Rather than post an excited rant about Google Wave, the upcoming communication system to end all communication systems, and what it could mean for us, I’m just going to link to the excellent rundown on Mashable:
http://mashable.com/2009/05/28/google-wave-guide/
Read and anticipate. If you find that even halfway interesting, be sure to check out their other Wave posts as linked to at the end.
Poor Dr. Raj Persaud has been suspended from practice for 3 months. Tut tut. The moral of the story is - don’t plagiarise!
Does this mean he can’t go on ‘This Morning’?!
Egypt has stated its intent to copyright the country’s famous antiquities, charging anyone who makes exact copies of their renowned landmarks, such as the sphinx or the pyramids.
If you are planning on making replicas of these, for personal or commercial use, then all royalties would go to the Egyptian city of Luxor, to pay for the upkeep of the Valley of the Kings.
An article on the BBC website caught my eye; it features Northampton’s very own Greyfriars bus station! The article airs two opinions on the bus station, firstly that it’s a blot on Northampton’s architectural heritage and should be demolished and secondly that it’s important and in years to come will be a visual aid in the towns history. So what do you think should it stay or go? (more…)
More from the ‘Too Many Browsers’ dept.: Mac enthusiasts and/or browser fetishists can now test-drive Apple’s Safari browser in a new Windows version. I’ve only just got around to installing it myself (I believe it’s been out a week, so I ought to file this post under ‘History’) and I’m not sure what I think of it - I suspect it might benefit from a better graphics card than my work PC has, and I don’t like the way it dispenses with the default XP style. It might look more at home in Vista, I’ve no idea, but under XP its use of Apple’s Unified interface feels out of place. Maybe there’s a way around that - I haven’t delved too deep yet.
Pages certainly seem to render quickly and correctly, and it passes the Acid 2 test with flying colours. I’ve read of a few problems with certain features in Blogger, but the current release is a public beta, so it’s safe to expect a few quirks and subsequent improvements.
I don’t think it’s going to take the place of Firefox on my Windows PCs, or even get regular use, but it’s an interesting development (very likely released with the imminent and Safari-using iPhone in mind), but it carries across features OS X users might pine for when they’re forced to use Windows, and it’s well worth taking for a spin if you’re interested in the varieties of browsing experience - particularly as to the best of my knowledge it’s the first uncomplicated, ‘for the people’ way to check out the admirable Konqueror rendering engine under Windows, albeit in Apple’s modified form.
The release is also great news for anyone producing web pages, because hopefully you can say goodbye to having to rely on angry emails from Mac users highlighting cross-platform issues because nobody will buy you a Mac for testing - perhaps Microsoft will join the party by raising IE for OS X from the grave. On the other hand, if Safari for Windows is a success, perhaps we web folk will end up looking back fondly on the days when all you had to worry about were the hideous inconsistencies between IE and Netscape - a previously unthinkable proposition.
For some time now I’ve been reading all my RSS feeds through Google Reader. I’ve forgotten what most of the blogs actually look like - everything’s filtered though Google’s interface, and being able to star and tag items from a variety of blogs using one system is - well, I can’t realistically say it’s invaluable, but it’s certainly very nice.
Anyway, I’ve also had a Nintendo Wii for a good while now, and that has an Opera-based web browser that’s operated by the Wii’s motion-sensing remote control. It’s a well-implemented browser and it’s pleasingly decadent to slouch around browsing the web on the TV, controlling it all with effete hand gestures like Oscar Wilde waving away a poorly presented platter of grapes.
So there’s the Wii browser and Google Reader, and now the twain have met in Google’s tailored Wii interface, which scales the size to fit the console’s non-HD output and takes advantage of the remote functions. You can try out the Wii interface in a standard browser - it’s still pretty impressive, though much of the impact is lost.
It’s an interesting way to surf, heading as it does in the opposite direction to mobile web technology. Efforts have been made before to bring the web to the living room - recall the Bush ‘internet TV’ of the early 00s - but Nintendo and Opera seem to have cracked the problem this time; scaling and reformatting of pages work fluidly, and the user interface removes the need for a mouse and keyboard without creating further problems in the process. Google’s Reader only sweetens the deal with its homogenised, custom-built interface - and similar sites are appearing, such as obviously-named video portal WiiToob.
Sony have a Playstation 3 browser in the works, which may offer an interesting alternative, as well as their Home project - potentially a front-room Second Life contender. Arguably it’s time to consider, as Google have, how to approach these emerging channels - flashes in the pan, or the early signs of a paradigm shift? I see the Wii browser as a halfway point - still tethered to the ‘traditional’ internet - long, uninteresting URLs remain unavoidable - but hinting at how our relationship to the web might evolve as those clumsy, unreliable PCs become less and less important.
The Wii’s News Channel deserves a mention here, too - a fascinating web-driven application that presents you with a 3D model of the Earth that you spin around and zoom in on to view regional news stories, presented as stacks of paper dropped on the relevant country or city. It’s a remarkable application - extra marks for the way the words on a page shuffle themselves around like letter-beetles as you zoom in - that would be a perfect addition to the sofa’n'papers section of the library.
I’m going to have to blame… let me think… ah, international time differences for the fact that I’m a day late in blogging about yesterday’s Day of Unity in Illinois (link via boingboing). Libraries there are protesting against HB1727, a local government act that would require public libraries, at their own expense, to “create and enforce an Internet safety policy” (essentially, install and operate web filtering software) that will, among other things “protect against access by adults to visual depictions that are obscene or child pornography”. I don’t know if some loophole means child pornography isn’t legally obscene in Illinois or if they’ve just added it onto the end there to conjure up some easy public support, but I don’t suppose its presence hurts the act’s chances.
You can read the act online - it also requires libraries, having installed filtering software, to disable it on the request of adults (or children, provided they are then supervised) on the proviso that they are using the internet for ‘legitimate research’.
Libraries in Illinois responded to this on their Day of Unity by setting up their public computers using temporary filtering software licences so that they behaved as the would if the act came into force, creating a mass of extra work for library workers (one correspondent estimates they might require two additional members of staff to cover the work) and a demonstrable nuisance for users (who were then provided with details of the act and advised to contact their senators). Other libraries disabled public internet access for the day. Several members of the public have written in (to the Day of Unity site) to express their disgust at such behaviour on the part of tax-funded libraries, possibly missing the point of the protest as a dry run.
This is a problem we don’t face in the UK yet - the old Library Association (now CILIP) had a heart-warming policy statement on the use of filtering software and its implication on ‘the right of access to information’ - but it’s definitely an issue that’s worth keeping an eye on, and not simply because you’re very fond of your online filth.
A couple of potentially interesting Web 2.0-related stories from the past few days:
Jakob Nielsen warns that Web 2.0 trends may be having an adverse effect on usability and good design, as reported by the BBC. He argues that for most sites, the majority of users will not be interested in customisation and contribution - and when such sites focus on providing 2.0 tools to support these functions, they risk alienating that majority, who merely want to access the content and move on.
Bad site design and usability is, of course, nothing new - it was here long before Web 2.0 and it’ll be here long after - but new trends do change the playing field (or battleground) a little. On one hand you’re inviting content from all and sundry, which is going to lead to some interesting design decisions, as a brief visit to MySpace will demonstrate - arrive there via the wrong profile and you’ll be lucky to come away with your eyesight, let alone enjoy a usable visit. On the other hand, technologies such as RSS allow users to do as they please with raw content. If I don’t like a blog’s design choices, I can subscribe to the feed and read it however I prefer, in six-inch-high orange letters on a lime green background if that’s the kind of thing I like. So Web 2.0 giveth, and it taketh away. Perhaps in the glorious future design and presentation will be the sole responsibility of the individual reader, and we’ll have no-one to blame but ourselves for how much web pages suck.
Meanwhile, Google has discovered that one in ten web pages contain malicious code, or ‘badware’ - you may already have noticed, if you do a lot of Googling, that they’ve started warning you about potentially unsafe results before you make the fatal mistake of clicking on them. And once again, Web 2.0 gets at least part of the blame, because once you invite content you need to be pretty confident you can ensure it’s safe - once a search engine picks up your site, you will face a cavalcade of spam, much of it badware-related. That’s a job and a concern for the provider, but readers also have a part to play - when it comes to badware attacks, to quite the BBC’s report, the “vast majority exploit vulnerabilities in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser”. So be sure to update your copy of IE to the latest secure version, and then use that to get Firefox.
Well we have text books, audio books, e-books and now books from beyond the grave?
The month of April 2007 sees a ‘new’ book from J R R Tolkien published, even though the author of the Hobbit (and others) died over thirty years ago. The Children of Hurin has been created by his son Christopher from his father’s papers, but both Tolkien senior and junior appear on the cover. So is this the first of a new trend? No as earlier this year Catherine Cookson who died in 1998 was resurrected when the romantic novelist Rosie Goodwin wrote a sequel to her Tilly Trotter books. Is it really necessary with new authors struggling to get their material published, well the publishers seem to think so…then they would. I wonder what the fans will have to say, I say let sleeping authors lie. Next perhaps titles from those yet to be born?
JRR Tolkein, Christopher Tolkein and Alan Lee - The Children of Hurin
Publisher: HarperCollins (16 April 2007)
Rosie Goodwin - Tilly Trotter’s Legacy
Publisher: Headline Book Publishing (22 Feb 2007)
Interesting article on copyright in the Guardian on Saturday that considers the balance between protecting creators (and publishers) and serving the public interest, by way of the birth of copyright, the darker side of Disney, the Bodleian Library considered as a machine, and the implications of Google Book Search and the awful spectre of digital bibliopiracy.
Refreshingly, it turns out to be an optimistic piece, offering ways forward (or perhaps backward, if you read the article) for copyright and suggesting, with regard to piracy, that a book is often more than the information it contains. Is this true? Is there something of a book that can’t be scanned and digitised? I seem to have suggested as much myself in an earlier blog post, so I suppose I agree. Where does that leave e-books? Q: Are they, in melodramatic terms, born without souls, doomed to walk the internet full of content but devoid of essence?
Just seen a flyer for a new book by Peter Pirolli on information foraging theory (Pirolli, P. (2007) Information Foraging Theory: adaptive interaction with information. Oxford: Oxford University Press) which looks worth a closer look. Pirolli is described as the ‘father of information foraging theory’, although I must admit that I’d never heard of it before (clearly ignorance isn’t bliss). In a nutshell, it seems that information foraging suggests that our searching for information matches the way that animals (and our ancestors presumably) forage for food. We find the richest patches of greenery, chocolate, chicken nuggets, Web sites etc and then gorge on it until we either can’t get any more because it is too hard (or expensive) to reach or we are satisfied that it has met our need. If the former is the case then we move on to the next clump of greenery, chip shops, databases etc. Pirolli has come up with a methodology that can predict our behaviour when using these clumps of information. To quote the blurb for the book “This natural selection implies that sites that have high information scent and usability would fare better than sites that have lower scent and usability”.
So, what we need to do is to make sure that our Web site has a high information scent, by which I assume it means the ability to lure innocent information seekers in (well designed pages leading to easily accessible, good quality information) and keep them there. I’m not sure that our pages will ever have the initial addictive aroma of Google or Wikipedia but if we provide the right sort of information first (linked directly and explicitly to the information needs of our users) and give out the right messages (directly in our teaching and via partnerships with academics) then we should be able to become a preferred grazing ground for our users.
Right, I’m off to gorge on the banquet that is wolves.co.uk
You know how it is you get a song going round in your head, now what’s it called? It can really drive you to distraction perhaps even affect your work, bore your colleagues, you get the song going round in their heads too and the next thing is the office comes to a standstill with everyone ‘Googling’ and trying to be first with the answer…well not anymore thanks to (there should be a fanfare here) ‘SONGTAPPER’ Use your computer keyboard to tap the rhythm of the song. SongTapper.com will help you find the name of the song. Its fun, it’s easy, and thousands of daily visitors find it very helpful, (apparently)
All you have to do is tap the song rhythm and SongTapper does the rest. After tapping is complete you will see a list of matching songs. If the tune can’t be identified you can teach the system by entering the song name.
Well whatever next I wonder, anyone know where I can get a spare keyboard?
DAILYLIT first appeared in September 2006 after the New York Times serialized a few classic works in supplements a few years ago. Books are sent in instalments via e-mail and there are over 250 titles that are in the public domain, authors range from Louisa May Alcott to Emile Zola, the books are sent in their entirety and completely free, you even get to choose the time and frequency of the e-mails and they can be read anywhere that you can receive e-mail including a PDA or perhaps even your mobile phone. DailyLit claim that each instalment can be read in less than 5 minutes, but beware if you choose something like Dracula which has 187 parts if you receive parts on weekdays, e.g. 5 days a week it could take you 37 weeks to complete, War and Peace however has 675 parts! But you could start with Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner which has only 7 parts.
But why “because if you are like us, you spend hours each day reading email but don’t find the time to read books. DailyLit brings books right into your inbox in convenient small messages that take less than 5 minutes to read” (Quote from DailyLit’s homepage)
In the words of Dr. Seuss (Green Eggs and Ham)
“You do not like them. So you say. Try them! Try them! And you may.”
Did you know that the library has access to a significant collection of ebooks (electronic books)? We are also offering a chance to win one of 50 1Gb memory sticks by entering our ebook competition. Competition entry forms are available from the library homepage.
What’s available?
Safari Tech Books Online – access to over 100 ebooks in the field of Computing, Maths, Engineering and Information Systems.
EEBO Early English Books Online - electronic books for English, History, Women’s Studies, Drama, Music and Art.
NetLibrary – health related, plus over 3000 publicly accessible books on many topics.
EBL eBook Library – most subjects.
How to access:
All of these ebooks are accessible with your Athens username and password. From the library homepage (http://library.northampton.ac.uk) click on ‘Subject Resources’, ‘A-Z listing’ and choose either Safari, EEBO, NetLibrary or EBL eBook Library.
For help and advice on how to search, read and download the ebooks consult the guides (printed or online) or contact one of your Academic Librarians.
In a climate where academics are increasingly loathe to accept references from Wikipedia in assignments, it was interesting to see a short article by Suzanne Goldenberg in the Guardian noting that over 100 rulings in US courts since 2004 have cited the online encyclopedia. In one case it was used to clarify the term ‘Booty music’ and why not? OK, there are examples of blatant vandalism to entries on the likes of Saddam Hussain and David Beckham and there is always the chance that the facts haven’t been checked by the legions of Wikipedia fact checkers (never mind the public) but what would be an authoritative source for Booty music?
I would never advocate the trashing of Halsbury’s Laws in favour of Jim or Harry Halsbury’s legal opinion but there are times when Wikipedia is the best starting point for a search. The danger, and here I do start to agree with the academics who are so negative towards it, is that it is the only source that students use. What we should be doing is making sure that people can distinguish between the relative merits of sources and make informed choices about which are appropriate for their particular needs.
And if you’re still not sure what Booty music is then Wikipedia awaits your call.