| Twitter Gets a New Homepage |
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Twitter has redesigned its homepage in a effort to get people to understand what the heck it actually does. CEO Biz Stone explains: “Defining a ‘tweet’ for the uninitiated and explaining how to create an account doesn’t resonate with everyone. ‘Why would I want to do that?’ is a common reaction. However, demonstrating the power of Twitter as a discovery engine for what is happening right now through our Search and Trends often awakens a sense of wonder which inevitably leads to a much more compelling question, ‘How do I get involved?’” This makes sense, considering that 69% of U.S. adults don’t have a clue about Twitter. |
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Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
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Comments (0)| The Montagues and Capulets Have Finally Gotten Together |
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We thought it was cute when they flirted. We shed tears when they had a very public breakup. We worried when one of them wanted to date somebody else. And now, joy — as rumored 2 weeks ago, Romeo (Microsoft) and Juliet (Yahoo) have finally tied the knot. So will they live happily ever after? Sort of — it’s a 10 year deal, which is like forever in Internet Years. Microsoft will license Yahoo’s search technology so that it can use it in Bing. Bing, however, will be the official search engine for both Microsoft and Yahoo. So Yahoo Search is going away. No dowry for either Romeo of Juliet — they’re going to share revenue. This is a good deal for Microsoft, because its search division lost a million dollars last quarter. The happy couple now account for a bit less than 30% of the search engine market — less than half the size of Google’s share. But they’re finally together and we wish them well. |
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Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
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July 28, 2009
| Useful PubMed Feature |
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Related Articles is a useful feature in PubMed for zeroing in on a particular subtopic after running a general search for a disease, condition, treatment, etc. If you locate an article that is on point, you can use this feature to expand your search and retrieve more articles like that article. It works like this – PubMed compares words from the title and abstract of your original article as well as the MeSH headings assigned to that article and then uses a word-weighted algorithm to return a list of citations which, hopefully, are similar to the article that you liked. The list is returned with the article that you linked from displayed first and then all other articles arranged by relevance, from most relevant to least relevant. Obviously, this feature works best if the article that you are linking from has been fully indexed with MeSH terms. Keep in mind that any limits that you added to your original PubMed search (date restriction, limit to English articles only, etc.) are removed when you click on the Related Articles link. Here is a detailed explanation of the Related Articles algorithm for those of you more technologically-oriented than I am (from PubMed Help). |
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Submitted by: Alice McCreary, Reference Librarian
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| Next Up, Mr. Tenenbaum |
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He’s being sued by the Recording Industry Association of America for illegally sharing 30 songs. I hope he fares better than Contestant #1, Jammie Thomas, who now owes the RIAA a cool two mil. |
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Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
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| “Texting Raises Crash Risk 23 Times, Study Finds.” Tell Me Something I Don’t Already Know. |
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I almost got run over last August. Anyway, the NY Times points to a new study by the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute that boils it down thusly: “In VTTI’s studies that included light vehicle drivers and truck drivers, manual manipulation of phones such as dialing and texting of the cell phone lead to a substantial increase in the risk of being involved in a safety‐critical event (e.g., crash or near crash). However, talking or listening increased risk much less for light vehicles and not at all for trucks. Text messaging on a cell phone was associated with the highest risk of all cell phone related tasks.” This study is timely, given the recent hooha over the case of the Boston trolley driver who crashed his vehicle and injured more than 60 passengers while texting his girlfriend. He’s 24 years old, facing 3 years in prison and a $5,000 fine if convicted. And at least one lawsuit. Speaking of young people, the Times quotes a 22 year-old who regularly texts while driving: “I put the phone on top of the steering wheel and text with both thumbs,” he said, adding that he often has exchanges of 10 messages or more. Sometimes, “I’ll look up and realize there’s a car sitting there and swerve around it.” Ah, youth. It puts me in mind of some lyrics by John Mayer (don’t laugh): I am invincible, |
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Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
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| Buy High, Sell Low. That’s the Ticket! |
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When Time Warner spun off AOL back in late May, they announced they were going to buy back Google’s stake in AOL. They did so in early July. Google’s $1 billion investment for 5% of AOL netted them a whopping $283 million 4 years later. AOL’s valuation has dropped by like 75% — from $20 billion in 2005 to around $5 billion as of the sale. Hey, Google’s not alone. Facebook lost 1/3 of its value 2 years after Microsoft pumped $250 million into it. (And 2 weeks ago it was valued at $6.5 billion.) Ultimately none of all this is about ROI — it’s about locking up valuable partners. |
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Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
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July 27, 2009
| AP Has a New Business Plan To Make “Multihundred-Million” Dollars |
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And it involves keeping you from linking to its stories. Unless, of course, you pay for the privilege. Here’s the AP vision, straight from the horse’s mouth: “The registry will employ a microformat for news developed by AP and which was endorsed two weeks ago by the Media Standards Trust, a London-based nonprofit research and development organization that has called on news organizations to adopt consistent news formats for online content. The microformat will essentially encapsulate AP and member content in an informational ‘wrapper’ that includes a digital permissions framework that lets publishers specify how their content is to be used online and which also supplies the critical information needed to track and monitor its usage. The registry also will enable content owners and publishers to more effectively manage and control digital use of their content, by providing detailed metrics on content consumption, payment services and enforcement support. It will support a variety of payment models, including pay walls.” Techdirt calls this DRM’ing the news, and I agree. Once again, I’d like to quote my dear old mum. She’d say this was a case of cutting off your nose to spite your face. (Where did that generation come up with chestnuts like that? Must have been an “old-world” thing.) |
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Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
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| How to Get and Keep Good Clients |
 By Jay G. FoonbergBest selling author Jay Foonberg gives tips and systems that you can use for long-range and immediate marketing success. This book is not theoretical. Foonberg encourages you to try different marketing approaches in order to develop your own winning personal style. You’ll find hundreds of useful suggestions intended to grow your practice, and improve the way you do business day to day. The end result is a more client-focused, efficient, and profitable practice. Library Record • Borrow it • More Titles |
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Submitted by: Malgorzata Pawska, Digital Content Coordinator
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July 24, 2009
| Book Review: Free: The Future of a Radical Price, Chris Anderson (2009) |
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Chris Anderson suckered me before, with his first book, The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More. I’d enjoyed the article in Wired upon which the book was based — he’s the editor-in-chief of the magazine — and hoped the book would flesh-out the ideas he explored there. Didn’t happen — it seemed like he had said all he had to say in the article. So I made up my mind I wasn’t gonna buy his new book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price. Again, I’d read the article that was the prototype for the book, so I was in a “fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me” mood. But, on a whim I charged into the Borders in The Gallery 5 minutes before my train was due and snatched a copy off the shelf. (But not snatch-and-run. I paid. “Free” only goes so far with some people, like mall security, for example.) I’m glad I did. This time, Anderson really did a good job expanding his premise. And it’s a straight-forward one at that: our digital age drives the cost of creating and delivering content almost to zero. Not “too cheap to meter” — as Lewis Strauss, head of the Atomic Energy Commission, once predicted for electricity — but “to cheap to matter”. Thus, companies can create businesses based upon “free” and still make money. The trick is to know what to give away and what to charge for. Google, for example, does it every day — the search engine is free for everyone, subsidized by advertising paid for by businesses trying to get your eyeballs. How is this a revelation? We all know about advertising. Radio, TV, newspapers, magazines — they’re all subsidized by ads. How’s this book-worthy? Well, it’s not just about advertising. There are other ways to implement “free”. Flickr is free. If you want additional functionality, you can opt for Flickr Pro for $25 per year. At the massive scale the Internet provides, you can make a bunch of money if only 5% of your users opt for the fee-based version of your service. Get the idea? Personally, the story of the Brazilian musical group Banda Calypso really resonated with me. They give their CDs to street vendors who crank out lots of copies and sell them inexpensively. The vendors get to keep all the profit. Why? The band knows that their concerts are their main source of income. They’re smart. (And not greedy.) The cheap CDs stoke their fans’ interest and get their butts in the seats. I can’t help but think that if the music labels were this forward-thinking, they wouldn’t be in a death-spiral right now. A good read. Well worth 27 bucks, the anxiety of watching the clock tick away while the World’s Slowest Sales Associate rang me up, and the sprint to the train. |
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Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
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| This Does Not Please Me |
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Searchme, one of the few next-gen search engines that I thought was actually worth using, is offline. Their URL now redirects to Google. According to TechCrunch, it’s all about money, or lack thereof. It looks like they’ll reposition themselves as the UI for “visual search for multi-media content” for broadband TV boxes. Dang. |
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Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
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