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PALINET Tech Update for 7/19/2008
On the Internet, How Do You Know If You Are Talking to a Dog? 7/15/2008 10:51:10 PM | the Jester Published in The New Yorker July 5, 1993. Image from The Cartoon Bank. The famous 1993 cartoon from The New Yorker has the caption “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” The question at the moment is: when you’re on the internet, ...
Think you know Google Search? 7/15/2008 5:15:00 PM | Richard Posey If you think that all there is to using Google Search is entering a few keywords and sorting through the answers, you don't know it very well. There are a number of "featured searches" built into that little search box on the Google ...
AquaBrowser releases reviews and ratings functionality in My ... 7/10/2008 6:33:47 PM | unknown ... Discoveries with functionality for users to create reviews and ratings and view personal tags. These features boost the existing AquaBrowser social networking experience to create a true global community for library users worldwide.
On Wednesday, just as the Senate passed sweeping new legislation to modernize a 30 year old federal surveillance law, President Bush signaled that he would swiftly veto a bill approved by the House earlier in the day that would overhaul the Presidential and Federal Records Act to ensure emails and other government documents are preserved in the age of the Internet.
The measure was passed by a vote of 286-137, more than a year after several Senate and House investigations discovered that the Bush administration apparently purged millions of emails and that dozens of administration officials used email accounts maintained by the Republican National Committee to conduct official White House business in what appeared to be a violation of the Presidential Records Act.
The team behind the popular torrent site The Pirate Bay has started to work on a new encryption technology that could potentially protect all Internet traffic from prying eyes. The project, which is still in its initial stages, goes by the name “Transparent end-to-end encryption for the Internets,” or IPETEE for short. It tackles encryption not on the application level, but on the network level, the aim being that all data exchanged on your PC would be encrypted, regardless of its nature — be it a web browser streaming video files or an instant messaging client. As Pirate Bay co-founder Fredrik Neij (a.k.a. Tiamo) told me, “Even applications that don’t supporting encryption will be encrypted where possible.”
It looks like any other Netgear router, it can even run under Vista (thanks Nachi), but it can run everything at a new Netgear site, MyOpenRouter, and more besides.
While Cisco accidentally created an open source router a few years ago, getting caught with Linux in its Linksys, the company never exploited this as a feature, but treated it as a bug, blaming chip supplier Broadcom.
Netgear is definitely treating this as a feature.
MyOpenRouter offers developers a comprehensive user guide, applications forums and downloads. Best of all this isn’t a stinky would-not-sell-otherwise router. It’s got an internal diversity antenna to improve performance, and supports WPS.
The site’s home page also has direct links to popular open source router software like Tomato and DD-WRT. Tomato downloads are even hosted from the site.
Nachiketa Prachanda, no relation (we assume) to the Nachi worm of five years ago, seems to be the main host-blogger at MyOpenRouter, and that’s a great idea because it immediately personalizes a site, gives it a voice.
So if there is a substantial open source router market out there, in 2008, Netgear will find it. I just wish the industry had this attitude back in 2003.
Nokia’s plan to open source the Symbian mobile OS platform is no threat to mobile Linux, maintains the executive director of the Linux Foundation.
Jim Zemlin maintains that mobile Linux will continue to evolve and flourish in spite of Nokia’s plans and the formation of the Symbian Foundation, whose membership includes several members of LiMO including Motorola, NTT DoCoMo, Samsung, and Vodaphone.
”Now that Symbian will be open and royalty free one of the advantages that Linux had over that platform is gone,” acknowledged Zemlin, in a blog written last week after the deal was announced. “However, there continue to be some fundamental disadvantages relative to Linux that Symbian must deal with. ”
Symbian’s large installed base is a plus but there’s a flip side, Zemlin notes. “While it has it advantages, it also locks Symbian platform development into the obsolete API’s that were developed for devices with obsolete form factors and significant performance limitations. Think of all the problems Microsoft has had with Vista and XP compatibility,” Zemlin wrote.
He also maintains that Symbian’s limitation to mobile devices makes it less appealing to developers. ”Symbain also fails to benefit from sharing a code base across the entire pantheon of computing. Linux shares development with embedded systems, desktop devices, super computing and server side computing,” Zemlin said. Linux supports more device components than any other platform in the market. One can simply walk down the streets of Guangzhou and assemble a Linux based device with almost any set of commodity components.
Finally, mobile Linux has it all over Symbian in green computing, he added. “Efforts to reduce power consumption in a large data center will benefit battery life on Linux mobile devices,” Zemlin said.
The executive director said Nokia’s announcement has served as a call to arms to mobile Linux developers. “Nokia has now put the Linux mobile community on notice that it needs to rapidly produce the development tools and testing infrastructure that will enable the creation of an ISV ecosystem,” Zemlin said. “Expect both Android and the LiMO Foundation to meet that challenge quickly.
He also pointed out that Nokia also “has its feet firmly planted in both the Linux and Symbian camps as members of the Linux Foundation, the Limo Foundation and creators of the N Series Mobile Linux device.” LiMO was founded in January of 2007 by Motorola, NTT DoCoMO, Samsung, Orange and Vodaphone (all members of the Symbian Foundation) to promote the adoption of the Linux operating system for mobile devices.
It’s a giant step beyond anything Google has done in open source. Google has released a ton of code, but not its search algorithm.
Google has many reasons it considers sound for this decision. It doesn’t want its own results manipulated. It doesn’t want its technology used by no-goodniks.
Yahoo is no longer in a position to make those objections. If someone wants to use its algorithms to help people find porn, or rogue code, or to inject client sites to the top of Yahoo searches, these are risks it’s willing to take.
In doing this, Yahoo is walking down a road Wikia Search has gone much further down, with little market impact so far. The bottom line impact of a proprietary company moving to open source is considerable, and at least in the near term negative.
Consider Sun. It has gained no stock benefit from its open source moves. The shares have actually fallen in value, to levels not seen (in real terms) since 1995. The lesson is clear. Open source is no path to riches.
But it is the path the world is treading. The network effects of open source are enormous, and even though few in this business have captured the lion’s share of them, they continue to change the world.
Consider Open Office, which descends from Sun’s Star Office. The product is no money spinner, but it is a market success, and it has had profound impacts on Microsoft, a competitor Sun could not touch in the proprietary era.
It’s the kind of revenge which is always served cold, morgue cold in financial terms, and once the step forward is taken it can’t be taken back.
We err sometimes when we think of moves toward open source, or the impact of open source, in purely selfish terms. There are many more dimensions worthy of consideration.
Open source is not a short term play. It is a long term trend. It is not a way to rescue a failed company. But it can give the work of that company something approaching eternal life. Just as this online copy may greatly outlive anything I have written for print.
And yahoo for that.
John Maynard Keynes (left), the economist, when asked about the long run impacts of high deficit spending, is said to have remarked “In the long run we’re all dead.”
Maybe so, but our work can live on, thanks to this medium. So can our code, thanks to open source.
Sesam.no has released Sesat (Sesam Search Application Toolkit) as open source software. Sesat is middleware - it sits between data sources and the search portal that users interact with. An announcement of Sesat’s release is provided here.
I had a discussion, via email, with Mick Wever about Sesat; he’s one of the active maintainers of the Sesat platform. Following are some excerpts of our dialogue.
CustomGuide has made a huge number of software cheat sheets available to print from their site. They're designed to print on the front and back of one page. You get Microsoft, Mac, QuickBooks, Adobe, Firefox, and more. And better yet, they're quite good. They say that they're fine to post on your website, hand out to users, etc. Sweet! These could come in quite handy for all of those software tech support we get at the reference desks, right?
ICANN (the Internet Corporation For Assigned Names and Numbers) has opened the door for new domain names by approving a recommendation that would add a large number of new domain names to the existing short list (e.g. .com, .net) and would also expand the character and language sets for all of the internationalized domain names. Remember when the .xxx domain name was turned down? Yeah, that was these guys. So, now they're starting a new chapter in more domain names. So remembering what those last few letters are will become all that more important (says the person who mistook a .net for a .org and found herself in a right mess because of it). Read more about the decision in the InfoToday article by Barbara Quint.
When teaching Flickr, I’ve shown people the neat Flickr Color Picker tool from Krazydad. Today I found a search that goes one step further. In addition to letting you search for just one color, Multicolr Search Labs lets you find pictures which match a color scheme.
This mural is said to depict Dewey and the railroad service he gave to Lake Placid, FL. It's time to throw Dewey under the train.
I hereby invite you to help build the Open Shelves Classification (OSC), a free, "humble," modern, open-source, crowd-sourced replacement for the Dewey Decimal System.
I've been speaking of doing something like this for a while, but I think it's finally going to become a reality. LibraryThing members are into it and after my ALA panel talk, a number of catalogers expressed interest too. Best of all, one library director has signed on as eager to implement the system, when it comes available. Hey, one's a start!
The Call. I am looking for one-to-five librarians willing to take leadership on the project. LibraryThing is willing to write the (fairly minimal) code necessary, but not to lead it.
As leaders, you will be "in charge" of the project only as a facilitator and executor of a consensus. Like Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales, your influence will depend on listening to others and exercising minimal direct power.
For a smart, newly-minted librarian, this could be a big opportunity. You won't be paid anything, but, hey, there's probably a paper or two in it, right?
Why it's necessary. The Dewey Decimal System® was great for its time, but it's outlived that. Libraries today should not be constrained by the mental models of the 1870s, doomed to tinker with an increasingly irrelevant system. Nor should they be forced into a proprietary system—copyrighted, trademarked and licensed by a single entity—expensive to adopt and encumbered by restrictions on publishing detailed schedules or coordinating necessary changes.
In recent years, a number of efforts have been made to discard Dewey in favor of other systems, such as BISAC, the "bookstore system." But none have proved good enough for widespread adoption, and license issues remain.
The vision. The Open Shelves Classification should be:
Free. Free both to use and to change, with all schedules and assignments in the public domain and easily accessible in bulk format. Nothing other than common consent will keep the project at LibraryThing. Indeed, success may well entail it leaving the site entirely.
Modern. The OSC should map to current mental models--knowing these will eventually change, but learning from the ways other systems have and haven't grown, and hoping to remain useful for some decades, at least.
Humble. No system--and least of all a one-dimensional shelf order--can get at "reality." The goal should be to create a something limited and humble--a "pretty good" system, a "mostly obvious" system, even a "better than the rest" system--that allows library patrons to browse a collection physically and with enjoyment.
Collaboratively written. The OSC itself should be written socially--slowly, with great care and testing--but socially. (I imagine doing this on the LibraryThing Wiki.)
Collaboriately assigned. As each level of OSC is proposed and ratified, members will be invited to catalog LibraryThing's books according to it. (I imagine using LibraryThing's fielded bibliographic wiki, Common Knowledge.)
I also favor:
Progressive development. I see members writing it "level-by-level" (DDC's classes, divisions, etc.), in a process of discussion, schedule proposals, adoption of a tenative schedule, collaborative assignemnt of a large number of books, statistical testing, more discussion, revision and "solidification."
Public-library focus. LibraryThing members are not predominantly academics, and academic collections, being larger, are less likely to change to a new system. Also, academic collections mostly use the Library of Congress System, which is already in the public domain.
Statistical testing. To my knowledge, no classification system has ever been tested statistically as it was built. Yet there are various interesting ways of doing just that. For example, it would be good to see how a proposed shelf-order matches up against other systems, like DDC, LCC, LCSH and tagging. If a statistical cluster in one of these systems ends up dispersed in OSC, why?
I have started a LibraryThing Group, "Build the Open Shelves Classication." Members are invited to join, and to start working through the basic decisions.
Screencast: What's the big deal about tagging? 6/12/2008 10:47:00 AM | Tim I just finished presenting to the annual meeting of the Association of Christian Librarians, in Quincy, MA. I enjoyed the talk more than usual, and thought I'd post a screencast of part of it, twenty minutes on tagging. It's not perfect, but it hits the points I wanted to hit, and who needs perfect anyway?
The talk was somewhat anomalous insofar as I have been known to make librarians squirm with some of my examples—"leather erotica" is not generally spoken of during most library talks. So I was particularly nervous how this would go over at the CLA. All-in-all it went over just fine.
Jason was the organizer of this year's BIGWIG Showcase, an innovative "camp"-style session at the American Library Associations conference in Anaheim. He is also the co-author of the recent Library Blogging, with Karen Coombs (who gets the first-author love).
It's my plan to talk with interesting people from all parts of the book "world." Casual blog readers should be aware, though, that this is a very library-focused talk.
We spent the first 14 minutes talking about BIGWIG and about library conference talks generally. Then we got into his book and I tried to stir things up a bit by challenging him on library blogging. We closed with the death of the library—and what can prevent it.
I may need to sit down with Library Podcasting to figure out the best way to make podcasts available. Until then, I'm just going to throw the file up as a MP3 here (here) and through this nifty flash plug-in.
I've just finished a first draft of a JSON-based API for book data, created a test page and typed up some basic documentation.
What is this for? The API gives you Javascript access to your book data. The most obvious use of this would be to create new, much better widgets. At first, we expect this to interest programmers, but as new widgets are developed, non-programmers will get cool things. I started by redoing our traditional widgets in a new way here. That's the base, not the ceiling!
How does it work? Every user can retrieve their data, in JSON format—basically as a ready-made JavaScript data structure. You control what is returned—books, tags, ratings, etc.—how it's sorted and so forth. By default we give you a standard library of functions to parse and display the data. You can use it, build on it or start from scratch. Find out more here.
What's great? All our code for processing the JSON API has been and will be released as open source—available for use, reuse and modification. Better—since we're not the best programmers, particularly in JavaScript!—we are requiring any software that builds upon the API to be released under similar terms, so everyone can take advantage of improvements and advances.
Does this make code look sexy?
What's the catch? The API is not intended for making backups or exporting your data to other programs. For that, use our CSV and TSV export functions, from the Tools tab. We are licensing the JSON API for browser-use only. This is about our data licenses. In-browser widgets have never drawn ire from our data providers.
Where can this go? This is just getting started. Everything can be expanded and improved. As members want new or different data, I will be only too happy to add it to the API. But the most interesting development will probably come from members, not LibraryThing employees.
I have created a LibraryThing API Development group to discuss the API, work through code and come up with new ideas.
At a minimum, I can see:
New widget types, like widgets showing your most recent reviews.
Widgets that take you to libraries, and other places other than LibraryThing. (Libraries have been clamoring for this for ages. Many use LibraryThing to feature new books on the website, and want the links to go to their catalog, not LibraryThing.)
New result sets, for your tags or authors (separate from our books), your book's works, series info, etc.
Integration with other JS-based APIs, like Google Book Search.
What if I'm not a programmer? No problem. Come and LibraryThing API Developmenttell us what you want. We'll help you, or maybe someone else will.
UPDATE: I've made some changes to the programming, changing how the code is structured and adding result sets for reading dates. We also have the first outside use of the API, a very promising—if not perfect—cover flip test by MMcM (here). Follow what's going on in the LibraryThing API Development group.
LibraryThing JSON-based books API 7/6/2008 8:23:00 PM | Tim Over on the main blog I posted news about the new LibraryThing JSON-based books API (see here). The new API, which supplements our works API, comes with a small library of functions to manipulate it--all open source.
The API should be of interest to the libraries, as there are a couple of cool things they can do with the API. For example, with a few tweaks, it should be possible for libraries that use LibraryThing to showcase new or selected titles—a very popular thing—to create a widget that links into their OPAC, not to Amazon or whomever.
I'll probably write some basic functions to change linking along these lines, if someone doesn't do it for me first...
LibLime and the eXtensible Catalog (XC) Project announce partnership 7/1/2008 6:55:50 PM | unknown ... currently underway at the University of Rochester's River Campus Libraries-- have announced a new partnership agreement to ensure future compatibility between the XC project and Koha, the first open-source integrated library system.
Polaris Library Systems forms partnership with Altarama ... 7/2/2008 4:16:17 PM | unknown Polaris Library Systems announced a partnership agreement with Altarama Information Systems. The agreement enables Polaris to offer Altarama's RefTracker Information Request Management System directly to customers. ...
On the Move with the Mobile Web: Libraries and Mobile Technologies 7/7/2008 12:46:47 AM | unknown The fifth issue of Library Technology Reports this year looks to the very near future — and for some libraries "on the move with the mobile Web," it highlights libraries' mobile activities already developed for the present. ...
We’re about to find out.
I decided to do a quick 30-minute podcast with 