European library site crashes hours after launch

European culture went digital — but it only lasted a day.

A massive online library and museum project crashed within 24 hours of its launch after millions sought to view treasures collected from museums, national libraries and archives, the European Union said Friday.

“We are doing our utmost to reopen Europeana in a more robust version as soon as possible,” the http://www.europeana.eu site said. “We will be back by mid-December.”

Assessing and Improving the Safety of Internet Search Engines (PDF; 519 KB)

In principle, search engines’ listing rules, ranking rules, and advertising policies might shield users from some bad practices, and users’ good judgment could protect them from others. But empirically, search engines often lead users to dangerous content. My analysis of search engine safety finds bad practices among approximately 5% of search results for popular keywords, or roughly one site per page of search results.

Source: The Power of Search Engines (via HBS Working Knowledge)

From the article:

The British Library in London is among more than 1,000 cultural organisations making contributions to a European online library.

The free multimedia venture, Europeana, will also see input from the European Commission and the Louvre Museum.

Internet users will be able to access more than two million books, maps, recordings, photographs, archive documents, paintings and films.

These will be sourced from institutions across the EU’s member states.

Source: BBC

Direct to European Digital Library

See Also: Learn More About Europeana
Backround, contact info, and history.

Source: BBC

See also: France Dominates Europe’s Digital Library (New York Times)

New Google Watching Service Launched by ArnoldIT.com

Blogger and technology expert Stephen Arnold has launched a free service (www.arnoldit.com/overflight) that aggregates the headlines from Google’s own blogs. Overflight, “An ArnoldIT.com Intelligence Service,” is an RSS aggregation service that aggregates the headlines from Google’s 74 weblogs. The most recent headlines are grouped using the same categories that Google favors. A fee-based service offers more bells and whistles.

SOurce: Information Today NewsBreaks

Israeli Candidate Borrows a (Web) Page From Obama

Click on the Russian-language version of the campaign Web site of Benjamin Netanyahu, the conservative Likud leader running for prime minister of Israel, and up pops a picture of him with Barack Obama. On the Hebrew version, Mr. Obama is not pictured. But he is, in fact, everywhere.

The colors, the fonts, the icons for donating and volunteering, the use of videos, and the social networking Facebook-type options — including Twitter, which hardly exists in Israel — all reflect a conscious effort by the Netanyahu campaign to learn from the Obama success.

Source: New York Times

New Google Services Could Burden Networks, Benefit Scholars

Yesterday Google unveiled three new services — two that may make campus-network administrators groan and one that could prove to be a boon to researchers in a number of disciplines.

The search giant’s voice- and video-chat offerings could encourage more campus-network users to switch from low-bandwidth communication technologies — instant messaging, e-mail, social networks — to chat applications that consume considerably more network resources. Voice and video chatting have been available for some time, of course, through Skype, Apple’s iChat, and other applications. But Google’s search and e-mail functions are widely used, and the software is easy to install and use, so more people may be drawn in.

Source: Wired Campus/Chronicle of Higher Education

Map Upon Map: New Dimensions in What Maps Can Do

It’s easy to assume that the real revolution in mapping is the global positioning satellite and Google revolution — the ability to pinpoint yourself in real time on a digital map using G.P.S. technology and to move effortlessly around the globe, at increasing levels of detail, as you can in Google Maps and Google Earth. But the real revolution lies in the layering of data onto these already kinetic methods of viewing the world. In a very real sense, the virtual planet becomes our index to what we know about the actual planet.

Source: New York Times

Google Uses Searches to Track Flu’s Spread

There is a new common symptom of the flu, in addition to the usual aches, coughs, fevers and sore throats. Turns out a lot of ailing Americans enter phrases like “flu symptoms” into Google and other search engines before they call their doctors.

That simple act, multiplied across millions of keyboards in homes around the country, has given rise to a new early warning system for fast-spreading flu outbreaks, called Google Flu Trends.

Tests of the new Web tool from Google.org, the company’s philanthropic unit, suggest that it may be able to detect regional outbreaks of the flu a week to 10 days before they are reported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

+ Google.org Flu Trends

Source: New York Times

Spammers mine new ground: Economic crisis, Obama’s election become major drivers of targeted e-mail attacks

Spammers have jumped on the global financial crisis to lure unsuspecting victims into their botnets using the line that “Treasury Secretary Paulsen wants to send you money!” and, in the wake of this week’s election, president-elect Barack Obama also has emerged as bait for other large spam campaigns.

In hours of the closing of polls, online security companies began reporting a rash of e-mails purportedly coming from news organizations or official government sites containing links to speeches, interviews or other election news. The links actually redirect e-mail recipients to malicious code. MX Logic reported seeing more than 1 million of the messages in the first two hours of their appearance, and Sophos said similar messages represented up to 60 percent of all malicious spam seen in its labs on Nov. 5.

Source: Government Computer News

Under Obama, Web Would Be the Way

Armed with millions of e-mail addresses and a political operation that harnessed the Internet like no campaign before it, Barack Obama will enter the White House with the opportunity to create the first truly “wired” presidency.

Obama aides and allies are preparing a major expansion of the White House communications operation, enabling them to reach out directly to the supporters they have collected over 21 months without having to go through the mainstream media.

Source: Washington Post

Librarians Want to Out-Google Google With a Better Search Engine

Have you ever wished for a personal reference librarian, an information guru to point you to the most reliable sites whenever you search the Web? A new search-engine project aims to simulate something like that. The trick? Weighting search results so that librarians’ picks rise to the top.

Called Reference Extract, the project is being developed by the Online Computer Library Center and the information schools of Syracuse University and the University of Washington. OCLC is an international cooperative that shares resources among more than 69,000 libraries in 112 countries and territories. A $100,000 grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation is covering planning costs.

According to the project proposal, the search engine “will be built for maximum credibility by relying on the expertise and credibility judgments of librarians from around the globe.”

Source: Wired Campus/Chronicle of Higher Education

Securing Home Office

Never before has so much technology and Internet access been available to the home user. Each year, more and more Americans are working from home. Because so many people now have home offices, the need for security has never been higher. Securing the home office need not be a difficult exercise. There are several considerations that need to be addressed to safely secure the home network from the outside world. The goal of this paper is to address the common vulnerabilities of the average home office and to suggest methods to safely secure it.

+ Full Paper (PDF; 554 KB)

Cyber advice for the next president

A commission formed to offer advice on cybersecurity to the next president is nearing the completion of its work, and some of the recommendations are likely to conflict with elements of President Bush’s Cyber Initiative.

“It will be finalized very shortly,” said Rep. Jim Langevin (D-R.I.), co-chairman of the bipartisan Commission on Cyber Security for the 44th Presidency. “The findings are preliminary at this point.”

The commission, created in November 2007 by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), held a series of public meetings to hear recommendations on issues of information security, identity theft and government leadership. It plans to present its findings to the new president prior to his inauguration in January.

When it does, one of the biggest departures from current cybersecurity policy will be the commission’s recommendation to take the lead away from the Homeland Security Department and give it to the White House.

Source: Government Computer News

How to Use the New Google Web Search RSS Feeds

Google’s been the lone hold out among major search engines on RSS but the company quietly enabled feeds for web search results this week. The offering is pretty limited and frustrating, you have to go through Google Alerts to get an obscure RSS URL, but we offer a tutorial and some strategic advice in this post.

Web search RSS is useful for being alerted whenever search results for your keywords or link have changed; subscribing to at least a few searches will let you know when Google users are seeing something new in the first few pages of search results for your company name, for example.

Source: ReadWriteWeb

Finding Experts By Semantic Matching of User Profiles

Extracting interest profiles of users based on their personal documents is one of the key topics of IR research. However, when these extracted profiles are used in expert finding applications, only naive text- matching techniques are used to rank experts for a given requirement. In this paper, we address this gap and describe multiple techniques to match user profiles for better ranking of experts. We propose new metrics for computing semantic similarity of user profiles using spreading activation networks derived from ontologies. Our pilot evaluation shows that matching algorithms based on bipartite graphs over semantic user profiles provide the best results. We show that using these techniques, we can find an expert more accurately than other approaches, in particular within the top ranked results. In applications where a group of candidate users need to be short-listed (say, for a job interview), we get very good precision and recall as well.

+ Full Paper (PDF; 246 KB)

Source: HP Labs