Webcast — 10 Ways to Wreck Your Database

Want to make sure your database loses data, duplicates records, and can only handle 5 transactions a minute? Want to make your application developers curse you, your sysadmin hate you, and get yourself fired without a reference? These ten database design techniques will set you on the road to downtime perdition and maintenance hell.

Date: Friday, July 10th at 10 am PT
Price: Free (registration required)
Duration: Approximately 60 minutes

Source: O’Reilly Media

Two items from two of the major search players.

First, Bing is now including Twitter results from “more prominent and prolific Twitterers from a variety of spheres” for certain types of searches. Learn more via the Bing blog and Search Engine Land.

Second, word from Google Book Search that they’ve added tag clouds for some titles in their database.

From a Blog Post:

Starting today, you’ll find a cloud of “Common Terms and Phrases” on the Book Overview page for some of our books. This cloud represents the distribution of words in a book: big terms are more common in the book, while small terms are rarer.

Here’s an example.

See Also: Amazon’s “Look Inside the Book” program continues to provide a concordance/tag clouds for some titles. They’re found under the heading “concordance” on a book overview page. Here’s an example.

UPDATE: Want More Web Search News? We’ve got it!
++ Google Blog and News Search has added several new features (via Search Engine Roundtable.

++ Google Blog Search Sees Twitter Trends & Raises With Blog Search ‘Hot Queries’ (via Search Engine Land)

++ Bing gets a favorable review from USA Today.

See Also: On a related note, if you’re a Firefox user you can now create tag clouds from Twitter, Google, and Yahoo results via a tool named Search Cloudlet.

Here at ResourceShelf we’re big fans and users of Zotero. If you’ve never used this great tool we suggest taking a look. It’s free to download and use with your Firefox browser.

From the Article:

With Zotero, you can build up a collection of digital documents, cataloging and sorting it as you go. You can gloss the material so harvested, attaching your notes as you go. Zotero is particularly useful for gathering bibliographical data, and allows you to export it in a wide range of standard scholarly citation formats.

Source: Inside HigherEd

From a Post:

A Chesapeake Project Legal Information Archive report illustrates the severity of link rot: the tendency of web hyperlinks to become invalid over time.

The report notes that nearly 14 percent of 4,300 online publications archived between 2007 and 2009 have already disappeared from their original locations on the web. Due to the project’s efforts, however, these publications remain available.

Access the Full Report (49 pages; PDF)
Link rot is addressed on page six.

Source: National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program / LC

From a mozillaZine Post:

Mozilla Firefox 3.5 has been released. Available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux in more than 70 different languages, Firefox 3.5 is the most recent major Mozilla browser release since the launch of Firefox 3 in June 2008.

The Firefox Features page at mozilla.com lists the new and improved features in Firefox 3.5

Download Here

Source: mozillaZine

From the Article:

With increasing demands on their time, librarians seek speedier, easier ways to create library course pages and subject research guides. Many libraries have turned to LibGuides, LibData, and other content management systems (CMS) to meet this need.1 Add to this mix, Library à la Carte, formerly Interactive Course Assignment Pages (or ICAP) Tool. Created by librarians and a programmer at Oregon State University (OSU) Libraries, Library à la Carte is a CMS originally designed to create course pages. Library à la Carte was recently enhanced to build subject pages. This open source tool is freely available to all libraries.

Direct to Library à la Carte Web Site

Source: C&RL News

The article discusses the following engines and tools:

+ Collecta

+ Ice Rocket

+ Scoopler

+ Trackle

+ Kosmix

+ Voyij.com

+ Indeed.com

+ Searchme.com

+ Fizy.com

+ Blinkx.com

and several others.

Direct to Article

Source: Wired

From the Summary:

In a world where we are surrounded by technology, where boundaries between our personal and professional lives merge, JISC’s e-Learning team have been looking at how to support teachers, researchers and academics with best practice advice and guidance for working in a ‘digital age’.

In this podcast with Rebecca O’Brien, Sarah Knight, a JISC e-Learning programme manager, shares the success of the team’s Effective Best Practice guide series and launches a new publication ‘Effective Practice in a Digital Age’. This new guide puts the teacher and learning at its centre and takes those new and experienced in using Web 2.0 technologies on a journey to enhance their practices and illustrates through case studies how practitioners are opening up their practice and enhancing the learner experience as well as their own.

Direct to Podcast
It runs about 19 minutes.

Source: JISC

FEC Seeks Public Comment on Improving Its Website and Internet Communications

At its Open Meeting Thursday, the Federal Election Commission (FEC) announced that it is seeking public suggestions on how to improve its website and Internet communications. The outreach effort is intended to ensure that the Commission website is a state-of-the-art resource for disclosure of information to the public, including campaign finance data, information on federal campaign finance laws and Commission actions. The Commission has continually engaged in ongoing efforts to improve all aspects of how it discloses information through its website.

The FEC seeks recommendations from all segments of the public, including representatives of political committees, federal candidates and officeholders, members of the media and other writers, members of the academic community and advocacy groups.

“This represents the first time the FEC has taken formal and comprehensive steps to look outside the Agency for suggestions, opinions, and ideas on improving our chief disclosure vehicle,” Commission Chairman Steven T. Walther said. “It is also the principal method of communication by the public to the Agency, and the way almost all financial disclosure reports are received. The best way to carry out this mission is to be in the forefront of leading technology. We believe this initiative will help people who are using our website and attract new users.”

Source: Federal Elections Commission

From the News Story:

What if the wisdom of Web could be yours, without having to read through it one page at a time? That’s what the military wants.

DARPA [Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency] has hired a company to develop a reading machine to reduce the gap between the ever increasing mountain of digitized text and the intelligence community’s insatiable appetite for data input.

BBN Technologies was awarded the $29.7 million contract to develop a universal text engine capable of capturing knowledge from written matter and rendering it into a format that artificial intelligence systems (AI) and human analysts can work with.

Source: News.com

See Also: Read the BBN Technologies News Release

See Also:Read the DARPA Announcement (86 pages; PDF)

See Also: Direct to DARPA Web Site

This guide to “accurate and free” sites was compiled and annotated by Rebecca A. Martin and Sarah McHone-Chase, both librarians at Northern Illinois University.

Direct to Article

Source: C&RL News

A bit late to the party on this one. )-: We say better late than never. (-:

From the Announcement:

AskScotland is a collaborative national service developed by the Scottish Library and Information Council (SLIC) that will pool the staff and resources of Scotland’s public library services to bring their knowledge and rich collections to a global audience.

In the initial stages of the project, users will submit questions via email using a form on the AskScotland website. The question will then be routed to the appropriate library service and a personalised response will be researched by a specialist reference librarian.

AskScotland is part of the wider ScotlandsInformation.com service that brings together information available in Scotland’s libraries, museums and archives to offer a single, user-friendly access point to the vast array of important resources and collections held in Scotland.

ScotlandsInformation uses Google map technology to allow users to browse collections and get service information by clicking on a location.

The new service is using QuestionPoint/OCLC technology

Direct to Ask Scotland

Source: Scottish Library and Information Council (SLIC)

From an Announcement:

Whatever their reason for posting their thoughts online, bloggers have a shared ethical code, according to a recent study published in the journal New Media Society, published by SAGE. Key issues in the blogosphere are telling the truth, accountability, minimizing harm and attribution, although the extent to which bloggers follow their own ethical ideals can depend on the context and intended audience.

Creating weblogs (blogs) is often viewed as a form of citizen journalism, open to anyone with Internet access. As it grows in prevalence and influence, communication scholars, news media, governments and bloggers themselves have raised questions about blogging’s ethical implications. Some academics propose that bloggers should follow an ethics code, based on standards journalists follow. But few researchers have examined ethical standards bloggers themselves aspire to, and whether they adhere to their own ethical standards.

Andy Koh, Alvin Lim and Ng Ee Soon of Nanyang Technological University, Singapore used a web survey of 1224 international bloggers with active, text-based blogs to find out more about bloggers, their ethical ideals and how they put these into practice. Of those surveyed, more than half were male (51%), most were under 30 (65%). Most were well educated, and the majority were from the USA (65%), with no other country accounting for more than eight percent of the participants.

Sharing thoughts and feelings or creating an online diary is the main drive for personal bloggers, who are mainly students (39%) and information technology industry workers (9%). These bloggers often feel they know their readers very well (62%) with many blogging for those they know personally (39%).

Non-personal bloggers are more likely to be male, older, married and better educated. Students (18%) and information technology workers (12%) still make up the largest proportions of this group. The non-personal bloggers’ main reasons for blogging are to make commentary (36%) or provide information (21%). Among their diverse blog topics, government and politics (28%) and news (10%) are most common. Their primary intended audiences tend to be people that they do not know personally (48%), or no particular intended audience (38%). Despite this, almost half still feel they know their readers well.

Direct to Full Text Article (available for a limited period of time)

Source: EurekAlert

From a Nielsen Wire Blog Post:

At the annual What Teens Want conference in New York, The Nielsen Company presented How Teens Use Media, which argues once you look past the hype - American teens are not as alien in their media usage as you might expect. Sure, it might sound hip and trendy to suggest they’re too busy texting, Twittering or LOL-ing to be engaged with traditional media, but ultimately, the research proves otherwise.

Direct to Full Text: How Teens Use Media (17 pages; PDF)

Key Takeaways:

+ Teens are NOT abandoning TV for new media: In fact, they watch more TV than ever, up 6% over the past five years in the U.S.

+ Teens love the Internet … but spend far less time browsing than adults: Teens spend 11 hours and 32 minutes per month online. Far below the average of 29 hours and 15 minutes.

+ Teens watch less online video than most adults, but the ads are highly engaging to them: Teens spend 35% less time watching online video than adults 25-34, but recall ads better when watching TV shows online than they do on television.

+ Teens read newspapers, listen to the radio and even like advertising more than most: Teens who recall TV ads are 44% more likely to say they liked the ad.

+ Teens play video games, but their tastes aren’t all for the blood-and-guts style games: Just two of their top five most-anticipated games since 2005 have been rated “Mature.”

+ Teens’ favorite TV shows, top websites and genre preferences across media are mostly the same as their parents: For U.S. teens, American Idol was the top show in 2008, Google the top website and general dramas are a preferred TV genre for teens around the world.

Source: Nielsen

Marti Hearst, the well known and highly respected professor from the School of Information at UC Berkeley has written a new book about search user interfaces and she’s making the full text available online at no charge. Cool!

The book will appear on bookshelves in September and is being published by Cambridge University Press.

Chapters Include:
1: Design of Search User Interfaces
2: Evaluation of Search User Interfaces
3: Models of the Information Seeking Process
4: Query Specification
5: Presentation of Search Results
6: Query Reformulation
7: Supporting the Search Process
8: Integrating Navigation with Search
9: Personalization in Search
10: Information Visualization for Search Interfaces
11: Information Visualization for Text Analysis
12: Emerging Trends in Search Interfaces

Direct to Full Text: Search User Interfaces

See Also: Marti Hearst’s Publications Page
Another full helping of some very interesting writing. Make sure to check it out.