Category: Digital Culture

Smartphone choices

I call upon the wisdom of the Intertubes: Help me decide on a smartphone. Our cell contract runs out this month, and I need to get a Smartphone of some type.

Needs:

Obviously, it needs to be a good phone
IM, SMS, and email must be solid and easy to use (bonus for gmail & outlook both working well)
View Word and PDF, edit would be nice
Must be a Cingular phone, due to coverage in our area

Here are the contenders:

I like the form factor of the Blackjack, but both it and the Treo lack 802.11 support, and I’d like to be able to browse/IM/Email via wifi if I’m somewhere with a signal. Hell, I’d love to be able to Skype with it if possible. The 8125 has wifi, but is the largest of the bunch…on the other hand, the slide out keyboard is pretty great. As much as I lust after the iPhone, Apple is not known for flawless first-gen products, and the $$ is a bit to drop in the foreseeable future. I like the Treo because I’ve always had a soft spot for Palm, and the secondary software support is huge, but Palm is, frankly, dead.

So I’m torn, Intertubes. Anyone use any of these phones? Got a recommendation for me for something I haven’t looked at?

Tags Digital Culture, mac, Personal

Goodbye, Mahalo

A new “search engine” went live this week calling itself Mahalo. How does it distinguish itself from the big guns of search (Google, Yahoo, Ask, MSN)?

Mahalo is the world’s first human-powered search engine powered by an enthusiastic and energetic group of Guides. Our Guides spend their days searching, filtering out spam, and hand-crafting the best search results possible. If they haven’t yet built a search result, you can request that search result. You can also suggest links for any of our search results.

Yep, they are human-indexing the web! Disregarding the “first human-powered search engine” bit, since they aren’t a search engine (they appear to be an index, with a search on top) and they clearly aren’t the first in any case (Yahoo started out exactly the same way, and the Librarian’s Internet Index is the same thing done by information professionals).

I wonder what Weinberger might think of their attempt?

In their FAQ, they handily tell you they selection criteria. Here’s the couple that stood out to me:

Sites they will not link to:

… sites of unknown origin (i.e. we cannot establish who operates the site).
… sites which have adult content or hate speech.

Establishment of “who operates” the site on the Internet? Really? Does a nom de plume count? How about a site whose authors must remain anonymous for political reasons? And that’s setting aside the longstanding legal precedent that anonymity in speech is a necessary for free speech. (see: McIntyre v. Ohio or Talley v. California)

Restricting Adult Content and Hate Speech makes it sound like those are two very clear categories. I’m always wary of groups who feel like they should be the ones making content decisions…one of the reasons I’m so happy to be a librarian.

They will link to:

… sites that are considered authorities in their field (i.e. Edmunds for autos, Engadget for consumer electronics, and the New York Times for news).

I swear on a stack of pancakes, I will get off my ass this year and write that article that’s been rattling around in my head about how Authority as a criteria for ANYTHING is old and busted.

Tags authority, Digital Culture, informationevaluation, library

Digital Culture

Google Gears

Google Offline access! Google Gears is a beta that allows for offline access to Reader (your feeds, no internet access needed) and is going to support Gmail very soon.

Not always needed, but invaluable during those long flights.

Tags Digital Culture, google

Digital Culture Media

Swarm of Angels

swarm of angels

If anyone hasn’t heard about the Swarm of Angels project, they just started their movie poster contest, and it’s a great time to read up on the project and get your fingers into some Open Source movie making.

NB: I’m a Angel…joined 5 May 06, and if the “user count” on the URL is correct, I was Angel #29. Crazy!

Tags Digital Culture, Media, video

Digital Culture

WordPress 2.2

Updating to WP 2.2 today…if there is weirdness, that’s why.

More, including a review of new features, after the upgrade.

Tags Digital Culture, wordpress

Digital Culture

LibraryThing for Libraries launches

Post author By griffey
Post date May 14, 2007
1 Comment on LibraryThing for Libraries launches

The most excellent Tim Spalding announced today that LibraryThing for Libraries officially went live with the Danbury Library in Danbury, CT.

I’m in awe of the results.

Seriously, I’m certain this is the future of the catalog. Not just the specific tools, but the idea of leveraging one set of data against another set using easily modified and extensible tools. It’s many-pieces-loosely-joined for the OPAC, and it’s brilliant.

I particularly love the tag browser, as well as the similar books links. Leveraging the LibraryThing data is a wonderful way to start this, but eventually libraries will need a way to share in a P2P system rather than having a central storehouse. We need to be sharing our data in a P2P format, with always-on trickle-and-compare running, updating the tag clouds and recommendations. If we just managed to collect the click-through data of our catalogs, we could manage to put together some pretty robust recommendations, all driven by scholarly activity.

Tags Digital Culture, library, library2.0, opac

Digital Culture

I think I will regret this

Post author By griffey
Post date May 3, 2007
3 Comments on I think I will regret this

Somehow, I feel like Steven Cohen will make me rue the day I point this out, but there’s an amazing new WordPress plugin for Twitter from Alex King called Twitter Tools. It has the ability to post to twitter from your WP blog, from twitter to your WP blog (not sure what happens if you turn BOTH options on, besides the eventual heat death of the universe), and even has an API hook built in to further allow for Twitterific integration. Also built in is the ability to Daily Digest your Tweets on your blog as a one-shot post. Brilliant!

Will work for both Widget and non-Widget loving WP types. I just installed it, and love the flexibility and control. Check the ReadMe for more info.