100 Best Tech Products of 2008

The editors at PC World have completed this year's list of the 100 best technology products available today. How did they do it? After nominating hundreds of devices, apps, sites, and services they knew to be good, they rated each one on its design, functionality, performance, and impact; the ones garnering the highest total scores made their list.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,146161/article.html

One video website featured is called Hulu http://www.hulu.com/

Digital Library Project Abandoned

On May 23, 2008 it was reported that Microsoft is abandoning their digital book efforts, leaving Google as the only major player.
The post is from Roy Tennant of LibraryJournal.com
http://www.libraryjournal.com/blog/1090000309/post/760027076.html

The End of Microsoft's Digital Book Efforts May 23, 2008Thanks to Peter Brantley and the Digital Library Federation list, I found out about this little tidbit. In a nutshell, Microsoft is abandoning their digital book efforts, leaving Google as the only major player. Some key excerpts of interest to libraries:
Today we informed our partners that we are ending the Live Search Books and Live Search Academic projects and that both sites will be taken down next week. Books and scholarly publications will continue to be integrated into our Search results, but not through separate indexes...
With Live Search Books and Live Search Academic, we digitized 750,000 books and indexed 80 million journal articles. Based on our experience, we foresee that the best way for a search engine to make book content available will be by crawling content repositories created by book publishers and libraries...
We are encouraging libraries to build on the platform we developed with Kirtas, the Internet Archive, CCS, and others to create digital archives available to library users and search engines...We are...removing our contractual restrictions placed on the digitized library content and making the scanning equipment available to our digitization partners and libraries to continue digitization programs.I don't know yet what impact this will have on the digitization efforts of the Open Content Alliance, but the removal of any major source of funds is not a good thing.

Tagging

Del.icio.us, Technorati, and LibraryThing I had heard of before but didn't really understand how they worked or how to use them. I had a tagging epiphany when I realized I could tag my LibraryThing collection. Right now I have a book that I write down titles of books I've read or I'd like to read. I started it when I worked at the library because I couldn't possibly read all of the books I checked out but I wanted to refer back to them if needed. I tried to organize the titles by subject or genre (dream house, children's, etc.) but quickly got into the cataloger's dilemna of one book-one place. Now I can catalog my one book in multiple places by tagging it with multiple subjects!

Frenz

Making friends on MySpace is confusing.... do I click on the "Invite" tab? or the "friend requests" box? I've used MySpace before and it just doesn't get any easier. The comparison that teens use MySpace like we use the telephone for communication was effective.

I've used other social networking sites more successfully - Goodreads.com for sharing books among friends and Linkedin.com is one my fellow students at the iSchool are going to try to use to keep in touch after we all graduate.

Blogs n Feeds

The thing about picking a couple of blogs from the KCLS participants was I didn't know who anybody's blog was. So I just asked some people what they called their blob and subscribed to it.

On the RSS feeds... that was pretty cool. I don't know when I'll get around to reading all the RSS feeds and blogs I subscribed to ....

I looked through topix and thought it was annoying because you have to click on the post to find out when it was posted. I clicked through the different statistics on syndic8 which I thought might be interesting for somebody else but then I found a feed I liked i nthe "200 most recently pinged feeds".

Mashups

I loved the trading card Mashup. I think it would make a great party favor or even Christmas card!
http://bighugelabs.com/flickr/deck.php
I liked the spelling one too.
http://metaatem.net/words/

Wooster Collective

, originally uploaded by lepublicnme.

This photo is from Flickr from "lepublicnme". I've gone to www.woostercollective.com to look at the art but I never thought of looking for the art from The Wooster Collective on Flickr. It took me a while to figure out how to post the photo on my blog. When I tried the option of downloading the photo from Blogger I just got a little box with a red X and no picture. This time I tried "Blog this Photo" from Flickr. I hope it works!