Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

Google Magazines – Top 20 Titles

Tuesday, November 17th, 2009

This is a subset of my list that has all titles as of November, 2009, when Google announced that they would provide their own list. The titles below are my subjective picks, based on generality of interest and/or length of availability. American Motorcyclist, Feb 1955 – July 2005 Backpacker, Spring 1973 – ...

Keep the Ball Rolling: Twitter & Blogging Together

Thursday, November 12th, 2009

I recently fell into a nice little example of how tweets "accumulate wisdom" as they get retweeted -- Starting with a simple "link to a good site" sort of tweet, then someone finds an especially good specific page down inside the good site and retweets that, then the next retweeter ...

Steve Jobs’ Legacy: To Save Publishing with the Tablet?

Friday, November 6th, 2009

John C. Abell, in his recent Wired article Steve Jobs’ Legacy Is the Missing Clue to the Apple Tablet, suggests that in the same way that he invigorated animated film with Pixar, the music industry with iTunes, and the mobile phone market with the iPhone, Jobs' next mission is to ...

Roy Tennant & the Onion on Weeding the Internet

Friday, November 6th, 2009

I love serendipity -- I happened to see these two pieces on the same day recently, and couldn't help putting them together. Is there a meaning somewhere here? .... Information on the Internet That Should Go Away, Roy Tennant This is the kind of information I wish would disappear: old, outdated, in ...

Google Books Integrated into Google Search Results

Friday, October 30th, 2009

The recent controversy about the Google Book Search Settlement seems to have taken up peoples' Google-watching attention so much that advances in the way GBS actually works have been getting overlooked. Several notable improvements were made during the summer, for example, that got very little recognition. Another change that seems ...

Google Book Search a Hot Topic? NOT!

Wednesday, October 28th, 2009

Searching for talk on Google Books and the Settlement since Judge Denny Chin delayed the decision on October 7, I've been finding very little -- What had been a stream of chatter in Twitter searches has turned into a trickle. I found a little example reflecting this today that I ...

Why Apple & Google Win – And Libraries Don’t

Thursday, October 22nd, 2009

Many possible takes on this picture. What comes to my mind first is the idea of the Attention Economy --The idea that in the days of the traditional library, before the Internet, information was a limited resource. Libraries could afford to work under the assumption that "we've got the good ...

MedlinePlus Needs a New Name

Wednesday, October 21st, 2009

Google Health OneBox is a boost for NLM's MedlinePlus -- As discussed previously, though, a few tweaks could make it an even bigger boost. A problem not discussed in the previous article is the "MedlinePlus" name -- It has little user recognition, and therefore gets considerably less traffic than it ...

MedlinePlus & Google Health OneBox

Thursday, October 15th, 2009

In August, Google launched Google Health OneBox (left). This puts the National Library of Medicine's Medline Plus right at the top of the search results, and is potentially a valuable new source of traffic for NLM. There are factors, however, that work against MLP -- The three prominent links on the ...

Tagging in Hardin MD — History

Thursday, October 15th, 2009

[This article accompanies previous article: Tagging in Hardin MD] Soon after the launching of Hardin MD, in 1996, we began adding keywords in the hidden META keyword field (The first pages for HMD in Internet Archive [Dec, 1998] show them on all pages checked.) We began checking to see if HMD ...