FT.com Home UK
“The BBC’s lessons for America”
By Lawrence Lessig. Financial Times,
September 8 2003.
“The US administration remains captured by a simplistic and fundamentally misguided idea: that if some control is good, then more control must be better. That idea is simply wrong.”
Guardian Unlimited | World Latest | Dewey Decimal Owner Sues ‘Library’ Hotel. AP, Guardian,
September 21, 2003. Alas, not a joke. OCLC owns the Dewey Decimal system and it is suing a hotel in Manhattan for trademark infringement because
each floor is dedicated to one of Dewey’s 10 categories.
The Shifted Librarian: Tuesday, September 16, 2003
Examples:
“U.S. public library cardholders outnumber Amazon customers by almost 5 to 1…. Each day, U.S. libraries circulate nearly 4 times more items than Amazon handles.”
“U.S. libraries circulate 1,947,600,000 items a year”
commons-blog: Contemplating Banned Books and Scanned Books
Pointers and excerpts here to “a couple of fabulous posts on librarianship that are especially pertinent given that we are just coming out of a week of battle with John Ashcroft (with more to come, no doubt) and just heading into Banned Books Week (September 21 to 27).”
OpenOffice.org Bibliographic Project
Open Office, the successor to “StarOffice,”
is an open source alternative to MS Office. It is intended as
an office suite that will run on all major platforms and provide access to all functionality and data through open-component based APIs and an XML-based file format.
The “Bibliographic” project intends to provide a comprehensive and high quality bibliographic function within OpenOffice. The planned bibliographic function will utilise the latest open standards and will make the fullest use of emerging XML technology.
RollingStone.com Artist Search
RSS isn’t just about blogs. RSS feeds can be created from almost any structured information. An excellent use of RSS is to turn the results of a search of a site into RSS.
Rolling Stone magazine has done just that with its artist search which resturns an RSS feed as a result. This allows you to keep up with Rolling Stone coverage of an artist. Ex-cellent!
Spy: Writing: Weblogging (Spiked)
A draft of an article to appear next week. “Nico Macdonald puts Weblogging in the context of the history of online publishing, explaining its novelty and value, and indicating where it needs to innovate. He concludes with a proposal encouraging publishers to properly embrace the Weblogging model.”
Academics sidelined in battle against computer worms
by Declan Butler,
Nature 425, 228 (18 September 2003); doi:10.1038/425228b.
The US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has decided to classify a major research programme aimed at building defences against computer worms. The move has angered scientists who argue that both universities and the military would benefit if some of the project’s results were published openly.
The Center for Democracy & Technology reported today that “GAO Finds Ashcroft FOIA Policy Has Impact on Fewer Agencies than Expected”. Seems that agencies are aware of Ashcroft’s 2001 memo to agencies requiring a change in freedom of information standards, but *only* 31% have decreased their release of information.
Waypath Buzz Maker
Interesting… Connections, trends. This engine returnes a graph that shows you word frequency of each term on blogs over the past 10 weeks. You can enter up to five topics and build a “Buzz-o-meter graph,” then click on the graph to visit the blogs that included the words you searched for.