Information Science News

New "big data" book in the works from Manning Press

2012-01-15T03:54:00.000-08:00

I received an email this morning from Manning Press announcing an early access edition of their upcoming book "Big Data."

"Big Data" is by Nathan Marz and Sam Ritchie, both engineers at a little startup called "Twitter" of which you may have heard. The book is a survey of the practical aspects of implementing a Big Data solution. As an early access edition, currently only the first chapter is written (and freely available at
http://www.manning.com/marz/). However, promised chapters with titles like "MapReduce and Batch Processing" will cover topics like Hadoop installations,NoSQL databases, and the like.

For the uninitiated, early access editions (MEAPs or
"Manning Early Access Program" in Manning parlance) allow you to purchase
the book before it is entirely written. The purchaser is granted access to
each chapter as soon as it is completed. For more information on MEAPs,
see http://www.manning.com/about/meap.html#meapfaq.

David Weinberger Big Data excerpt in The Atlantic

2012-01-05T15:49:00.000-08:00

David Weinberger, a Senior Researcher at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for the Internet and Society, has authored a new book titled "Too Big To Know." The book is concerned with how the size of data affects the way in which we use it to forge new understanding.

The Atlantic has published an excerpt here:

http://m.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/01/to-know-but-not-understand-david-weinberger-on-science-and-big-data/250820/

Apps For Library Idea Challenge

2011-10-27T04:16:00.000-07:00

Sciverse is hosting an "Apps for Library Idea Challenge," in which 10 app ideas suggested by librarians are voted on in order to determine the most popular entry.

There are some good ideas here. Right now the most popular idea is "JTOCs to go," a mobile app for journal tables of contents including authorization links to enable full text access.

Check out the list of entries here:

http://www.appsforlibrary.com/entries/

Amazon's new tablet

2011-09-28T09:05:00.000-07:00

This morning Amazon introduced their competitor for the iPad: the Kindle Fire, a touch screen app that leverages Amazon's extensive content and strength in cloud computing.

To check it out, click here.

E book treasures at the British Library

2011-08-23T03:57:00.000-07:00

The British Library announced the first few titles in their eBook treasures series last week. The series will make available rare manuscripts which were previously only accessible to scholars, or to the public under glass.

First up is Leonardo da Vinci's Codex Arundel, a series of drawings and notes the artist made mostly concerning mechanics and geometry.

The eBooks are not free; prices listed on the eBook Treasures web site are in British pounds.

Nice overview of big data, with pretty picture

2011-08-17T07:37:00.000-07:00

In an article this week on ZDNet.com, Dion Hinchcliffe provides a nice overview of Big Data. There's also a nice graphic included with the article, which gives a pretty good visual breakdown of where all the pieces you've heard about (Hadoop, etc) fit in.

Here's the link:

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/hinchcliffe/the-enterprise-opportunity-of-big-data-closing-the-clue-gap/1648

How different are Google and Bing?

2011-08-01T07:01:00.001-07:00

Nice comparison of Google and Bing in the New York Times this past week:

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/07/30/technology/bing-versus-google.html

Big Data as Engine of Innovation?

2011-05-14T04:00:00.000-07:00

An article in the New York Times this week talks about how Big Data will drive innovation in the next few years, likening its effect to the impact of computers on business over the last few decades, or even the effect of coal on the early industrial economy:

"Data is a vital raw material of the information economy, much as coal and iron ore were in the Industrial Revolution," the article proclaims. "But the business world is just beginning to learn how to process it all."

Here's the link:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/13/technology/13data.html

Is Delicious the Next Discovery Engine?

2011-05-07T02:10:00.000-07:00

This article in Search Engine Watch notes that Delicious (www.delicious.com), which was recently purchased from Yahoo by the co-founders of YouTube, has the potential to be a next generation search engine. Why? Because we are more likely to look at content that has been pre-filtered and flagged by our friends, family, and colleagues. For example as a software engineer I may be looking for information about a new feature the Java programming language. If I search the term in delicious, I will find many links that have been tagged with that term.

Here's the link:

Is Delicious the Next Discovery Engine?

"Information design"

2011-04-07T04:04:00.000-07:00

Nice article in the New York Times about "Information Design," i.e. Information Visualization:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/03/business/03stream.html

A periodic table of Google APIs

2011-03-23T13:18:00.000-07:00

Google now offers so many APIs and services that it is difficult to keep track of them all, or to even take heed when new ones are offered. Google's engineers may have realized that this is a problem, because they have recently created a nice place to see all of these APIs and services in one glance.

In January, the folks over at Google Code posted this "periodic table of APIS" graphic to allow you to see all of Google's API endeavors at once. Pay special attention to the buttons on the top of the page -- when you mouse over each one (eg Mobile, Data APIs, etc), the corresponding APIs in the table below are highlighted. Clicking on one of the individual "elements" will take you to a page that describes that particular API.

Check it out here:
http://code.google.com/more/table/

Google NGrams

2011-03-15T11:52:00.000-07:00

There are so many things going on in Google Labs that sometimes you can find yourself stumbling upon an interesting creation from them that you had missed. I discovered Google N-Grams while reading a post in Alexis Madrigal's blog in The Atlantic.

NGrams searches the occurrences of a word (or a comma delimited list of words) in Google Books from the year 1800 to the present and plots their frequency on a graph. You can start playing with it here: http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/

Here is a sample experiment to get you started: type "selfish,selfless" into the search box, click search, and then view the results.

If You Bought Apple Stock Instead of Products

2011-03-11T11:19:00.000-08:00

The Bits blog in the New York Times this week related some amusing research on how you would have fared if back in the day you had purchased Apple stock instead of Apple products:

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/10/if-you-bought-apple-stock-instead-of-products/

Have a good weekend and don't lose too much sleep over What Might Have Been ... ;-)

Update to Google Public Data Explorer: Visualize Your Own Data

2011-03-09T07:51:00.000-08:00

Google recently released an update to their Public Data Explorer that now allows you to upload your own data in addition the canned datasets that Google had on the site.

In conjunction with this update is the release of the Dataset Publishing Language (DSPL) format which allows you to mark up your data so that Google can slurp it in and create visualizations of it.

With this release, Google hopes that "more datasets can come to life through Public Data Explorer visualisations and enable people to better understand the world around them and make more informed, data-driven decisions."

Google Data Visualization Challenge

2011-02-23T03:37:00.000-08:00

Google announced a Data Visualization Challenge yesterday on their blog. Participants will compete to create the best visualization of data on the whatwepayfor.com website. On that website, users can enter their tax return information and have their 2010 taxes broken down by what they were spent on, presumable using the percentages provided by the IRS (eg certain percentages goes to defense, entitlement programs, etc.)

The deadline for entry is March 27, 2011. The top visualization will receive $5,000 and mention on Google's blog. The winner will be announced fittingly enough on April 18, 2011 (tax day).

Digitization project: "Rescuing the Earth's Weather History"

2011-02-06T05:33:00.000-08:00

The "Green" blog (of the New York Times) has an entry this week about a few different efforts to digitize archival weather observations so that they can be pulled into computers for anaylsis and perhaps some new resulting ideas about climate.

Read the entry at:

http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/04/rescuing-the-earths-weather-history/?hp

A critical look at Google Scholar citation data

2011-01-17T04:31:00.000-08:00

I just stumbled across this article and thought I'd share the link. I must make two points: 1) I must disclose that I work for a company that is a competitor with Google in this field and 2) the author does not balance his criticism with equally detailed criticisms of existing abstracting & indexing services (such as the on I work for). That being said, it's worth reading.

http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6703850.html

Big data article in JavaWorld

2010-09-30T20:27:00.000-07:00

In JavaWorld recently, an article about the "Big Promise of Big Data" :

http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/jw-09-2010/100914-big-data.html

It's a nice overview of what's happening in the world of Big Data, and where to look further for information.

The Atlantic Tech Canon

2010-09-21T05:21:00.000-07:00

This week in The Atlantic, Alexis Madrigal lists 50 books and films that purportedly constitute a "Tech Canon." Madrigal constructed the list with starting with over 200 suggestions from tech writers and scholars, then whittled it down to the final 50. Covering written fiction and nonfiction as well as film, the list includes old standbys like Fred Brooks' _The Mythical Man Month_ and William Gibson's _Neuromancer_. However the list also includes books like Orson Scott Card's _Ender's Game_, which is perhaps lesser known to the non-science-fiction-reading public, but thought to have been an influence in the creation of the fictional universe in which the bestselling video game "Halo" takes place.

As with any list, there are arguments to be made for and against each choice. I must say that personally I was surprised by the thoughtful case made for the inclusion of "Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan" on the list.

Check out the list on the Atlantic site at:

The Atlantic Tech Canon - Alexis Madrigal - Technology - The Atlantic

Swingly -- A search engine that answers your questions

2010-08-18T08:38:00.000-07:00

SearchEngineLand has an article about a new search engine called "Swingly" that answers your questions directly rather than giving you a list of sites where you might find the answer.

Swingly does well at certain kinds of questions like "What was the first video on MTV?" However, Swingly could not answer the logical inverse of that question. When asked, "Why are the Buggles important in music history?" Swingly's answer was less than satisfactory. However, this "why" question is more subjective than the question that preceded it.

Google and Bing Catch-up

2010-08-12T10:15:00.000-07:00

Good piece in the NYTimes recently about how Google is constantly adjusting to the challenges posed by Bing, Microsoft's search engine.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/02/technology/02google.html

How Google Works

2010-07-02T03:42:00.000-07:00

PPC Blog has produced a great new graphic entitled "How Google Works." Since they have given blanket permission to include this image on other web sites, I went ahead and pasted it in below. Check it out--it's a great nuts and bolts overview of what happens with Google search. You can view the full size version here.

Infographic by PPC Blog

"Big Data"

2010-05-10T19:34:00.000-07:00

Ok, so it turns out that someone has coined a term for the "tsunami of data" that has been mentioned a few times in this blog: "Big Data." The term refers to the large amount of data in the stores of corporate and government entities as well as the software and services that capitalize on it.

To read more about Big Data, check out this article from ZDNet:

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/virtualization/what-is-big-data/1708

Surprising economic indicators

2010-04-15T08:36:00.000-07:00

In the article “New Ways to Read the Economy” in the Wall Street Journal last week, journalist Cari Tuna quotes several economists who are looking at new and surprising data sources to determine levels of economic activity. For example, Ted Egan, the chief economist in the San Francisco controller’s office, looks at Saturday passenger counts from the subway station near the Union Square shopping district to get an idea of how the local economy is doing. And Edward Leamer, an eonomist with the University of California, looks at diesel fuel sales on California’s I-5 interstate highway (a major lumber trucking route) as an indicator of construction employment.

It's heartening to hear about people using data like this to solve problems at a time when we hear a lot about the "tsunami of data" going unharvested. (See blog entry on this).

"SuperCrunchers" referenced in Daily Beast article

2010-04-09T09:10:00.000-07:00

An article in the Daily Beast, "How Visa Predicts Divorce" , discusses how credit card companies use data mining techniques to determine if a person is more likely to get a divorce. The author of the article mentions that this technique was discussed in the book SuperCrunchers, which I reviewed in this blog a while back.

A snippet from the article: "By scrutinizing your purchases, credit companies try to figure out if your life is about to change—so they’ll know what to sell you."

Bing and baseball

2010-04-08T01:46:00.000-07:00

The latest post on the Microsoft Search blog describes how Bing adds value to the results of Major League Baseball related searches. Search for your favorite team and you will see the latest win/loss results, a schedule for upcoming games, and a one line summary of standings. Bing also provides real-time results for current games. Search for your favorite player and you will see a picture along with a table of their stats for the most recent game and a one line summary of their stats for the season.

In comparison, when you search your team in Google, you will see an inning scorecard of the most recent game. Also Google currently has nothing comparable to the MLB player results offered by Bing.

iPad and Gutenberg

2010-04-05T12:50:00.000-07:00

For a thoughtful rumination on the possible effects of digital media on society (in light of the recent release of the iPad), see today's entry in the Paper Cuts blog at the New York Times.

There's also another article in the same vein from the Arizon Republic entitled "iPad, Kindle and other e-reader technology book business."

Google Public Data Visualization

2010-03-11T06:03:00.000-08:00

In a previous post, I mentioned Google's public data feature, which allows users to explore publicly available data sets from sources such as the World Bank.

Now Google has amped up this feature with some new visualization tools. Google calls this set of tools the "Public Data Explorer," and states that now "students, journalists, and everyone else can play with the tool to create visualizations of public data, link to them, or embed them in their own web pages."

You can read the announcement from Google here.

Going to see Tufte

2010-03-06T02:43:00.000-08:00

Edward Tufte, pioneer in the field of information visualization and author of such books as "The Visual Display of Quanititative Information," will be coming to Philly to do one of his famous one day courses. I registered as soon as I saw he was coming.

Not to be a shill for the guy, but here's the information on his upcoming courses

I'll let you know how it goes.

SuperCrunchers by Ian Ayres

2010-02-14T03:19:00.000-08:00

There is a lot of data out there.

This fact has urged a few related notions to propagate from the realm of research into the world of business and the popular consciousness. The first such notion is that the amount of data out there is a bit frightening – there is a tremendous, staggering amount of it residing in the digital storehouses of government and industry, and it is growing bigger every minute. The second notion is that there is a desperate need to harness this data both for the betterment of society and the growth of business. The third is that this desperate need is starting to be met by emerging disciplines, tools, and methods.

I can tick off several books that reside in one or more of the above categories. “Beyond the Tsunami,” an online book from Microsoft Research mentioned in a post in this blog, is one such book. “Visualizing Data,” a title from O'Reilly Press, falls into the the third category.

But the book I want to talk about now is “SuperCrunchers,” a 2007 book by Ian Ayres, a professor at both the Yale School of Law and the Yale School of Management.

SuperCrunchers is a book about how statistical analysis of large datasets (that is, “supercrunching”) is beginning to profoundly affect our lives. The book illustrates this effect with a series of anecdotal case studies. In one example, a computer science professor started the website farecast.com after he was annoyed by learning that the people in the seat next to him on a plane had paid less for their tickets simply by waiting longer before buying them. Farecast is a site that predicts when tickets for your desired flight will be cheapest.

Ayres also describes the application of statistical methods to societal problems in the fields of medicine (evidence based medicine) and education (direct instruction). The sometimes innovative and sometimes creepy use of such methods by large corporations are detailed by Ayres as well.

The anecdotes contained in this book are compellingly written, and since the book is for a popular audience, the statistical methods described are described easily digested by the average reader.

This is an important book—-it clearly describes how the abundance of data and the statistical methods to manipulate it are changing society. This change is sometimes clearly for the better, and sometimes less so.

Google translator phone; CNN interviews Google policy analyst

2010-02-08T14:54:00.001-08:00

An article in the Australian Herald Sun (and noted in the Beyond Search blog) states that within a few years Google will have a working translator phone. Yes, you heard right. You speak English, and the guy on the other end hears Mandarin (or French or...). This is, as Beyond Search noted, a very Star Trek-y advance in communications.

In other news, CNN interviewed Derek Slater, a policy analyst at Google about universality of access and the benefits of improving broadband in the U.S.

Google, public data, and visualization

2010-01-19T02:20:00.000-08:00

Google offers a recently added feature (discussed on the Google blog in April here) that allows for both searching and visualization of public data.

There is no special doorway to this data; just search on "unemployment rate Philadelphia" (for example) in the plain old Google search box. The first link in the result list will be accompanied by a chart illustrating the latest data for your search.

When you click the link, however, you are taken to a larger interactive chart where you can compare the unemployment rate in Philadelphia with the rate in other cities and states.

The Google blog states that the visualization aspect of the public data search comes through their acquisition of Trendalyzer, a program that enabled the animation of statistical data.

Librarians and Programming Skills

2010-01-08T07:43:00.000-08:00

A recent article in Research Information (and referenced on the LISNews blog as well as the ResourceShelf Blog) talks about transforming the role librarians through their acquisition of programming skills.

One point that author David Stuart makes in the article is that librarians are still somewhat bound to the concept of "document," even in an age where the web abounds with all kinds of "structured data" that is not necessarily in a "document" format per se. Stuart believes that if librarians had the right technical skill sets, they could make this data available to their patrons through the use of programming APIs and mashup tools such as Yahoo Pipes. In particular they could integrate it into the result sets of an open source ILS or OPAC.

I think this is a great point. Librarians, especially at academic institutions, are moving away from being guides to stacks of paper books toward being gatekeepers of digital resources, subscription or otherwise. It's exciting and quite fitting to consider librarians as imaginative data aggregators -- using technical skills to combine data from different sources into a result portfolio for a patron or selected audience -- for example, engineers or humanities students.

Check out the article -- it's a great read!

Google Goggles

2009-12-23T02:01:00.001-08:00

Google has an image search engine where the input itself is an image, not text as has been customary even in Google itself.

The project is called "Goggles." It's intended for use with your mobile phone as you are out and about. If you, for example, see a bottle of wine, book, or work of art that you would like to know more about, snap a picture of it, submit it to Google and view the results. You can also use Goggles to get more information from a business using a business card. Or take a picture of a store on a street to find out what else is in the neighborhood.

You can find more information about Goggles at:

http://www.google.com/mobile/goggles/#landmark

Happy Holidays from Information Science News

2009-12-23T01:43:00.001-08:00

A Merry Christmas to those who celebrate, and a Happy New Year to all! Here's wishing you a productive and rewarding 2010. May you find the things you search for.

I was trying to come up with a clever New Year's wish, and that last sentence was the best I could conjure. Still, it has a nice (George) Lucasian ring to it.

Happy Holidays y'all.

The Fourth Paradigm

2009-12-15T10:41:00.000-08:00

There is a new collection of essays from Microsoft Research in honor of Jim Gray, the renowned researcher at Microsoft who was lost at sea in 2007. The collection is titled "The Fourth Paradigm: Data Intensive Scientific Discovery." According to an article by John Markoff of the New York Times, the book's essays are centered around the topic of how to deal with the explosion of data -- particularly scientific data -- in recent years. This particular topic has come up in this blog before -- read about it here.

Some sample essay titles: "Beyond the tsunami: developing the infrastructure
to deal with life sciences data," "Visualization for data-intensive science," and "From web 2.0 to the global database."

Access to this book is free -- it's available at the Microsoft research site at research.microsoft.com.

Data.gov

2009-12-14T12:57:00.000-08:00

After reading a mention of the data.gov site in a recent NY Times article about how programmers are using government data in new and interesting ways (including an mashup of maps and crime reports that will help a user navigate home from a pub using a path with the fewest reported crimes), I wanted to take a look.

Data.gov is a very well done site. The interface is very nicely designed, and a brief look at the available data makes we want to come up with an app myself. There is a load of raw data on this site -- weekly fatality reports, IRS immigration data, airport status data -- you name it.

Interestingly, two days after the article appeared, there was another article in the NY Times about how the White House is asking all agencies to get their data onto this site...perhaps someone in the White House read the initial article and got fired up with the coolness of the idea of citizens creating value from government data.

2009-12-02T12:44:00.001-08:00

Great article in the New York Times about the oddities and curiosities that reside in the main branch of the New York Public Library. Some highlights: the cane Virginia Woolf left on the riverbank the day she committed suicide, as well as William Blake's hand-engraved 1793 version of “The Songs of Innocence."

Check it out at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/08/nyregion/08libr.html

Got my Google Wave

2009-11-30T13:22:00.000-08:00

Yipee! I just got my Google Wave account and activated it. I have been playing around with it when I have a few minutes. My initial impression is that it's going to take me a bit to get the feel of what I can do with a "wave."

I have seen web-based collaboration software before with some of the features (like real time messaging) that I see in Wave. However, Wave adds nifty new features like a playback mode where you can step through each individual contribution to the Wave (someone typed in, posted a video whatever) to get a sense of the history of what happened.

Wave is a work in progress -- when I tried to do playback and then fast forward to the last message of a large wave, Wave crashed. It recovered gracefully though, and did not crash my browser -- it just told me I needed to refresh the page.

I'll try to write up some more impressions when I get more familiar with the tool.

Google Dashboard

2009-11-06T07:59:00.000-08:00

Google now allows you to see some of the information they have collected on your from your various accounts (e.g., Gmail , Picasa, etc.). The announcement is available at: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/11/transparency-choice-and-control-now.html and the dashboard view is available at http://www/google.com/dashboard (you need to log in with your Google username and password to see your data.)

I took a look, and I have to say that I was expecting to see more. What I did see, and what the New York Times Bits blog also noted, is that most of the information that is listed on the dashboard is simply the kind of humdrum stuff you already know about your account. For example, how many pictures you have stored in your Picasa Web Album and how many emails you have stored in Gmail. I guess I was expecting something more along the lines of "this dude is 40, male, and here's the last web site he visited," but there is nothing like that to be found in Dashboard.

The Bits blog entry also quotes John Simpson of Consumer Watchdog who says essentially that the information in Dashboard is the info linked to your name, but the real dirt is in the information linked to your IP address, which Google is not revealing for now.

Munging mountains of data

2009-10-13T08:47:00.000-07:00

An interesting New York Times piece this week on training today's young minds to comprehend and manipulate the huge (and growing) amount of data available for processing by computer.

IBM and Google are lending a hand to universities so that students can leverage the big processing power needed to even begin to deal with this scale of data.

The article is available at:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/12/technology/12data.html

Google Wave

2009-06-10T10:43:00.001-07:00

Google Wave is a forthcoming "collaboration and communication" tool from Google. From the preview screenshots, I'd say it looks a little like some other collaboration tools I've seen, especially tools like Blackboard that are used by academic insitutions. The "real time" aspect looks to be a newish wrinkle though.

Like most Google tools, it's extensible, with it's own API.

According to mashable.com, we should be hearing more about this tool soon.

Google Squared: Structured Data Search

2009-06-10T10:35:00.000-07:00

A new addition to the Google Labs suite of experimental and beta software, Google Squared, presents search results in a structured format, similar to a spreadsheet.

Some reviewers have framed this as an effort by Google to keep pace with Wolfram Alpha and Cuil, two other search engines that present results in a structured format.

According to several reviewers, when search engines like this work, the results are pretty cool. When these engines fail, however, they fail pretty miserably. The general consensus seems to be that this is an interesting idea that needs work.

Bing!

2009-05-29T08:13:00.000-07:00

So Microsoft has a new search engine called "Bing," apparently intended to replace Live Search. (Meanwhile I'm still wondering what happened to Live Search Academic).

The first thing that comes to mind when I hear this word is the Ned Ryerson character in "Groundhog Day" using it repeatedly as in "Ned Ryerson, got the shingles real bad senior year, almost didn't graduate! Bing! Ned Ryerson, dated your sister Mary until you told me not to. Bing!"

So I guess the word is being used appropriately to denote the "aha" moment, the "sound of found," as Microsoft says.

The site itself is not available yet; it goes live next week. Microsoft has apparently been previewing the functionality to the press, and there are several reviews available.

Searchengineland.com (Posted using ShareThis) has a particularly thorough review including a search-by-search comparison of Bing and Google.

Computerworld also has a nice hands on review titled "Hands on with Microsoft Bing" (also Posted using ShareThis)

Finally, there's a more newsy piece on the release in the New York Times.

WolframAlpha

2009-05-11T10:38:00.000-07:00

The New York Times today talks about a new search engine from Stephen Wolfram, the creator of Mathematica software. The engine is not a Google/Yahoo-like web crawler, but rather a query interface to a large collection of data. WolframAlpha can answer queries like "ldl 120," for example, with charts of cholesterol levels in the U.S. population. This kind of search engine is less of a competitor and more of a complement to search engines like Google.

Is Perl dead?

2009-04-17T06:54:00.000-07:00

As a young programmer working in the Systems Office at a large academic library in 1996, I discovered the wondrous utility of Perl for text processing and web programming. I hacked together a primitive service request program for users to report problems with desktops and dumb terminals from the old Geac GLIS 9000 System.

Lately it seems that Perl has fallen out of favor. Whether it's merely a generational thing or due to fundamental technical merits is a debatable question. The very question of whether Perl is in fact dead spurs lively discussion online. To wit, see the tersely worded site at isperldead.com. To see more, just google "is perl dead" to see some fun results.

There have been a number of languages to emerge in the last 10 years that one could use instead of Perl to get the job done. Ruby, PHP, and Python are the first to come to mind, but there are many others.

We still have a significant Perl codebase where I currently work, although we are moving more and more code over to Java. I'm just wondering what everyone else's experience is out there. I'd love to hear from you about this!

Local search

2009-04-14T10:32:00.000-07:00

I just stumbled on EveryBlock last week when a friend emailed me a link to inform me that the Chinese food truck on the street where we work was closed down by the Licenses and Inspection Department. Coincidentally, I was browsing the New York Times website this week and was surprised to find a story there on EveryBlock.

EveryBlock aggregrates data from a number of sources, including government information such as health inspection data. It's a neat site--you can find out about home sales and police reports in your neighborhood as well as seeing if anyone has geotagged a photo from your block in flickr of late.

New article in code4lib

2009-04-06T06:55:00.000-07:00

Issue 6 of code4lib is now live, and contains an article by none other than this blogger. code4lib's mission is to "foster community and share information among those interested in the intersection of libraries, technology, and the future." The article I wrote fits nicely in with this mission statemtent; it's about using tree structures from GUI libraries to represent hierarchical data. Check it out at:

http://journal.code4lib.org/articles/1083

Google Visualization API

2009-03-06T02:32:00.000-08:00

The Google Visualization API allows you to display "structured" data using a variety of different visualizations.

An overview and documentation is available at: http://code.google.com/apis/visualization/. You can view some samples at the Google Ajax APIs Playground. Some of the interesting examples include an annotated timeline and a motion chart (of the housing price index against the unemployment rate).

Data Rot on Sunday Morning

2009-03-01T07:41:00.000-08:00

David Pogue did a piece about "data rot" on CBS's Sunday Morning this weekend. In case you are not familiar with the term, it means the process by which data formats and hardware become outmoded or physically deteriorate over time, thus rendering the data on them unrecoverable. One woman in the segment talks about how she can't watch her first movie for film school as there are no longer any machines to play it on -- even though school was not that long ago for her. Also, the CIO for the Library of Congress was interviewed about LOC's efforts to preserve historical and culturally significant information.

Check out the story at the CBS news website.

New York Times article about the "Deep Web"

2009-02-23T09:47:00.000-08:00

An article in the New York Times today talks about the latest efforts to plumb the Deep/Invisible Web. Google's efforts in the area are discussed, as is an effort partially funded by Jeffrey Bezos (http://www.kosmix.com). A University of Utah effort is also mentioned (http://www.deeppeep.org).

You can view the article online at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/23/technology/internet/23search.html

Gmail Tasks and other things

2009-02-09T18:07:00.001-08:00

On Monday, the Gmail blog weighed in on whether paper or the iPhone is the more productive tool. All of this as a humorous way to talk about GMail tasks, a new productivity tool available in Gmail (and also, be extension, on the iPhone).

http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2009/02/tasks-paper-vs-iphone.html

In other news, there was an article in the New York Times the other day about digital archivists being in demand right now:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/08/jobs/08starts.html?partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

GDrive?

2009-01-20T02:07:00.000-08:00

Since I am now in a search for a proper external hard drive or other storage medium to store my accumulating collection of videos and photographs (mostly of my adorable 6 month old), I was quite intrigued this morning to hear an update on the status of "GDrive," the rumored online storage service from none other than Google.

You can see the story on Search Engine Land at:
GDrive: It’s Alive! — Or So It Appears

(Posted using ShareThis)

A New Year

2009-01-19T07:18:00.000-08:00

A busy quarter at Drexel has kept me from posting for the past few months. There is a lot going on however. I went to ASIST in October for the first time and had a great time meeting people and listening to a lot of great presentations.

I hope to post more regularly in the coming weeks.

One of the things I'm thinking about now is access to information for programmers and other technical folks, especially at the introductory/tutorial level. Is this information organized and easily accessible on the Internet? I think it may be a matter of finding the right search string or error message to dump into Google. I think this type of access would be complemented nicely by browsable list of resources. Does anyone know of a good one(s)?

Google this and Google that.

2008-10-02T04:05:00.000-07:00

Just a few Google news items this morning. Information Today has an article on Google Book Search Preview. You can actually view preview contents of copyrighted material, similar to doing this on Amazon's "Look inside the book."
Check the article out at: http://newsbreaks.infotoday.com/nbReader.asp?ArticleId=50924

Also, Search Engine Land has an item about the revised Google Blog Search: results are new clustered around story items similar to Google News.

http://searchengineland.com/new-browse-top-stories-at-google-blog-search-14897.php

Conferences, conferences

2008-09-14T05:27:00.001-07:00

JSFOne, a conference about the Java Server Faces framework, concluded recently and there is a wrap-up post here.

In addition, the library world has two upcoming conferences, both in October, both in Ohio. The LITA National Forum OCtober 16-19 in Cincinnati, and the ASIS&T annual meeting is Oct 26-29 in Columbus. Also, there was a recent update on the ASIS&T listserv that the Information Architecture Summit will be in Memphis, TN from March 18-22.

2008-09-11T10:19:00.001-07:00

"Many Eyes" at IBM

The Visual Communication lab at IBM has a new site whose purpose is to make it easier to create and share visualizations of information. Called “Many Eyes,” the site is located at http://services.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/app and is the lab’s attempt to bring visualization to the masses.

On the site you can create visualizations of already uploaded data, or upload your own data and try some visualizations on it. But the ultimate goal of the site is for you to share your visualizations with others. In fact, the site states that “our goal is to ‘democratize’ visualization and to enable a new social kind of data analysis.” The hope of the group at IBM is that these visualizations will provoke “data conversations” around the data that is visualized.

Types of visualizations range from the familiar (bar and line graphs, tag clouds) to the more contemporary and occasionally startling such as: treemaps (described by the site as “a visualization of hierarchical structures”) --in this case a comparison of highway and city MPG for various types of vehicles:

and “wordles” (kind of like a tag cloud that maximizes screen space). Below is a wordle elicited from the Congressional Record from a particular date:

There is even a striking visualization called a “flower” which is a sphere-like graph composed of smaller circles that represent data items. In this case the flower is of uploads to Flickr broken out by the digital camera from which they were uploaded (this information is encoded in digital photographs):

Other examples of visualizations currently on the site include a map of the U.S showing where gas prices are highest, and a tag cloud of Shakespeare’s favorite words. There are already a number of visualization uploaded on the site that will appeal to almost any interest.Check it, enjoy, and remember to share your visualizations!

Google's Chrome Browser: A Brief Review

2008-09-03T07:45:00.000-07:00

Google yesterday unveiled its entry into the browser wars. Their new browser is called Chrome, and is an attempt at changing the face of the modern browser. Google released the news of their browser on the official Google blog at http://googleblog.blogspot.com/.

As you might expect in a browser designed by Google, the interface looks minimal. In the blog entry on Chrome, the Googlers state that the browser is "clean and fast," much like the classic Google homepage.

Indeed, gone are the File, Edit, Bookmark and other menus. In their place are two simple menus to the right--one for settings (represented by a wrench icon) and one for navigation and editing (represented by a document icon). In place of a bookmark menu, there is a bookmark bar along the top of the browser. You can drag and drop sites from your screenshot list to the bookmark bar. One of the nifty new features of the browser is the screenshot view of your most frequently visited sites. This view is displayed by default in every new blank tab you open.

Along with the interface changes, things are different on the inside of the browser too. Google states that the browser is faster and rendering pages and javascript, and tabs are now more insulated so that a crash in one tab will not affect page viewing in another.

How about searching? Like Firefox 3.0, search as-you-type is built right into the location bar. For example, typing "ny" will list "nytimes.com" as a candidate site that you can quickly click on to navigate to. Adding a "c" will give you a site like "nycvisit.com" as a candidate, and so on. I think one difference is that Firefox is searching your history, whereas Chrome is actually searching the internet for sites that match your query. In other words, if you type "ny" and you have not visited any sites that match that string in Firefox, nothing will come up.

In addition, Chrome makes it a little more intuitive to view and search your history. In your screenshot view there is a link to see full history as a simple list of links.

Chrome represents a turn toward the "less is more" philosophy in browser development. The simplified interface may appeal to those who have no need for 90% of the features in current browsers. I personally have relatives who only open the browser by clicking on saved bookmark shortcuts on the Windows desktop. Chrome's screenshot view will be just the thing for them.

And yet the intuitive power of Chrome is what will bring people back. Just being able to type something in the bar and find will be very appealing I think to the wider internet audience. Kudos to Google on a good first effort.

Try Chrome yourself by downloading it from:
http://www.google.com/chrome