Within the past two days the news came out that Google was shot down by Judge Chin for overstepping in the Google Books case, and that Google is forking over half a million dollars to detect Internet transparency issues. On the topic of a Google books: I am not by any stretch of the imagination a copyright lawyer, so I’m not really qualified to be issuing opinions on this subject… Read More
Welcome to the Tungle
As I tweeted the other day, I want a better way to let students schedule meetings with me, but I don’t want to make my Google Calendar public. And I asked the World Brain for suggestions. I got several: Doodle, TimeBridge (including a tweet from the VP of Marketing and Business Development of TimeBridge), Tungle, and simply blocking out time in Google Calendar. I also saw this post on Prof… Read More
The Not-so-Perpetual Beta
One of the tenets of Web 2.0, according to Tim O’Reilly’s seminal article, is “the perpetual beta.” That is, “the product is developed in the open, with new features slipstreamed in on a monthly, weekly, or even daily basis.” Well, Web 2.0-ish applications seem to be shedding beta-ness fast and furious lately: first Gmail, now Remember The Milk. I know, I know: two datapoints does not a trend make. Also,.. Read More
Nitpicking the Google Book Search agreement
Today’s big news: Google and the Authors Guild and Association of American Publishers have come to an agreement on the lawsuit that was brought against Google in 2005 about the Google Book Search project. As usual, Jessamyn West has collected and posted an excellent set of links about this. Two sentences in particular from the Google blog post about this caught my attention: The agreement gives public and university libraries.. Read More
Have you seen this car?
I’m fascinated by Google Street View. Like so many Google toys, it’s both exceptionally addictive as a time-sink and slightly creepy. Because what one does with Google and all Google toys is ego surf, I of course drove virtually down my street. I was gratified to discover that (a) neither I nor any of my neighbors was captured on camera, and (b) that you can’t see my house or car.. Read More
UBC is not ignoring Google Scholar
Five (5) Reasons Why Academic Librarians Can’t Ignore Google Scholar, from the UBC Academic Search – Google Scholar Blog For my money, reason #2 is the killer: GS will now contain on the order of 800 million to 1 billion citations, thus making it probably one of the largest scholarly citation databases on the planet. Ignoring that is like ignoring the elephant in the room. And, I would just like.. Read More
Google saving university presses?
Some Publishers Warm to Google Book Search, from the Chronicle This has been so effective, says a representative of Oxford University Press, that “321,000 times in the last two years, people have clicked on an Oxford book saying ‘I want to buy this.’ We spent nothing to do that. That’s why we’re a big fan of this program.” This is an interesting (one presumes) unintended consequence of Google Book Search,.. Read More
Authors@Google
Maybe I’m hopelessly behind the times, but I just stumbled across this: Authors@Google. The Authors@Google program brings authors of all stripes to Google for informal talks centering on their recently published books. Interestingly, the full set of videos is on YouTube and not Google Video. Though I suppose now that Google owns YouTube, it’s six of one half dozen of the other. Makes me wonder why Google Video still exists,.. Read More
G12
Press release from Princeton: Library joins Google project to make books available online A new partnership between the Princeton University Library and Google soon will make approximately 1 million books in Princeton’s collection available online in a searchable format. Princeton will be joining 11 other libraries. Copyright issues notwithstanding, I’m particularly glad to see the Google Books project expanding, in light of this: Archivists Lose Another Round in Bid to.. Read More
More thoughts on the death of Google Answers
This article in the NY Times repeats a lot of the same coverage, and even much of the same text I’ve seen elsewhere, but it does have one additional bit: “It has been one of our most successful launches,” said Tomi Poutanen, product director for Yahoo Social Search. … Mr. Poutanen described it as a way to harness the “wisdom of the crowds.” First of all, it’s the wisdom of.. Read More