Another great video from Jess3, The State of Wikipedia
It is with great excitement that we present to you our newest installment in the “State of” series: The State of Wikipedia. This 3.5 minute video, narrated by none other than Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales, launches alongside the 10-year anniversary of the web-based encyclopedia.
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There was a recent online fracus about the death of RSS. If you missed it, Mathew Ingram over at Gigaom gives a good overview of the main players and their thoughts. The end result seems to be we can all calm down again, it isn’t going anywhere.
That is why I want to bring you attention to Feedly, which takes your Google Reader feed and turns it into a magazine style display. Using your Gmail ID to log in, it synchronizes with Google Reader and displays content on an easily organized and customizable page. I have been using it for a while, and beyond been beautiful to look at, it gives you plenty of insight into how you think about your feed, what you really focus on and what you may be missing, by allowing you to visualize your feed differently.
As librarians are passionate RSS users, it is certainly worth giving it a try.
Arduino The Documentary (2010) English HD from gnd on Vimeo.
All about everyone’s favorite microcontroller, Arduino. The documentary site includes downloadable, English and Spanish versions.
Enjoy!
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Book Saver, from Ion Audio, is a device designed to allow you to digitize your home library, at the cost of $150. For more information check out the company’s site and promotional materials.
Book Saver has two cameras that take separate images in rapid succession of each page within an open book. Both cameras of Book Saver also have a flash for allowing the page to be fully illuminated during the scanning process. Book Saver’s cradle, where the book is placed during the scanning process, is also angled as to not require you to hold pages down to get a flat, even surface. While similar devices require up to seven seconds per one page, Book Saver takes only one second per two pages!
Reported to become available in the summer, it will be interesting to see if it hastens the end of publisher’s use of DRM on ebooks, an end that was recently predicted in PricewaterhouseCoopers report, Turning the page: the future of ebooks.
In the long term, most experts expect cumbersome DRM will disappear and that developments on the eBook market will follow those that have been seen on the music market. Music publishers abandoned DRM in spring 2009, after a lengthy battle against file sharing. Experts believe that abolishing DRM is necessary sooner rather than later because illegal content will be available anyway as the market develops, and that DRM will not be able to perform its protection function. Most experts expect that soft DRM will become established.
Update: Soon after posting this I found the following video’s online; a promotional video from Ion Audio and a hands-on from this year’s CES.
I have been a fan of Amber Case’s work for quite a while and was excited to see her talking at TEDWomen on cyborg anthropology. As we move towards a world where mobile is the norm in any urban environment, her conceptualization of what this means can open doors to interesting insights for librarians as we deal with this change, seeking the balance between space for reflection and silence (a traditional role for libraries) and time for information gathering and our online “second-selves”.
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Library Bazaar is now closed and the blog has moved here.
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