Thursday June 21, 2007

Recent readings tangential to digital libraries

Three articles I've read recently that seemed worth passing along.

1) Michael Jensen on how authority is constructed, conferred, and maintained in various online venues. Read this in the Chronicle of Higher Ed a few days back and then saw that the ACRLlog had picked it up too. No mention of libraries, but undergrads are rife for discussions of this sort on methodologies when it comes time to mention the dreaded phrase, "authoritative sources." He includes a lengthy guess list at what Authority 3.0 will be that strongly reminds me of Vernor Vinge's recent fiction.

2) An article by Kalevi Kilkki in First Monday on quantitatively analyzing Long Tail phenomena. Chris Anderson used mostly qualitative arguments and avoided the nitty gritty math really needed to fully analyze and predict distributions of this nature. Saw this on Lorcan Dempsey's blog a bit ago and finally got around to reading it. If you're interested in Long Tail behavior, this is required reading.

3) The New York Times Magazine just this past Sunday had a feature on the rather darker sweatshop side of online gaming. As usual for me and 2.0 stuff, I'm way more interested in the economics and social influences rippling out from the growth of online games than I am in the actual technologies involved or the games themselves (though a good question is where do you draw the line between those categories)

I'd love to hear what others have come across lately.

Scott

Wednesday June 13, 2007

We all get to digitize books

Check out this story from CNN about the distorted word puzzles we all have to solve to register at Web sites.

"Instead of wasting time typing in random letters and numbers, Carnegie
Mellon researchers have come up with a way for people to type in
snippets of books to put their time to good use, confirm they're not
machines and help speed up the process of getting searchable texts
online."

The idea is that when a machine can't decipher words from a book, get all of us non-machines to do that work, bit by bit. How smart is that?

Thursday June 07, 2007

Photosynth

First, I want to thank Erik M. for sharing this amazing video with me.

Fast forward to the 3min mark to see a demo of this amazing software called Photosynth.

The basic idea is that the software takes a huge pile of ordinary photos about a subject (e.g. photos of Notre Dame from Flickr) and virtually stitches them together to form an interactive model of the subject.