R+W is a boutique book blogging effort run solely by yours truly, but as well as covering what I read between covers, it does act as something of a filter for those too busy to read all the literature and publishing feeds I’ve amassed for myself in recent times.
I do far less library blog and tech reading than I did when I started this blog, but seem to have enough knowledge of blogging and online writing to make me an online reviewer and a member of the selection panel for the Summer Read program at the State Library of Victoria. And some other nice things have happened too, not least including getting to know lots of kind book bloggers, and having the odd person ask my opinion here and there, which is simply delightful for an unemployed librarian. (I do hope to change that soon too – I’ve been doing contract work in special libraries and hope to pick up more cataloguing soon.)

So if there’s anyone out there who would really like to use the name Library Sputnik for their blog (it was admired by no less a person than Christy Dena, after all), give me a yell and I’ll be happy to give it to you if you give me an acknowledgement somewhere, just to be polite that is.

Thanks for coming by, linking and reading, and enjoy your blogging.

I am quite happy with the addons for Firefox and IE which are expanded to take up more of your browser edges if you like that, and I do – it’s helpful for my grazing habits to have my favourite bundles of tags sitting in the toolbar in case I get too distracted with feeds.

This way, I occasionally do read, reply, listen to or research things I’ve saved.

And although I’m not a great fan of cluttered desktops, I rather like
the sidebar sitting in the browser, even though one has to return to
the del.icio.us site to edit bookmarks and tags.

There are people of course who wonder why we use sites like delicious at all, who argue that blogging is dead and that Facebook and social streaming tools like Twitter are the new face of the social web.

There are also old stodges like me who not only like delicious, we like keeping web bookmarks so much that we have a Furl account as well, where we can keep a copy of the original webpage ‘4 evah’. (Furl is owned by Looksmart and I was first introduced to it by Mary Ellen Bates, a US librarian and information professional who tours the world giving workshops on Web research.)

But there are younger people out there who, despite it being so last week, are happy to help us oldies make the most of our muddled, child-like efforts to colour in bits of the Web so we can find them later.

Here’s Sarah Perez of ReadWriteWeb to tell us how to build our own custom search engine to milk several sets of bookmarks from different sources at once. If we so desire.

I’m not convinced of the usefulness of that approach, but the original post she quotes from Matthew Ewing’s blog has some terrific commentary on delicious usage in general, with Marshall Kirkpatrick of RWW chipping in to offer this comment:

"thinking about it more, perhaps my preferred response would be – thank
goodness many people do tag things in Del.icio.us because using their
collective intelligence is one of the best things about the service."

I think use is something that depends on so many things, like desire and availability and time to customise your tool of choice, that I’m no longer upset that my use of the Web is still mainly restricted to collections of print items, and that my best shot at finding them quickly is to mark the spot, in some way, if only to remind myself that I did actually see this thing once before…and thought it might come in handy.

And if that’s your usage pattern, any more powerful search  technologies will still need to acknowledge that in some way. There will still be a place for people like me who are easily overloaded and want to find something – how can I put it nicely? -  more than once. Us readers, certainly, need to be able to tell the Web to behave in some ways like a personalised librarian as well as a researcher – one of the greatest things about it at present is that it can be both.

Don’t get me wrong, there are areas of the ‘in the moment’ Web I find relaxing and delightful, like concerts and art galleries in their way. I"m certainly not above visiting graphic websites to see things for the first and probably last time, just for the experience of the moment – to which end I note also that Corvida at ReadWriteWeb recommends this photo website, Vi.sualize.us, calling it ‘a place where all the cool photos hang out’.

Have a look and let me know what you think. I’m tagging it for later, Augustus.

Crossposted at Reeling and Writhing.

As Talis has jumped into Web 2.0 in a big way, though with a Semantic Web underpinning, it’s hardly surprising they’d be advocates for LibraryThing with the big guys.

I do feel bad about this blog – at present I’m trying to write a bit more for print publications, as well as fiddle with other writing, and the ideas I can filch from blogging for those would probably have filled two blogs quite nicely once upon a time.

So it’s a recalibration time over here. Expect to see ‘Archive’ added to the header of this blog sometime soon. A slow library sputnik. And if you like this name, and you’d like to use it, please drop me a line.
You don’t have to, but I’d like to know it’s gone to a good home. Hell, I’ll even visit you.

But who would have thought that social network would have had so much blood in it? 15 billion?? Is Facebook just a big…. blood orange, waiting for an exceptionally large set of choppers?

Analysts said Microsoft paid a steep price on a bet that the three-year-old company would be able to transform itself into a hub for all sorts of Web activity.

The only way this works is if Facebook becomes sort of the users’ operating system on the Internet — everyone logs into Facebook every day to get in contact with their friends and use a multitude of future applications that will be developed for it, said Morningstar analyst Toan Tran.

Facebook, a social network that lets friends share information, allows outside developers to create games and other applications for its site.

The popularity and depth of knowledge Facebook has about its users makes it valuable to companies like Microsoft and Google which want to sell advertising targeted to individual preferences. (Reuters)

And from The Australian, a few days ago – Dymocks is to offer e-books, boosting its catalogue to more than 4.5 million titles. (Its largest store, in George Street, Sydney, can hold about 350,000 hard copy books.)
The e-book project has been in development for two and a half years, with Dymocks management keeping a close eye on what has happened in the music industry and recognising that Internet sales are slowly eating away at shopfront distributors’ figures. At present it is claimed that ‘many…titles would be sold at a discount to their hardcover cousins.’

Update: There is more news on this over at Australian Writers’ Marketplace Online, at their Speakeasy blog – it looks as though Dymocks are claiming a world first on this one.

HAHAHA!!
That didn’t take very long. Or hurt much. Did it.

Last night I zipped over to Le Figaro’s forums after reading a heartrending account there of actress Sandrine Bonnaire’s struggle to have services provided for her autistic sister in France (don’t ask me why I’m reading this when my son has gone for a lovely night out with a sports respite group. I’m potty) and on a whim, je me suis enregistre la-bas as a commenter.

In fear and trembling, knowing my French is nowhere near good enough – but lo and behold, looking around for the logout tab (there is none), I found a little tab called “Mon Figaro” and clicked on it. Up came a Netvibes screen (like iGoogle or PageFlakes), all in French. Zut alors, c’est magnifique.

The caption at the top of the page translates crudely as My Figaro, News Which Resembles You ( News Like You). So, why don’t the Australian papers have this, huh???

This is for lazy people like me who can’t be bothered taping the French news on SBS, of course. If only I could get to the gym by nine am, I could listen to it and run at the same time…That isn’t going to happen.

(R+W, that’s Reeling and Writhing.)

I intend to keep an eye on this: Librarians who Library Thing (from the groups on Library Thing). (And keep an eye on that link as well – it is down at the moment, so I will go back there and check it soon.)

ReadWriteWeb reports that apparently NASA is close to stabilising a semantic browser and presented on it at the 2007 Semantic Technology Conference.

As everyone knows by now, Google has purchased Feedburner for around $100 million, confirming what Chris Sherman said last year at WebSearchPacific workshops, that advertising is increasingly important to the G. Over at ReadWriteWeb, Josh Catone reported that:

In a blog post, Google’s VP of Product Management Susan Wojcicki said that Google aims “to give AdWords advertisers broader distribution to an even wider audience of users” and spoke glowingly of Feedburner’s current RSS feed advertising platform. As we said last week, this marriage seems like a match made in heaven. Google already controls the mostprofitable text ad network on the Internet and will now have the opportunity to expand it into a large number of RSS feeds, giving them even more reach. They also gain access to a lot of statistical data about how people consume content.

Maybe it also explains why, when I went through my notes on Sherman and Mary Ellen Bates’s workshops recently and was exploring the analytics site Blogniscient, I was redirected to Google to subscribe to a feed on a search. I went back to Blogniscient and entered another search, only to be returned to a page of Google search results. Try as I might, it was impossible to get the original interface to resume activity. Incredibly annoying, and I didn’t bother exploring the cause as it was clear that in the space of six months, Google had been out shopping and just hadn’t bothered to tell anyone who visited this site what was going down. On a subsequent visit I noted that the most recent articles and headlines on Blogniscient were dated March 2007 – so that must have been the date of the takeover, yet the site is still up and there is no information on it about what has happened.

There is a report in this morning’s paper that Google and Microsoft are elbowing each other over Google Desktop being blocked by Vista software. Bigger isn’t always better, is it.