Ramblings, citations and "brainwaves" of a college librarian in Toronto. 475 square feet refers to the size of my home, not the size of my office or library.



Mahalo.com


Human Powered Search, so they say. We've heard this before....


Future of the Web?


See Windowcity.com. Is this the future of the web? It is a bit creepy, but I can see it evolving. Websites with only images and text are going to go the way of the dodo. Video clips are already going mainstream.


eBay for Cheaters: Essaybay.com


Essaybay.com: a person needing an essay posts their essay topic and criteria, such as necessary focuses and length. Writers then bid on the item, stating their price and their qualifications. The buyer chooses an offer.
The company says: "Don't blame us for poor assessment methods".



brijit.com

Story from the National Post


Wikipedia at a Crossroads


Wikipedia showed us just how weak traditional print publishing channels were in providing basic information about topics of interest. You find topics in Wikipedia you find nowhere else via dictionaries, encyclopedias and handbooks. Now their are rumors they may clamp down on the topics covered to "gain credibility". I hope not. Then we'll have to start all over again...



A major challenge for colleges that want to post lecture
materials on the Web involves making sure they have permission to
use the copyrighted images from journals and other sources that
professors have put in their slides. Today the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology announced that it has reached a deal with
Elsevier, one of the largest journal publishers, to allow a
limited amount of material from its journals to be used in MIT's
OpenCourseWare project.

The agreement allows the project to use up to three illustrations per journal
article, and up to 100 words of text.


Google Relaunches JotSpot Wikis


"The JotSpot wiki service which offered spreadsheet functionality, photo pages, calendars, and file storage, within their wikis has been in limbo since Google’s acquisition of the company in late 2006. According to TechCrunch, Google has relaunched the application as Google Sites, a free service with up to 10 GB of storage. Wiki authors can embed Google Docs and Calendars into their wikis as well as YouTube videos, and make their sites public or private. Like the former JotSpot service, Google Sites’ wikis seem easily adaptable as intranets, team websites, virtual classrooms, or family organizers."

iLibrarian





"A national workplace survey reports that more than seven in ten American white collar workers feel inundated with information at their workplace, while more than two in five feel that they are headed for an information "breaking point."

Lexis Nexis


Really Cool New Books Website Display




Okay, it was only a matter of time.

Ryerson University is going after a student who created a Facebook group to crowdsource a course assignment/take home test. Yes the students should know better, but why is the professor not disciplined too? The assignment should be crowdsourcing resistent. They are as much to blame for making cheating so easy.

Like I always tell folks, if you leave a new bike at the end of your lawn and somebody takes it, you are only to blame. Teachers who fail to properly update assignments each semester, to reflect local contexts, are not victims, but are simply careless. Harsh? Perhaps, but it is true. It takes two to tango.



Paramount Pictures will make clips from thousands of its movies available for use on the Internet, teaming with developer FanRocket to launch the VooZoo application on Facebook. The service gives Facebook users access to footage from thousands of movies to share with friends. Bravo!


Getting Books to Circulate


I love this great idea of a book display based on colour of cover. Now if only I could get money for furniture.



Thanks Stephen.


He Said, She Said, They Said



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