Comments for Seeing the picture

Comment on Google Books : Color & PDF by Patrick LaFollette

Patrick LaFollette — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 22:18:34 +0000

Presumably Google books now photographs book pages in color then renders them into binary during the PDF compression process. This usually works well enough for text, but it often trashes the plates, especially the hand colored plates in 19th century natural history works, rendering them into useless black and white blobs. Does Google provide any way of accessing the original photographs from which the PDFs are made?

Comment on MedlinePlus & Google Health OneBox by Kari Simon

Kari Simon — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 19:46:23 +0000

I didn’t even know Google Health existed. Thanks for addressing this. I agree that symptoms are what folks will be looking for. That’s what I look for!

Comment on Twitter’s power to inform : Swine flu by Scott La Plant

Scott La Plant — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 18:47:35 +0000

It’s not just twitter, the Internet has the power to misinform. It’s up to the end-user to do their due diligence and research the facts before jumping to conclusions.

Comment on Visualization with Twitter Venn diagrams by Scott La Plant

Scott La Plant — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 18:44:12 +0000

I never thought to utilize Venn Diagrams for Twitter, or for Tweets for that matter. Twitter Venn is great and I wouldn’t have found out about it with you, thanks

Comment on More Metadata Problems in Google Books?: Word Clouds by Arash Jooracbhi

Arash Jooracbhi — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 10:48:43 +0000

Hi Eric,

Thanks for you response, I came to the same conclusion.

I am starting a datamining project in which I am planning to use these word clouds and hoping there might be an easier way than HTML parsing to access them. Are they accessible through GBS API? I could not find any document on that. Cuurently I am using http queries like this: http://www.google.com/books/feeds/volumes?max-results=20&q=“query” to search books and get the results in XML but those results do not contain the word clouds.

Also Diego confimed my suspicions that they are using TF/IDF but I am now wondering how they convert the TF/IDF value to different font sizes and if there is anyway to retrive the original TF/IDF value for each term.

Thanks,
Arash

Comment on Keep the Ball Rolling: Twitter & Blogging Together by Eric Rumsey

Eric Rumsey — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 22:20:42 +0000

Frank, Thanks for Keeping the Ball Rolling with your comment! … Before publishing, I labored a good bit over the title, and I do like “Keep the Ball Rolling …” But I also like your idea of Blog-Tweet *Synergy* — If I’d thought of it myself, I might have used it in the title. I’ll keep it in mind for future use

Comment on More Metadata Problems in Google Books?: Word Clouds by Eric Rumsey

Eric Rumsey — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 18:59:42 +0000

Arash, I just did a little random survey in Google Book Search, and I find that word clouds are included for all books in GBS, except the ones with “No preview available.”

Comment on More Metadata Problems in Google Books?: Word Clouds by Arash Joorabchi

Arash Joorabchi — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 18:45:17 +0000

I am also wondering if there is any rough estimate of the number of books that do have this feature.

Comment on iPhone 3.0 & the eBook market by Dr. Rory Lewis

Dr. Rory Lewis — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 18:04:00 +0000

I have been waiting myself for the Hodgkin and Shatzkin’s comments on the eBook market and particularly how they believe the iTablet will replace books for students. I have not heard a tweet — or anything. I am also surprised that Ben Parr, and the mashable.com scene have not seen the iTablet avalanche heading their way.

Dr. Rory Lewis
University of Colorado at Colorado Springs.
Computer Science: Epilepsy Prediction
http://rorylewis.com/apple/

Comment on Keep the Ball Rolling: Twitter & Blogging Together by Eric Rumsey

Eric Rumsey — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 15:50:34 +0000

Graham, Sounds like you’re the one to do it … You could start here and here.