Ranking the World's Best Digital Libraries
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Friday, February 29
Friday Fun Link - Ranking the World's Best Digital Libraries (Feb 29, 2008)
by
Jason
on Fri 29 Feb 2008 06:59 AM CST
You know it's a hard core list when the Library of Congress only ranks an "honourable mention".
Ranking the World's Best Digital Libraries Monday, February 18
The Demographics of Search (and A List of The Internet's Most Popular Sites)
by
Jason
on Mon 18 Feb 2008 09:46 PM CST
TechCrunch recently had a story about a new study which found that lower-income people tend to prefer Yahoo! and higher-income people prefer Google.
(Shea's reading over my shoulder and goes "That's funny - I didn't know anyone preferred Yahoo!") Anyhow, that made me think about the "Everything You Wanted To Know About the Internet (But Were Afraid To Ask)" public sessions I've been giving in rural libraries for the last month and a half. I introduce my presentation as "a guided tour of the Internet's most useful and most popular web sites" and tend to have an audience of very new, inexperienced Internet users who are mostly online for e-mail and some basic web surfing. In very general terms, they've heard of Google, Hotmail, Ebay (but definitely haven't bought or sold anything online!) and occasionally Facebook but that's about it. And to be fair, "rural villages" are almost perfectly split between using Yahoo! and Google according to the TechCrunch article while "small towns" skew towards Google. It's places like "struggling societies", "blue collar backbone" and "remote America" that spend more time with Yahoo! (Just don't ask me what those different categories mean!) During the presentation, I also do a section on sites that are useful for our everyday life in the province - sites for maps, phone books, local news, etc. and a plug for the library's web site and all it has to offer. But for the bulk of the presentation, these are the sites I talk about (with related subjects I cover in brackets.) Amazon.com (buying online and e-commerce) Download.com (viruses and keeping your computer secure) Ebay.com (how sites like Amazon and Ebay among others have leveled the playing field for people in rural areas who are now able to buy (and sell) a massive range of products that used to require special trips to the nearest major centre to obtain in the past) Facebook.com (online privacy) Flickr.com (your digital footprint) Google.com (basic tips to improve your searches, different features of Google beyond search) Hotmail.com Wikipedia.org YouTube.com Do you notice a glaring omission? Did my own anti-Yahoo! bias factor into my choice of sites to talk about during my presentation, even when Yahoo is the number one site for traffic on a global basis and one of the top three companies for Internet traffic in the United States? This is also especially ironic given my recent discovery that only three of the four major search engines find my blog - Yahoo! is one that does along with MSN Live and Ask.com. Google is the only one that doesn't! I've only got a couple weeks left but are there any other sites that you'd introduce to an audience of beginning Internet users (er, other than Yahoo?  ) Thursday, February 14
Happy Valenkeg's Day
by
Jason
on Thu 14 Feb 2008 09:27 PM CST
When I was in undergrad, I was a regular at the Bushwakker Brew Pub for Robbie Burns Night each January. Every year, they had a draw to go with the celebrations and on one particularly memorable occasion, I happened to win a free keg. Since the next major holiday after Robbie Burns Night (barring Groundhog Day of course) is Valentine's Day, I thought it would be a good idea to have a party, invite all my single male and female friends, tap the keg and voila - romance (or at least drunken foolishness) was sure to follow.
The party was a blast (although, in retrospect, probably not as charming for the women who were brave enough to show up as for the men) and ever since, I have always thought of Valentine's Day with the name we used for the party, "Valenkeg's Day". Also since then, that slight turn of phrase has helped take the edge off an otherwise insufferable holiday. When you're single, you're made to feel like a leper for not being in a relationship. When you're in a relationship, there is Christmas Consumption level of pressure to buy crap - flowers, chocolates, expensive dinners, tickets to even more expensive shows, etc. to show/express/prove your love. So have a pint on me and remember, own the holiday or it will own you! (And in a tribute to grade school when everybody shared the love, I offer a copy of this card to each and everyone of you...)  I know this is "below the fold" in newspaper parlance but here is a list of... WORDS PEOPLE HAVE USED TO DESCRIBE THE TASTE OF BUSHWAKKER'S PALLISER PORTER BEER TO ME Banana Chocolate Cigarette Coffee Dirt Earth Oak Smoke The correct answer is, of course, Heaven.  Saturday, February 9
Friday Late Link - Free On-Demand Music (Feb 9, 2008)
by
Jason
on Sat 09 Feb 2008 02:48 PM CST
I was going to link to a list of the symptoms of severe food poisoning and leave off at that. But after sleeping sixteen hours out of the last twenty-four (I won't get too graphic about how I spent the other eight hours but you can imagine...
 ...I'm feeling a bit better so I decided to do a regular Friday Fun Link, if one day late.) During a public session a couple weeks ago, I got asked if there was a web site where a person could type in a song and have it play automatically. My best suggestion was MeeMix. But I forgot about a couple interfaces I'd seen which use Google's advanced search to find MP3's that people have uploaded to their web sites. Then a recent MetaFilter thread unveiled a couple more - Songza and Songerize. So here's a list of all of them that I know about ( should also mention QTrax that was launched recently but down for the time being due to overwhelming interest): Songerize Songza G2P Google MP3 Search MeeMix (via MetaFilter) Wednesday, February 6
My Favourite Authors - A Semi-Scientific Study
by
Jason
on Wed 06 Feb 2008 12:07 AM CST
Cue the "anal retentive librarian" stereotypes...
I've kept a list of every book I've read since 1996. I was recently thinking about who my favourite authors are and instead of just picking the first names that came to mind, I thought it would be interesting to sort that list by author then record everybody whose name appears more than once. You can probably assume that this technique gives a pretty good indication that there's something about the author that I enjoy - whether its their writing style, the topics they write about or whatever. Of course, it's also embarrassing that there are a lot of great authors who, for whatever reason, I've only read one of their books - at least in that time frame. (I admit I was tempted to slip in a few of their names to give me more "cool" cachet but hey, what's a blog for if not stupid levels of personal revelation?) If you don't know an author on this list, you can do a quick Google search on the name to find out a bit more about them - although, in 90% of the cases, I warn you that it will probably just lead to somebody writing about one of my not-so-guilty pleasures (the Beatles) or one of my guilty ones (professional wrestling.) Here you go... Al Franken Alex Garland Anthony Bourdain Art Slade Ben Elton Bill Bryson Bret Hart Carl Sagan Christopher Sandford Chuck Klosterman Chuck Palahniuk Clifford Stoll Dave Barry Dave Bidini Dave Margoshes David Carpenter Dean Koontz Douglas Coupland Douglas Rushkoff Eric Hansen Eric Schlosser Frank McCourt Fred Stenson George Tremlett Gore Vidal Hal Niedzviecki Helene Hanff Howard Stern Hunter Davies Hunter S. Thompson Ian MacDonald Irvine Welsh James Mitchener Jay Ingram Jerry Spinelli JK Rowling John Allen Paulos John Rocco Kevin Taft Kurt Vonnegut Malcolm Gladwell Marcello di Cintio Mark Lisac Martin Amis Michael Crichton Michael Moore Mick Foley Molly Ivins Naomi Klein Oliver Sacks Pete Best Pete Shotton Philip Norman Ray Coleman Richard Dawkins Robert Fulghum Robert Harris Roddy Doyle Scott Adams Scott Keith Stephen King Steven Michael Berenzky (Mick Burrs) Thomas Wharton Tim Sandlin Timothy Findley Will Ferguson Yoko Ono Themes? Lots of popular culture and bestselling authors. More non-fiction than fiction. Not a lot of literature (I think I had my fill of that in undergrad!) A few Canadian authors but honestly, not as many as I suspected I'd have. I think, having worked in publishing and with writers, there are a lot of authors who I've read one of their books but rarely went on to read a second work because there was always the next new author to try. What would be really interesting would be to have a list like this going back to the time that you began reading - so you'd have everybody from Dr. Seuss to Franklin W. Dixon. Monday, February 4
We Get Questions, Lots and Lots of Questions
by
Jason
on Mon 04 Feb 2008 05:19 PM CST
Just finished trying to help someone update their profile on VampireFreaks.com (half successfully, half not - I figured out how to add a background image rather than a solid colour and to add an embedded music player as well. But I couldn't figure out how to place the music player where the person wanted it on the page.) - how do I do better Google searches? |
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