Emdashes reports that the New Yorker will soon sell the Complete New Yorker on portable hard drive in addition to the DVD set already on sale. For $299 you get an installation CD and a portable 3″x5″ drive. Since $59.99 gets you the same coverage on DVD, I’m curious about their target audience with this …
Author Archives: abigail
Social Networks and Portals
InfoWorld says, “Search satisfaction on the wane,” but happiness with web portals is increasing. Compete, a market research firm, asserts that traffic to social networking sites like MySpace is poised to overtake traffic to portal sites like Yahoo! Nielsen//NetRatings reports that “User-generated content drives half of U.S. top 10 fastest growing web brands.” PDF Report …
Does Your Browser Choice Reveal Your Personality?
For a Monday morning diversion with a grain of truth see What does your browser reveal about you? “You really don’t care if FF is faster, or safer than IE – you would use it even if it performed 10 times worse. “ You betcha! Found via Library Garden.
NYT Site Search
At least library catalogs aren’t the only search tools with problems: When I search for “A Food Website Spiced with Attitude”, the NYT’s search engine should take a wild, off-the-wall guess about what article I might be looking for, and not return zero results. At This is Broken An interesting discussion ensues concerning what search …
Web Accessibility: Failure is Not an Option
I just visited Web Accessibility for All, which is maintained by the Center for Education and Work at the University of Wisconsin. The site’s tagline is, “Failure is Not an Option.” To gain some understanding of what people with impairments may see or hear on the web, try the following experiments: Using Firefox or Opera, …
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if:book
Gosh darn it, one of my unwritten rules for this blog is not to reference other blogs too often. I often appreciate such referencing in the blogs I read, I just don’t want to do it too much myself. But along comes if:book and I find myself wanting to pass on its commentary every time …
Technophile at Work; Luddite at Home
if:book (I’ve been reading it a lot lately) has a post about the future of television. Today, radio listening habits have shifted, and I only hear the radio in cars and offices. Television viewing (if you can even call it that) is experiencing a similar shift, as people multitask at home, with the television playing …
Dewey Decibel System
This American Life just repeated its episode from 8/5/05, which includes an act about rock concerts in Michigan public libraries. The theme of the episode? “Stories of people and institutions who are worried about what the world thinks of them, and who take action, decisive action.” Streaming is free, podcasts are not.
The Access Principle
John Willinsky of the University of British Columbia has written a book, The Access Priniciple, on open access, digital publishing, and scholarly communication and made the whole darn thing available for download at the MIT Press website. If you, like me, have been meaning to read up on open access, this looks like a good …
Traditional Publishing and the Web
Two interesting pieces recently came across my aggregator on the topic of the web’s impact on traditional publishing. The first is an article in the Chronicle, “Book 2.0,” about an experimental book format that allows readers to comment on the original text and the author to respond. The book under discussion, GAM3R 7H30RY by McKenzie …