Tuesday, December 27, 2005

Aggregated Customization

Inc Magazine has an article about a trend David Freedman calls aggregated customization. The article describes the latest venture for the CEO of Citrix Systems. The idea is to create daily direct flight patterns and prices based on when and where most of your customers want to fly. Since I have to either fly to Atlanta or Denver to get to San Antonio this winter, this sounds like a great idea to me.

Thursday, December 22, 2005

Just Don't call it a Lego Drive.

Check out the latest external hard drive from Lacie. http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?pid=10695

Wednesday, December 21, 2005

More cool stuff you can do with HIP

The same person who was experimenting with the HIP 'tagcloud' is now experimenting with allowing users to tag items in a test HIP environment.

I'm not entirely sold on the idea of user-tagging for library databases, but it's a cool thing to play with. (I'm not automatically *against* the idea of user-tagging for library databases, either. I'm perched right on the fence on this one. It looks awfully cool, but I'm not sure the benefits outweigh the risks in all cases.)

Monday, December 12, 2005

Wikipedia fall out

We are always pushing technology forward to find new applications, but we often don't anticipate ways how that technology will be used and the resulting social implications.

According to a CNN article, the author who wrote a false entry linking Seigenthaler to the Kennedy assassinations has come forward.

Also from the article:

"Chase said he didn't know the free Internet encyclopedia called Wikipedia was used as a serious reference tool."

Thursday, December 08, 2005

Library Elf

No, not a student worker in costume, but a package more and more libraries seem to be buying into to track loans and due dates. Interesting post about privacy concerns related to Library ELF.

Library ELF is a company based in Canada that allows you to track the books you have checked out, overdues and other things through RSS feeds.

Tuesday, December 06, 2005

'INCREDIBLY SMART BOOKMARKING'

Source: The Chronicle

"Open-source software being developed at George Mason University is intended to make it easier for professors to organize and cite materials they find online. The program, called Firefox Scholar, will plug into the popular Firefox browser and automatically capture bibliographic data, researchers say.

For more about information technology, including IT news reported elsewhere online, visit our Information Technology section"

Friday, December 02, 2005

Question of the Day

Are you talking about CALEA (Communications Assistance to Law Enforcement Act) and its impact on your network on your campus...or do you know of conversations going on? Our consortium is polling each other to see who is talking about it since it seems that little conversations are starting to take place...

Aside, Jonathan took his first five steps a few days ago! He's brilliant for figuring out how to walk before his first birth day... :)

Thursday, December 01, 2005

Again with the infinite number of monkeys ...

Sue V sent me a pointer to a USA today article about the hazards of trusting our fellow humans too much. It's an op-ed piece by John Seigenthaler a retired journalist whose hopping mad about his entry in the Wikipedia. It said that he had once been suspected involved in both Kennedy assinations. that version of entry was only up for 132 days on Wikipedia was eventually corrected.

It's true that the mistake was eventually corrected and I know this is the argument that people use to support open content but there are some mistakes you'd rather were never made to have to correct them.