Yesterday’s FT had a piece about mapping as an interface to the web. This is one view on why this change is important:
… Keep ReadingErik Jorgensen, a senior executive in Microsoft’s online operations, says the software company is building a “digital representation of the globe to a high degree of accuracy” that will bring about “a change in how you think about the internet”. He adds: “We’re very much betting on a paradigm shift. We believe it will be
Sure, it is already happening. Today I followed a link from Om Malik, where he was talking about movie clips popping up within Skype conversations (apparently that is coming — and I totally agree that Skype video calls work very well, so why not include video in the conversation?). Anyway, Om was citing the way that TV shows are now using Skype interviews, here is a link to Oprah doing it. Well that is interesting, and the Skype … Keep Reading
For years I have been on the Liblicense list, which is widely read by university librarians and academic publishers. It is a big list with several thousand adherents, but librarians are not particularly vocal (that comes with needing to be quiet in the library — yeah, I know, very feeble joke) and many publishers sign up to the list but keep their heads down (because they dont want to be exposed as money grasping scoundrels — even more … Keep Reading
We recently discovered that Google was no longer finding the home page of one of our partner publishers because the description of the magazine Quest Bulgaria on their home page was pretty much identical to the description on our system. Our derivative entry knocked them out, rather than the other way round, because our site is busier than theirs…..so given more weight by Google.
This was a puzzling and unwanted result so the publisher quickly changed the description on our … Keep Reading
Google’s Book Search project is possibly their most ambitious undertaking. From one point of view it is an attempt to reverse engineer a proposal entertained by Alan Turing 60 years ago. He was wondering how to design a computer which would have a very large, efficient and affordable digital memory. As a thought experiment he considered the potential for using books ( a library) as a system of machine memory:
… Keep ReadingWe may say that storage on tape and papyrus scrolls
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