Be sure to check out this year’s Freedom To Read Week events in your local area. Those of you living in the Edmonton area may want to show your support at Edmonton Public Library’s Banned Books Cafe on March 1st.

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I had a sick feeling in my stomach when I came across a Greenpeace news release this morning about Monsanto’s patenting of pigs and pig herds. Seriously. Repeat after me, “What the hell is wrong with our world today…”.
Reading of Microsoft’s latest flurry of patent applications makes me feel equally ill. All the more […]

Posted in Access to Information, Digital Life, Technology No Comments »

This video has probably been out in the wilds for a while, but I didn’t come across it until now (stumbled into it through some searching for screencasting tools reviews).
Nevertheless, a good item for a Friday lunch hour posting…
ACLU Surveillance Campaign - Pizza and the Total urveillance Society, complete with library borrowing info and […]

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It has been very busy as of late, but this story is well worth repeating. The Internet has been an incredibly empowering and democratizing force for many netizens, but yet tragically freedom of speech and thought are far from universally acceptable laws. One has to really question Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft and other corporations that woulds […]

Posted in Access to Information, Censorship 3 Comments »

What if every kid had a computer? That would be swell.
Today, we can do much the same thing for children by giving them their own simple tool: a $100 laptop. It’s a goal that’s closer then you might think. The MIT Media Lab is working with partners including AMD, Google, and News […]

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I got a little wordy in the last post - apologies. A few other blog postings caught my eye tonight, mostly from others also talking about the challenges of providing better services and tools for our users. These are two from the OCLC gang that struck a chord with me…
1) Getting Thousands of Hits” - […]

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I’m not sure how scalable this approach would be in a library setting, but Zuggest is certainly an interesting proof of concept. I’m impressed by how quick it generates suggestions (it is “lightning fast” as ResearchBuzz suggests) although yes, it is definitely a bit rough around the edges.
Providing users with the option to choose whether […]

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November 15, 2004 — Today, OCLC (http://www.oclc.org) and Yahoo! officially launch a free co-branded toolbar that provides one-click access to Open WorldCat as well as Yahoo! Search’s Web search engine. The free toolbar plugs into Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser. A whirligig OCLC logo to the extreme left on the toolbar clicks to a subset of […]

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Setting a world speed record for the one skill that we hope will become obsolete in the very near future, James Trusler has emerged as the world’s fastest text messager, tapping out, “The razor-toothed piranhas of the genera Serrasalmus and Pygocentrus are the most ferocious freshwater fish in the world. In reality they seldom attack […]

Posted in Access to Information, Handheld/Wireless News, Technology 2 Comments »

It looks as though China has blocked its citizens from accesing Typepad-hosted blogs. The only way that many bloggers have reported being able to access their site is via their RSS aggregators. The details are somewhat fuzzy, although the details and comments in this post reveal that there is most definitely an issue of censorship […]

Posted in Blogosphere, Censorship, Politicians and Rabble-rousers, RSS and Aggregators No Comments »