Break the Confines of Keyword Search

An interesting new search engine is being developed based on natural language processing. The following is from their Press Release of September 17, 2007:

Powerset is building a consumer search engine based on breakthrough natural language processing technology licensed from PARC and developed internally. Unlike other search engines that index keywords, Powerset does a deep linguistic analysis on every sentence it reads. Powerset extracts and indexes facts about every sentence in every page, making its index the first truly robust semantic index of the web. Powerset will offer a transformative search experience, with better, more relevant results. Powerset Labs is an online community that will contribute to the development of Powerset and allow the company a direct line of communication with consumers to better understand the potential, possibilities, and challenges of building a large-scale search engine.

Some related articles:

• The Risks to Google's Rise
• The Human Touch That May Loosen Google's Grip

Advertising in Facebook

Here are two interesting articles about the new Facebook model of advertising that came up in our class discussion this week:

http://money.cnn.com/2007/11/08/technology/facebook_ads.fortune/index.htm?postversion=2007110908

http://techland.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2007/11/06/big-advertisers-are-facebooks-new-friends/

Interactive scholarly edition of Roland

A scholarly edition that lets you "construct" or read your own version of the text based on your choices of theme, character, image, or section. This wouldn't work for me in IE, but did work for me in Firefox. Start by selecting an excerpt from the left-hand column, then scroll over the characters or themes in the center (sword) column and you'll see the relevant sections of the text are highlighted in the right column. Click on a center column link and you're given a selected group of excerpts to work with on the left.

Penguin's web 2.0 features

For books, I usually go to Barnes and Noble or Amazon, but this assignment prompted me to look around at some of the big book publishers. Penguin has a good site with a blog (doesn't look like a popular feature) and podcasts. They list 'top 5's' as well, but it isn't clear if this is from any rating system or not. I don't see a way to vote for them, but perhaps it is accumulated from what people buy from the site.

Random House also has blogs and podcasts, but the blogs again look like news clips written by staff to sell the books.

Making a standard blogger template into three columns

http://tips-for-new-bloggers.blogspot.com/2007/08/three-columns-dots-template.html
offers fairly simple directions for editing the XML code of several standard blogger templates to add a third column. I had no success trying to get downloaded non-blogger templates to work before I discovered this option.

Audible.com

I just signed up for an account at Audible.com after seeing an ad on the Subway train for it

Audible specializes in providing digital audio editions of books, newspapers and magazines, original programming, and TV and radio subscriptions. Consumers buy and download audio content from http://www.audible.com/

It's 14.95 a month to be a member ...but every month you get a FREE download of an audio book (most books run between $20 to $40 so it's a pretty good deal to go and get the audio version from audible dot com)

I downloaded 2 audio books:

I Am America (And So Can You!)
by Stephen Colbert

Hollywood Hulk Hogan
by (wrestler) Hulk Hogan

Most people download audio to their PCs and Macs and then transfer the audio to MP3 players, personal digital assistants (PDAs), or to smart mobile devices (SMDs) for listening on the go. Others "burn" the content to audio CDs.... many howevere simply listen at their computers.

you can listen to a SAMPLE of the following book for FREE off of the site
The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More

HELP GUIDE: Installing Blogger XML Templates

The first thing you do is download the template from the website. Go to http://www.google.com/ and type in keywords like "XML, Blogger, Templates" (This is just one sample... feel free to try others) ....

This will lead you to webpages that offer "Templates" to download... after choosing one you like.... download and save the file to your desktop.

Once you’ve done that your file will be in a .xml or .txt format It’s not necessary to open the file though, you can use the automated file uploader built into Blogger’s control panel.

This makes it easy to install a new template.

BY THE WAY..... when building the BLOG... loading up the template should be the first thing you do... because as we saw in class that day... when you try to change the template ...you may loose some widgets in the process.

Hope this guide helps... I had a tough time with this last week.... looking foward to class on NOV 8th ! :)

Class Resumes 8 November

Session 6 is on for this Thursday!

Please remember to post any interesting "Book Publishing" sites that make use of interactive publishing techniques.

I look forward to seeing all of you there.

National Novel Writing Month

This site convinces would-be authors to stop procrastinating and just write something, anything that totals 50,000 words, in the month of November. It's kind of competition, but everyone who completes the word count wins the prize... which is, not really anything except the respect of your fellow NaNoWriMo'ers. I'm sure a lot of people have heard of this already, but the website has developed into its own community where you can read excerpts from users and check out who's been published, etc.

Roughly related—but not really relevant until February—is the RPM challenge where people attempt to write and record an entire album of music (10 songs or 35 minutes) in the month of February.

-B.Miller

Web 2.0 and Vanity Presses

Commercial book publishers have been criticized for fearing the paradigm shift of the Internet, and for being slow to integrate new technologies into their websites and their marketing strategies. Because I do freelance reviewing, I spend a lot of time wading through the websites of the larger presses, and I can attest that they're a real drag to search and navigate—fifteen different imprints of the same title to scroll past, genres with too much content to browse, etc. However, companies that offer self-publishing have apparently not been so lethargic. In fact, one of the prizes in the Books category of the 2007 Web 2.0 awards was given to www. lulu.com, a company that offers self-publishing services.

If you want to play around, you can log in as InteractivePublishing, with the password intpub. The site is definitely very Web 2.0—a web-based platform (with upselling of additional special services—marketing, translation, packaging, etc.), wherein they offer the technology, and you control your own content and design. Not only that, but you can sell your book right on the site and buy books from other self-publishers. You can join groups for children's authors, horror writers, etc., or you can create your own community. There's a blog, live chat, multimedia and so on.

Most importantly, there's a rating system. Usually vanity presses are disparaged because of the lack of quality control—scholarly and commercial reviews can't get involved with their lists because there'd be so much schlock to wade through. But although Lulu will facilitate the publication of anything and everything, there is a pre-screening process powered by its users, so it might actually have a shot at competing with commercial presses in terms of getting press and selling copies.

Project Gutenburg has nothing to do with vanity presses, but it is kind of Web. 2.0. They offer totally free access to online books that are no longer under copyright. It's accomplished almost entirely by volunteers. I used to be a volunteer proofreader with them, using their all-Web interface. There are cross-platform capabilities, and although there isn't actually voting, the site does track and publicize the top downloads. Moreover, the site is extremely vocal and committed about the freedom to download, share, distribute information, which seems almost as much Web 2.0 as RSS feeds.