of the site. The speed at which the Rumsfeld news--a quick read at only two sentences--was promoted to the front page of Digg "broke a record," said Rose last week at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco.

But the incident is more than a milestone for the social news site: it underscores the power that legions of citizen editors have to determine the importance and timeliness of news. By comparison, Rose said, Google News, a site that uses algorithms to find and establish the importance of news (based on the reputation of news sources), took about 25 minutes to pick up the story."

Kate Greene
MIT Technology Review

Wade Roush of MIT Technology Review makes some interesting comments about the downfall of MySpace:

"My biggest worry about MySpace is that it is undermining the "social" in social networking. The general expectation when one joins a social network is that its other members are actual people. On MySpace, this isn't always so. The movie Jackass: Number Two has a profile on the site, as do Pepsi, NASCAR, and Veronica Mars, the CW network's teen detective. The company interprets the idea of a "profile" so broadly that real people end up on the same footing as products, movies, promotional campaigns, and fictional characters--not exactly the conditions for a new flowering of authentic personal expression."

If you can't control marketers, you'll live a short life...

Thanks largely to Google Earth, released by Google in 2005, finding information linked to geographical locations is becoming far easier. Now, earlier this month, Google unveiled new layers for Google Earth: collections of practical and educational resources related to specific places on the planet.

Icons linking to this mass of information--which is being provided by organizations such as the United Nations, the U.S. National Park Service, National Geographic, and Turn Here, a publisher of city guides--appear atop the Google Earth landscape with the click of a mouse.

Although details such as buildings, national boundaries, and road networks have long been a part of Google Earth, this new "featured content" material represents the website's first official attempt to build what might be described as a geographically indexed world encyclopedia.

MIT Technology Review

A new study by the Educational Testing Service (ETS) suggests that
although college students appear fluent with technology, many are
unable to effectively use computers to solve information problems.
Students are comfortable using technology for leisure and social
activities, but the study indicates that they have much more trouble
evaluating online material and using technology effectively to find
needed information. In the study, which surveyed more than 6,300
college students and high school seniors, fewer than half correctly
identified from several choices the Web site that was objective,
authoritative, and timely.

Inside Higher Ed, 15 November 2006

Duhh!

http://librariesinteract.info

Cybrary City in Second Life
"Some ideas about how Australian Libraries could use the donated Cybrary building:

1. A meeting place for Australian library folk who want to know about Second Life.
2. If a library sees its role as educating their clients about Virtual Worlds,
this could be a good place to hold a class.
3. ALIA could hold section meetings in the SL building, without people needing to
physically gather.
4. National Library could create a display of some of the Flickr Picture
Australia photos.
5. Libraries Australia (or any other catalogue) could have a searchable portal in
the building.
6. As a place to virtually host library folk from other countries
7. As a student project in a library school..create the furtniture, mash up
something amazing, staff an Australian reference desk
8. A venue for Australian writers to give talks.
9. A place for displays like Childrens’ Book Week finalists.
10. Cybrary City has an auditorium and facility for conferencing, so seminars and
presentations could be held there.
11. A place to host Australian Library Week events."

Like usual, the Australians lead the game. I've been saying this for 8 years now.

Disconnects Between Library Culture and Millennial Generation Values
Libraries must consider changes in both policy and technology to remain relevant to the next generation of students
By Robert H. McDonald and Chuck Thomas
EDUCAUSE 29(4)

Quoted:
"Technology Disconnects

Some of the key technology disconnects between libraries and current online communities include:

* Libraries lack tools to support the creation of new-model digital scholarship and to enable the use of Web services frameworks to support information reformatting (for example, RSS) and point-of-need Web-based assistance (multimedia tutorials or instant messaging assistance).
* Dogmatic library protection of privacy inhibits library support for file-sharing, work-sharing, and online trust-based transactions that are increasingly common in online environments, thus limiting seamless integration of Web-based services.
* Ubiquitous handheld access is more prominent thanks to digital lifestyle devices such as smart phones and iPods, yet libraries still focus on digital content for typical desktop PCs.

These stereotypes obviously do not describe every situation. Nonetheless, they indicate the areas in many research libraries that typically need attention.
Policy Disconnects

Drawing a clear line between technology and policy can be difficult. For example, how many of the characteristics of current libraries (identified by the list below) are driven purely by technology or by policy? These traits include:

* Mainly electronic text-based collections with multimedia content noticeably absent
* Constructed for individual use but requires users to learn from experts how to access and use information and services
* Library presence usually "outside" the main online place for student activity (MySpace, iTunes, Facebook, the campus portal, or learning management system)
"

Damned Millenials again...what are we going to do about them?

About XC

"The University of Rochester’s River Campus Libraries is studying how best to develop an open-source online system that can unify access to traditional and digital library resources. With a $283,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the University will begin planning and requirements analysis activities for a new system known as eXtensible Catalog (XC).

XC has the potential to allow future library users at any level of proficiency to get more out of academic library collections and to give academic libraries more control over how best to help people gather information. As envisioned, XC’s simple yet powerful interface will allow users to navigate through comprehensive search results sorted into useful categories that will give them the resources they seek more easily.

As lead institution for the XC project, the University of Rochester will draw upon the combined talents and expertise of existing staff within the University’s River Campus Libraries in the areas of programming, metadata, anthropology, graphic design, user-centered design, and usability testing. The principal investigator for the project is Ronald F. Dow, the Andrew H. and Janet Dayton Neilly Dean of River Campus Libraries, with co-principal investigators David Lindahl, director of digital initiatives; Jennifer Bowen, head of cataloging; and Nancy Fried Foster, lead anthropologist for the libraries. The length of the grant is May 2006 to April 2007.

The first phase of the analysis will produce a plan that will include:

* A survey of related projects that will assess the feasibility of bringing together and building upon work being done at other institutions
* An analysis of freely-available source code that could be incorporated into the development of XC
* Outreach to other academic institutions doing similar work at libraries
* Recommendations for the metadata requirements of the new system, informed by data models that focus on how metadata helps people gather and understand information
* An analysis of existing user studies and recommendations for additional studies of user practices to guide the development of XC
* An analysis of needs for the XC system within academic libraries
* One end result of an XC system may be inexpensive, flexible alternatives to using off-the-shelf software to provide access to library collections.

River Campus Libraries already has a track record of successes with open-source projects, strong institutional support for collaboration and innovation, and a vision for XC’s future as a collaborative project that can benefit academic libraries and their users."

Globe and Mail

"Concerned about the U.S. government's prying eyes, a number of Canadian universities are changing the way their professors and students conduct online research.

Many university libraries subscribe to RefWorks, a popular U.S.-based Internet tool that allows academics and students to create personal accounts and store research information, as well as generate citations and bibliographies.

But the Patriot Act — which grew out of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and which potentially allows U.S. authorities to sweep through databases such as RefWorks — has prompted Canadian postsecondary institutions to abandon the American server for one housed at the University of Toronto.

Canadian university officials worry that if the research is of a sensitive nature, it could be misunderstood."

Seems reasonable. Maybe we should host all their content, since researchers all share this concern.

"The largest collection of book reviews published since 1987 in the print
and online edition of Publishers Weekly has become open access (along with
other materials in Publishers Weekly). Although only the title and some
bibliographic data elements (ISBN, author, publisher, BISAC subject) are
searchable, not the full text itself, the full text of the reviews can be
displayed and printed. The informative reviews help in selecting the most
appropriate books for adults, children and young adults in all genres, and
on all subjects."

Thanks Peter

The 2006 National Survey of Student Engagement, released today, for the first time offers a close look at distance education, offering provocative new data suggesting that e-learners report higher levels of engagement, satisfaction and academic challenge than their on-campus peers.

Insidehighered.com

According to a University of California, Berkeley analysis of search queries from Google and Microsoft, only about 1 percent of all Web pages contain sexually explicit material and only 6 percent of all search queries return sexually explicit Web sites. Said Seth Finkelstein, a programmer and civil-liberties activist, "What we are learning about the Internet is that it reflects life and that it is not -- contrary to what some people might think -- more sexual than people are in general."

Good Morning SiliconValley

John Paczkowski

Here's a great list of free ePrint archives.

Peter's Digital Reference Shelf has an excellent review of the Google Book Project. As I have found, A9.com is better in terms of searching...

Quoted:
"Beyond simple keyword searching, Google’s software seems to be cognitively challenged, to put it nicely, and hinders access to the content, which would deserve at least a functional and half as smart software as Amazon has."

Evaluating the Quality of Internet Information Sources: Consolidated Listing of Evaluation Criteria and Quality Indicators, written by Professors Gene Wilkinson, Lisa Bennett, and Kevin Oliver.

For those in the evaluation game...

Seems, after hearing a audiobook that offended a patron, the topic of libraries rating their books came up. When you think of it it is more reasonable than censorship initiatives. Movies have ratings on them by age group why can't publishers do the same for books? OPAC vendors could then ofer filters by ratings.

SlideShare
"SlideShare - Sharing Your PowerPoint and OpenOffice Presentations a la YouTube", By Luis Suarez.

zSlide
A simple software which enables you to send and receive e-mail attachments of any size without clogging e-mail boxes.

"Film clips featuring stars such as Jack Nicholson, Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz can now be shared online without violating copyright law.

Grouper.com, acquired last August by Sony Pictures Entertainment, is offering snippets from 100 Sony films and TV shows for users to integrate into blogs and on social networking sites such as MySpace, the company said Thursday.

Fans can choose, for example, to have Nicholson appear barking "You can't handle the truth!" (in A Few Good Men) or Marlon Brando declaring "I could have been a contender" (in On the Waterfront).

This is the latest attempt to solve the copyright issue plaguing the video-sharing sector. Hollywood studios and other media companies are cracking down on sites that allow users to upload their copyright material without compensating them. "

C|NET News.com.

Finally! sanity prevails.

Tune Tracker
Tune Tracker software, clients can quickly identify their favourite songs by holding their wireless phone close to a stereo speaker. If the song is part of the your provider's Music catalogue, they can immediately download the song via a link on the phone's display.

"Whether you're out on the town or in da club, TuneTracker records the music you're listening to, and then sends a text message with the name of the song and the artist performing it directly to your phone!" Rogers.

Like.com
This search service located items worm by celebrities. It displays recent photos of thousands of celebrities with a focus on what they are wearing and holding. Overall it displays 4 million product images. Image recognition software to meet a need, I love it!

Gannett Company, the largest U.S. newspaper chain, announced this week that it plans to create stories with information from bloggers and other "citizen journalists". USA Today is hoping this move will help it reverse declining circulation and advertising revenue.

On the flip side, Google wants to buy blocks of advertising space in newspapers to offer advertisers a complete solutions package. Google newspaper feeds are cannibalizing newspaper revenue and now they're offering a greedy olive branch?

strange world.

Stephen Abram recently ranted about something that made me think...you're right. Stephen doe not do that often for me, I usually get annoyed...

"I wonder how much user generated content there is on library websites and what the nature of that content is?

Blog postings
Blog comments
Book reviews
Tags
Presentations
YouTube videos
Podcasts
Board Minutes
eBooks
Art
Photos
Genealogies
Local histories
Club notes
Book clubs
Community meetings
more...

What other types of content from our users do we host? It's certainly a good way to connect to communities and users. How do we make these services more explicit and valued?"

Yup, its a good point indeed. Why do we still have gatekeeper systems?

Gear Up Your Research Guides with the Emerging OPML Codes
by Kimberley Wilcox. Information Today Nov./Dec. 2006.

"Dave Winer, author of the OPML specification, explained that “OPML [is] an XML-based format that allows exchange of outline-structured information between applications running on different operating systems and environments” (http://www.opml.org/about). Simply stated, OPML provides a mechanism for sharing outlines, which can consist of RSS feeds, links, audio and video files, and text.

As an XML format, OPML specifies a standardized set of metadata elements that describe outlines. These metadata elements are quite minimal and are intended to be both human- and machine-readable, which means that anyone with a basic knowledge of XHTML can create OPML files with nothing more than a text editor."

Web 2.0 -- no! But a great development none the less!

Directory of blogs by academic librarians. It is a short list, but most biggies are posted.

Seems call centres are looking into "emotion detection software" to screen ongoing calls for problems. Now that we have VoiP in Virtual Reference, maybe we should jump on the bandwagon!

The Brave New World of Social Bookmarking: Everything You Always Wanted to Know but Were Too Afraid to Ask by Amanda Etches-Johnson.

Cha Cha Underground is a new directory of web link pathfinders. Check it out.

Book Recommendation Engines (List by Stephen Abram)

Amazon

Barnes & Noble

BN BookBrowser

Borders

Suggestica

Inside a Dog (teens)

MySpace Books

Books We Like

OCLC's FictionFinder

All Consuming

LibraryThing

Next Favorite

StoryCode

Rating Zone

Hypatia and AlexLit

WhichBook.net

AllReaders.com

Reader's Robot

gnooks

What is del.icio.us?

del.icio.us is a collection of favorites - yours and everyone else's. You can use del.icio.us to:

* Keep links to your favorite articles, blogs, music, reviews, recipes, and more,
and access them from any computer on the web.
* Share favorites with friends, family, coworkers, and the del.icio.us community.
* Discover new things. Everything on del.icio.us is someone's favorite -- they've
already done the work of finding it. So del.icio.us is full of bookmarks about
technology, entertainment, useful information, and more. Explore and enjoy.

del.icio.us is a social bookmarking website -- the primary use of del.icio.us is to store your bookmarks online, which allows you to access the same bookmarks from any computer and add bookmarks from anywhere, too. On del.icio.us, you can use tags to organize and remember your bookmarks, which is a much more flexible system than folders.

You can also use del.icio.us to see the interesting links that your friends and other people bookmark, and share links with them in return. You can even browse and search del.icio.us to discover the cool and useful bookmarks that everyone else has saved -- which is made easy with tags.

All you need is a browser and an internet connection. Sound good? Here's how to get started. If you'd like to find out more, keep reading.
What can I use del.icio.us for?

del.icio.us is an open-ended system, so you decide how you want to use it. Here are examples of things you can do with saving bookmarks on del.icio.us:

* Research - Writing an article? Researching an industry? Slaving away on your
dissertation? Use del.icio.us to keep track of all the source materials and
commentary that you find online.
* Wishlist - Go to any commerce site, find what you like, save it to del.icio.us
and tag it as wishlist. Then you can tell people to check out your wishlist
bookmarks by giving them a link to http://del.icio.us/username/wishlist .
* Podcast - Want to hear some great podcasts? Visit the mp3+podcast tag
combination and start listening. Are you a podcaster? Start posting your mp3
files to del.icio.us and we will create an RSS feed for you.
* Vacation - Planning a trip? Save links to hotels, activities, and
transportation and use tags like "travel", "vacation", and "to-visit".
Collaborate with friends and family by using the "for:username" tag.
* Linklog - Save bookmarks to interesting websites and add a bit of commentary to
create a lightweight linklog. Then, use linkrolls or the daily blog posting
feature to include your del.icio.us bookmarks on your blog or website.
* Cookbook - Whenever you find a great recipe on a website, save it to
del.icio.us. Tag it with the recipe's ingredients or style of cooking, and then
when you're wondering what to make for dinner, you can use your saved bookmarks
to help you remember the perfect recipe.
* Collaboration - Friends, coworkers, and other groups can use a shared account,
special tag, or their del.icio.us networks to collect and organize bookmarks
that are relevant -- and useful -- to the entire group.


Okay, I'm lazy. I cut and pasted this.

Other options: List

Qwika searches 21,964,380 articles in 1,158 wikis.

Here's a great piece on how FlickR is proving that Folksonomies work. Librarians stop resisting! Library of Congress, you're going down baby!

I knew there were lots of feed aggregators out there, but geez. The Shifted Librarian has a short list that demonstrates the challenge of keeping up.

Free Software and Open Source Symposium was a blast this year. The recorded talks are archived here. Lots of good stuff on DRM, Creative Commons, etc.

Marilyn R. Pukkila posted in the ACRLBlog, seeing what I see every day, Millenials who've never heard of Podcasts, Blogs, MySpace, BitTorrent and the like. Take that Stephen Abram!

Quoted:
"Our college now podcasts shows intended to convey to students information about the campus, its people, and its major events. I was wondering how we could work in a story about the libraries, and mentioned this to a group of students at dinner one night. They replied, “What’s a podcast?”

Out of two first years, three sophomores, and a junior, only one of them had heard of podcasting, and only because their parents used it.

We had a library pizza lunch for members of our student government, the campus movers and shakers. I mentioned podcasting to three of them, and was met with blank stares. I then launched into an explanation of Second Life, and the ways some librarians were exploring it for instruction possibilities. Their response? “Why would anyone want to spend time with that?”

So just who is it that’s driving all this social computing, anyway? I may be asking a small pool of users, but it’s MY pool. If they don’t know anything about these technologies, and if they feel that librarians in MySpace or Facebook are peering through the open curtains of their (perceived) student-only spaces, then why would I want to spend all the time it would take for me to become fluent in them? Is it to get ready for their younger siblings (according to the Pew study)? Or would I be better off spending the time asking students how THEY want to receive information from me?"

There's alot of hype out there, I'm not seeing it. Yes more and more students are using laptops with wireless internet, IM'g all the time and know about Youtube. BUt they work jobs, commute from far, many don't have 8 hours a day to play around social networking. You kknow what I see in the classroom, those that fit the sterotypical Millenial, the tech immersed, do the least well in courses, because, well, they're playing instead of working.

Quoted from BlogwithoutalibraryMarch 24, 2006:

"CiL: SMS in Libraries: The Killer Ap?

John Iliff, Palinet
John devoted the first half of his presentation to the extent to which SMS (short message service) took the telecom industry by storm (500 billion text messages are sent per year!) and is permeating our culture. Everything from Pam Anderson advertising for Virgin Mobile to viral text campaigns to register young voters, to the political impact of texting in the creation of smart mobs. He also covered some of the basics of the technology:

* each message is limited to 160 characters
* GSM is the basic standard for text messaging, although there are competing standards in the US
* there is a basic cost involved (usually 10 cents per message) for those who send and receive text messages

He then highlighted a few libraries that are using SMS for reference services, which I’ll list here for reference:

* Southeastern Louisiana University (using Altarama, costs approx $1300 per year)
* Curtin (over 70% of the student body are texters, so they jumped in!
* Helsinki university of technology (using a product called Liblet for patron messages)
* Swinburne University of Technology

Does a library need a vendor to make this happen or can they do it themselves? According to John, it is doable with a cellular modem and software (gnokki, SMSGateway for Windows, Ozekisms for linux and windows), but should they? John’s final analysis is that SMS is not “the killer app”, nor is it ubiquitous or life-changing. But as long as usage grows and as long we we can see it sticking around for the forseeable future, we should be offering the service. In closing: 500 billion messages a year, why aren’t we there?"

I'm blown away...

Library Marketing-Thinking Outside the Book.

Resources, readings, news and ideas for librarians who seek outside-the-book marketing innovations for their libraries.

Great Marketing blog...

Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography (SEPB),
Scholarly Electronic Publishing Resources (SEPR), and
the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog (SEPW) have been moved to:

http://www.digital-scholarship.com/

SEPB
http://www.digital-scholarship.com/sepb/sepb.html

SEPR
http://www.digital-scholarship.com/sepb/sepr.htm

SEPW
http://www.digital-scholarship.com/sepb/sepw.htm

Item #1 of my bibliography on Millenials (argh).

Educause.

Stephen Abram talks about his chosen ones.

Disconnects Between Library Culture and Millennial Generation Values.

N. Howe and W. Strauss, Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation (New York: Vintage Books, 2000).

The Millennials : Americans born 1977 to 1994 / by the New Strategist editors. Ithaca , N.Y. : New Strategist Publications, c2004.

Lancaster, Lynne. When generations collide : traditionalists, baby boomers, generation xers, millennials : who they are, why they clash, how to solve the generational puzzle at work / Lynne C. Lancaster and David Stillman. New York : HarperBusiness, c2002.

Diana G. Oblinger and James L. Oblinger, Editors. Educating the Net Generation. The magna carta that started it all.

The MILLENNIALS COME to CAMPUS About Campus , Jul2001, Vol. 6 Issue 3, p6, 7p

Advice for (and from) the Young at Heart: Understanding the Millennial Generation. By: Atkinson, Michael L.. Guidance & Counseling , Summer2004, Vol. 19 Issue 4, p153-157, 5p.

The Next Great Generation? By: Brownstein, Andrew. Chronicle of Higher Education , 10/13/2000, Vol. 47 Issue 7, pA71, 2p

The Net Generation in the Classroom. By: Carlson, Scott. Chronicle of Higher Education , 10/7/2005, Vol. 52 Issue 7, pA34-A37, 4p, 3c

Millennials coming to college. By: DeBard, Robert. New Directions for Student Services , Summer2004 Issue 106, p33-45, 13p

The generation Z connection: teaching information literacy to the newest net generation. By: Geck, Caroline. Teacher Librarian , Feb2006, Vol. 33 Issue 3, p19-23, 5p

The 'millennials' come of age. By: Sharon Jayson. USA Today , 06/29/2006.

Sweeney, R.T. (October 5, 2005). Higher education for multi-taskers. Chronicle of Higher Education Colloquy. Available here.

WikiBibliography. a bit dated, but a good starting point.

With video and music downloads gobbling up Internet
bandwidth at an ever-expanding pace, Canadian cable company
Videotron is pushing for content providers like movie
studios to share some of the cost to expand broadband
pipelines. Videotron boss Robert Depatie wants the federal
government to slap a transmission tariff on providers — like
the music and film industry — so they can shoulder part of
the burden.

Canadian Press.

Student Public Interest Research Groups (PIRGs)conducted a new survey to identify textbooks that exemplify the textbook industry’s publishing tactics. In the fall of 2006, they interviewed faculty members, walked through bookstores and interviewed bookstore staff to uncover textbooks that reveal six types of textbook industry gimmicks: increased prices; costly bundles; new covers, withdrawn old books; new types of bundles; deceptive low cost options and limited print runs to cut down the used book market. Their report is here.

Students don't want to pay for books, they're in business, so both side continue to spar. I'd like to see book costs rolled into course registration fees, to eliminate the jockeying, copyright infringment and general complaining.

Violet Blue's SF Chronicle column this week, about YouTube's more porn-friendly cousins. Here's a snip from BoingBoing:

As content delivery evolves, porn, as an extension of human sexual expression, follows. The Flickr spin-off sites are a great example: Flickrchicks, Adult Flickr, FlickrBooty (all defunct) and several others made up for what Flicker's TOU couldn't, or wouldn't, deliver (yet appeared on the site, regardless). These sites essentially skimmed Flickr for hotties to repost in babelog-style form and pull in affiliate click-through revenue, many knowing full well that the pictures they link to have a limited life span.

Many businesses have flourished where others decidedly feared to tread, rather than creating a healthy, inclusive and lucrative business structure. Where Google's AdSense wouldn't go, AdBrite mopped up the revenue. And when PayPal decided that grown-up money was filthy lucre, a whole host of adult transaction services were eager to Dumpster-dive for PayPal's sizable leavings.

Similarly, early this year sites like (NSFW) HotTube.wordpress.com and (NSFW) DudeTube.blogspot.com sprang up in the tradition of the Flickr spin-off babe sites, making the most of YouTube's easily accessed user-submitted content and its inconceivably exponential growth rate. Simply sifting through YouTube for porn and coming up with the goods over and over again and then reposting the juicy finds was enough to make these sites merit repeat visits for viewers.

SecurityFocus's Scott Granneman says that when you unwrap your copy of Vista, you "agree" not to publish damning information about the OS -- benchmarks, security vulnerabilities -- except under terms dictated by Microsoft (and those terms can change at any time).

No right to complain about what you bought...I'm sure that will work.

Two years after opening its MSN Music store to compete with Apple Computer's iTunes, Microsoft plans to stop selling downloads from the site, CNET News.com has learned.

How long Microsoft will support this content is anyone's guess, I'm guessing 5 years max. Then you're out of luck.

The Web is worth celebrating.

Quoted...
OneWebDay is one day a year when we all - everyone around the physical globe - can celebrate the Web and what it means to us as individuals, organizations, and communities.

As with Earth Day - an inspiration and model for OneWebDay - it’s up to the celebrants to decide how to celebrate. We encourage all celebrations! Collaboration, connection, creativity, freedom.

By the end of the day, the Web should be just a little bit better than it was before, and we’ll be able to see our connection to it more clearly.

OneWebDay is September 22 every year, starting in 2006.

Seedwiki is a nice wiki service. Alot of profesors are using it.

Metacafe actually screen its content and pays posters based on number of viewings. Matrix for Real is the top clip thus far, and the author has received more than $23 000 to date (Toronto Metro Paper).

Marian Dworaczek is trying to keep a list of all library related conferences. Far from complete, but a great starting point.

James

Just more than a year ago, the National Institute of Standards and Technology built an online database to help organizations track security flaws in popular software products.

The National Vulnerability Database Web site is on pace to receive 25 million hits per year, according to NIST, so users obviously like it. And the need for it has never been greater. The database, which began with a list of 12,000 vulnerabilities, recently hit 20,000, with no sign of slowing.

http://www.fcw.com.

"MySpace took steps on Monday to eliminate unauthorized music from reaching the site. To do it, MySpace turned to a new technology from audio-recognition company Gracenote that identifies waveforms unique to every digital recording.

Gracenote scans music downloaded to MySpace and cross checks songs with those in the Emeryville, Calif., company's 10 million-song database, according to Jim Hollingsworth, Gracenote's senior vice president of sales and marketing. The system only needs a few seconds worth of music to identify the music and discern whether a song is copyrighted."

News.com

Some day courseware systems will be audited in a similar way...

"The idealists who conceived and pioneered the Web described a kind of enlightened utopia built on mutual understanding, a world in which knowledge is limited only by one's curiosity. Instead, we have constructed a virtual Wild West, where the masses indulge their darkest vices, pirates of all kinds troll for victims, and the rest of us have come to accept that cyberspace isn't the kind of place you'd want to raise your kids. The great multinational exchange of ideas and goodwill has devolved into a food fight. And the virtual marketplace is a great place to get robbed. The answers to the great questions of our world may be out there somewhere, but finding them will require you to first wade through an ocean of misinformation, trivia and sludge. We have been sold a bill of goods. We're paying for it through automatic monthly withdrawals from our PayPal accounts."

Maclean's Steve Maich says the Internet sucks.

E-SYSTEMS: A COLUMN ON E-RESOURCES MANAGEMENT AND ACCESS
INFRASTRUCTURES

Gary Ives, Column Editor
Texas A&M University Libraries
College Station, TX 77843-5000
gives@lib-gw.tamu.edu

As libraries have purchased more and more e-content, the challenges of
managing and providing access to it all have rapidly grown by leaps.
And as libraries, agents, publishers, and system providers develop new
systems and standards to support the management and delivery of
e-content, we all (including our users) have become increasingly reliant
on the new interdependent infrastructures we are building to contain,
manage, deliver, and preserve the e-content our culture produces.

Serials Librarian is launching this new column to focus on hot-topic as
well as slow-burn developments and issues in e-resource management and
access infrastructures. From home-grown systems to commercially
produced products; from the traditional ILS systems to link resolvers,
federated search platforms, and the newly emerging ERMs; from ERMI to
ERMI2; from LOCKSS, CLOCKSS, Portico and SUSHI to whatever next appears
from over the horizon.

Wikiweb.de.

WikiMatrix.org.

Shopping for a wiki, check these out.

LibraryThing is an online service to help people catalog their books easily. You can access your catalog from anywhere—even on your mobile phone. Because everyone catalogs together, LibraryThing also connects people with the same books, comes up with suggestions for what to read next, and so forth.

Seems like overkill to me.

The Motion Picture Association of America announced October 20 a new education program in conjunction with the Los Angeles Area Boy Scouts of America. The curriculum (PDF file) is part of an ongoing effort to educate kids about copyright protection, and offers a chance for scouts to earn the Respect Copyrights patch.

Seems the idea of teaching kids from kindergarden up, "just say yes to licensing" is not going away.

The Motion Picture Association of America announced October 20 a new education program in conjunction with the Los Angeles Area Boy Scouts of America. The curriculum (PDF file) is part of an ongoing effort to educate kids about copyright protection, and offers a chance for scouts to earn the Respect Copyrights patch.

Seems the idea of teaching kids from kindergarden up, "just say yes to licensing" is not going away.

Ten years ago, Yale University spent $300,000 to access 10 electronic databases, according to Ann Okerson, associate university librarian. In its most recent fiscal year, Yale spent $5 million on 900 separate databases...

Wall Street Journal, Oct. 21

My question is, is the usage the same, more or less, in other words are they getting their money's worth?

OLITA has a new blog to report on the tech goings on in Ontario. Hopefully people will post what they're up to.

MsDewey is playing with what future search engines will offer, an avatar. Right now it looks like the search engine of a madman.

By streaming video of popular television programs over the Web, a self-described peer-to-peer service called TVUPlayer has begun to draw a loyal worldwide following.

The service, however, could also become an enticing target for Hollywood legal eagles with an eye out for copyright infringement.

http://news.com.com/2100-1025_3-6128775.html

Slingbox to the next level.

Google has Blogger, now for Wikis they have JotSpot. Ya gotta love it...