False Alarm

Unfortunately, the scheduled Thursday nights in June and July conflicted with a lot of my business travel so I had to back out. I have given NYU some great leads on my replacement. The class is sure to be great even without yours truly.

I'm Teaching Again!

Yes, its true. I am lined up to teach again this summer - June through July. The class is called
Crossing the Digital Divide What Print Professionals Need to Know. I am still trying to decide whether to host it at my place or at a NYU computer lab on 42nd Street. Any thoughts on this would be most appreciated. Have a look at the class description and let me know if you have any questions.

SeaDragon Rocks the Hard Rock

Last year Microsoft demonstrated their SeaDragon software that easily allowed users to zoom in dynamically on images. This tech is now part of Silverlight 2 and referred to as Deep Zoom.

A great example can be found at the
Hard Rock Memorabilia site

John Udell also commented on this tech here going into some depth about the facility for making persistent links to parts of the images.

Definitely worth a look!

Ask.com Leaves General Search Market

I was blown away to learn that just this week that Ask.com announced that it would be narrowing its search engine to focus on topics for women in their late 30s and older, who already make up a disproportionate amount of Ask’s users. According to newly appointed CEO Jim Safka. (Summary at TechCrunch) Ask will lay off about 40 employees, or 8 percent of its work force.
With Yahoo and Microsoft continuing to duke it out over a potential takeover, it certainly seems like Google has even more room now to continue to balloon further into the unstoppable monster that it has become.

A Unit of Knowledge

KnolStuff.com is a new social networking community for Google's Open Encyclopedia.


From the site: The days of our beloved, AD-FREE, one-spot knowledge source for all our questions, Wikipedia, might be numbered. Google, the giant search and advertising company, has announced Knol ("which stands for a unit of knowledge") as an alternative to Wikipedia.

Netscape gone!?! The end of an era.

While this probably comes as no surprise to anyone. "Netscape Navigator, now owned by AOL, will no longer be supported after 1 March 2008, the company has said." See article by BBC here. For those of us old timers it is a sad day. Mozilla/Netscape helped get many of us started. I remember eagerly awaiting the new release of Netscape to see what cool new HTML thing I could code. It was also fun riding the rapids between the HTML "standards" of IE and Netscape.

Well its legacy is not dead. It lives on in the Mozilla open source community. If you haven't already given Firefox and Flock a try. You may never go back to IE.

The lights may be out Netscape, but you will never be forgotten.

The Global Mashup, I mean Encyclopedia, of Life

Amazing project spearheaded by E.O. Wilson; described in the NY Times at http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/26/science/26ency.html

NYU SCPS Center New Course Catalog

NYU has updated their course catalog.

Have a look at their new and improved site.

Enjoy.

5 Minute Videos

5min.com is comprised of video shorts on all matter of practical topics. According to the site "5min is a place to find short video solutions for every practical question and is also a place for people who want to share their knowledge. 5min's vision is simple: any solution can be visually explained in 5 minutes. Show us your skills! Join 5min and spread your knowledge!"

Go check it out. It's fun and very interactive.

Knowledgebase on Common Models/Standards for Hosting Raw Data and Grey Literature

The Future Lab Committee of the STM trade organization (of which I am part of) will likely be creating a knowledge base/wiki on the common models/standards that people are using for hosting raw research data and grey literature. This effort is not meant to create a central repository for this type of content but rather an information space for publishers and others to learn about efforts that are already underway. The intention is to categorize these initiatives but subject area.

If you know about any of the efforts around standardizing raw research data and grey literature, I would be happy to post any information you send me to the knowledge base. Additionally, the wiki will be open to the world for reading but invite only for contributing. So if you wish to be a contributor just let me know and I'll get you in.