Since there is limited space at the venue, you must be 21 years of age and RSVP to have an opportunity to get into the event. By RSVP’ing you will also have the chance to win $300 worth of O’Reilly books of your choosing. You must be present to win. There will likely be other items like tee-shirts and other promo items for those who alert us ahead that they plan to attend. If you plan to attend, and do not RSVP you will be put in the ‘wait-list’ queue.

For more info:

http://igniteboston.eventbrite.com/

Posted by Rich

Speakers:
* Daniel Clancy, Engineering Director, Google Books
* John Palfrey, Henry N. Ess III Professor of Law and Vice Dean for Library and Information Resources, Harvard Law School
* Ann Wolpert, Director of Libraries, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
* Hal Abelson, Class of 1922 Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Moderated by Maura Marx, Executive Director, Open Knowledge Commons

For more info:

http://tinyurl.com/lk3xef

Posted by Rich

“URL-shortening site Cligs last month sent more than 2 million Web addresses to an entirely different destination. Phishers are also taking advantage of the trust users have in TinyURL Web addresses by using them to mask malicious destinations.”

“But easy solutions are available, PC Magazine points out. You can easily decode those cryptic URLs by pasting them into—what else—a URL lengthener. One such tool: Untiny. Just cut and paste the shortened URL into the box, and you’ll get the original address. Make sure it’s legit, click, and you’re good to go.”

For the whole article:

http://tinyurl.com/mtd2rk

h/t Consumerist.com

Posted by Rich

Rebecca showed us some censored messages various blog services use to either block posts at the time of publication or after removing published posts. She is not naming the services that published certain posts other hosts blocked because she fears the government will retaliate against them.

Some bloggers circumvent censorship methods by using words that sound similar to censored words or by using images to represent ideas, like people doing pushups because discussion about an unfortunate suspicious death was banned.

How can the international Internet community reach out to China to help the government increase freedom and connect Internet users with good things the Great Firewall blocks?

Join the live webcast.

Some of you who have been reading the scratchpad for a while might remember that Rebecca used to attend blog group meetings regularly when she was a Berkman Fellow. She and Ethan Zuckerman founded the online project Global Voices to give people in countries not necessarily covered by the mainstream media a speaking place. An authority on many Asian and Internet topics, the former CNN journalist now teaches in China and is working on a book about China and the Internet.

Editor & Publisher:

“NEW YORK The librarian who operates The Wall Street Journal’s news research library — which is set to close with the elimination of her job and another staffer’s — said in a memo to other librarians that the shutdown is both a personal difficulty and a hit to news coverage.

“When I asked who will do research for the reporters, I was told, ‘No one,’” the memo from Leslie A. Norman, posted on a librarian list serve last week, stated. “The reporters will probably be using a Lexis product called Due Diligence Dashboard (you know how your moms told you ‘if you can’t say something nice…’)”

She later adds that it cannot replace the “knowledge about how to research using all the tricks we’ve learned over the years. We figure that the reporters will probably spend 10 times our compensation trying to do their own research.”

The library cutback is part of a 14-person newsroom job reduction announced last week by the Journal, which also includes news assistant Ed Ramos in the library. Norman and Ramos plan to remain on the job until at least March 23, the memo stated.”

Techdirt:

Apparently, the Wall Street Journal has eliminated the two research librarian jobs at the paper with no plans to replace them. The idea, apparently, is that reporters should be doing their own damn research from now on. I actually have rather mixed feelings on the news. At a time when newspapers should be focused on providing a better product to remain relevant, you have to wonder if removing research services makes sense. However, the question remains as to whether or not the position is really needed. This is not — at all — to suggest that research librarian aren’t quite good at what they do and provide a truly valuable service. But, it is true that the tools for research have become much cheaper and accessible for anyone.

Here are the two links:

http://tinyurl.com/d8ul84

http://tinyurl.com/cpg49z

h/t to LisNews.com

Posted by Rich

Despite the internet’s origins as an academic network, when it comes to finding a book, e-commerce rules. Put any book title into your favourite search engine, and the hits will be dominated by commercial sites run by retailers, publishers, even authors. But even with your postcode, you won’t find the nearest library where you can borrow that book. (The exception is Google Books, and even that is limited.)

That’s strange, because almost every library has an electronic database of its books – searchable either at the library’s own website or via its local council. The wrinkle is that at the book level, those databases aren’t accessible to the search engines; and you may not be able to search all the libraries in your area at once.

Bibliographic data

Yet there is an alternative that few people seem aware of: Worldcat  worldcat.org), which offers web access to the largest repository of bibliographic data in the world – from the 40-year-old Ohio-based non-profit Online Computer Library Center  oclc.org). But Worldcat suffers from the same problem on a larger scale. OCLC shares only 3m of its 125m records with Google Books; none of them show up in an ordinary search.

You might expect forward-thinking libraries to put their databases online, to encourage people through their doors. But they can’t. Even though they created the data, pay to have records added to the database and pay to download them, they can’t.

In November, OCLC announced new rules covering the use of Worldcat data due to go live on 19 February. Among other things, the new policy prohibits any use – transfer, sharing – that “substantially replicates the function, purpose, and/or size of WorldCat”. In other words, no publicly searchable databases.

“It’s safe to say that the policy change is a direct response to Open Library,” says Aaron Swartz, the founder of Open Library  openlibrary.org), a project to give every published book its own Wikipedia-style page. “Since the beginning of Open Library, OCLC has been threatening funders, pressuring libraries not to work with us, and using tricks to try to shut us down. It didn’t work – and so now this.”

For the whole article:

http://tinyurl.com/bfwt2v

h/t to Librarian.net:

http://www.librarian.net/

Posted by Rich

I thought some of you might want to know what my Halloween costume is. After all, on the Internet, no one knows you’re a cat.

Um … consider this an early Blogacatmas present!

That blog, by the way, is full of a lot of great posts that explain the software we develop and what we do with the router data. It’s not all geek talk, either. Take a look at some of the other posts to learn more. I got a kick out of reading Internet Vigilantism, a more recent entry by Earl Zmijewski dealing with how some Internet companies decided to temporarily drop service to a hosting service doing bad things.

I always feel weird writing about my employer on my blog because I try to keep my work and my blog separate, but I’ve been getting enough questions lately that I think another post is ok, especially since the Hurricane Ike data is a good example of one of the things we can do with the tools we create.

Alles klar, ja?

It’s OneWebDay! Today provides a great excuse to celebrate the Internet. Where would we be without it? How has it changed your life and our world?