Tag Archives: Google

Tech Sharecase, 19 February 2010

Attendees: Robert Drzewicki, Louise Klusek, Kannen Mohan, Mike Waldman, Arthur Downing, Joseph Hartnet, Ryan Phillips

Bing Augmented Reality Maps 
We began the Tech Sharecase by watching Microsoft’s Blaise Aguera’s TED presentation on Bing’s augmented-reality maps. The presentation demoed the image and video capabilities that have been integrated into Bing Maps. The demo features live video feed from Seattle’s Pike Place accessed directly from Bing. This is similar to rumored Google plan to move beyond Street Views to capture the inside of retail stores.

Applications for such capabilities in the Newman Library may include virtual tours of the library building as well as capturing the history of the building as a power station.  This could also be a solution to the lack of signage in the library.

More Online Map Discussion
The conversation then turned to Four Square. Four Square is a social networking tool that pinpoints geographic locations people visit and currently are. Users can view locations, called venues, and see what the venue has to offer, who’s been there and how often they’ve been there (through frequency of virtually tagging themselves). The person who “visits” the venue the most often becomes the “Mayor” of that venue. Currently, Stephen is the “Mayor” of the Newman Library on Four Square.

We discussed the possibility of a contest for students to compete to become the Mayor of the Newman Library on Four Square.

Also discussed is the website Please Rob Me which posts feeds of people announcing via twitter they’ve left their home. The site posts these as “Recent Empty Homes” and thus an opportunity for theft. The web site seeks to promote the dangers of announcing such information publicly, or as the website describes “The goal of this website is to raise some awareness on this issue and have people think about how they use services like Foursquare, Brightkite, Google Buzz etc.”

Google Newman Library

Googling "Newman Library"

We then discussed the misinformation in searching via Google Maps. For instance, if you google Baruch, the phone returned is for the dean of the Weissman School.  The website address returned when googling the Newman Library is athletics.baruch.cuny.edu.

Google News, Fast Flip, was also discussed. Fast Flip is the service at the bottom of Google News that allows you to flip through the stories as if flipping through a magazine. News featured here tend to be a combination of the odd, gossipy, science-oriented and tech-oriented.

Chat Widget in EBSCOhost
Changing topics entirely, we conversed about the new capabilities to add a chat widget into the EBSChost databases.  It’s possible for our 24/7 chat service to reside in a space on EBSCOhost. It would be an opportunity for students to access a librarian while searching any EBSCOhost database. 

A possible pitfall to adding a chat box would be a disconnect in context between the patron and librarian.  A Baruch Librarian, or another librarian in the QuestionPoint consortium, would not know if the patron came from EBSCOhost or the Newman Library webpage. If a different set of expectations existed, or a different type of question was being asked by a patron coming from EBSCOhost, it might lead to problems when a librarian is unaware of a patron’s origin.

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Tech Sharecase, 30 October 2009

Attendees
Arthur Downing, Stephen Francoeur, Joseph Hartnett, Randy Hensley, Ellen Kaufman, Louise Klusek, Ryan Phillips

Google Discover Music
Talked about new Google Discover Music service in which search results are more socially based and about October 23, 2009, radio story from On the Media, “Charting the Charts,” which noted how Billboard is waning in influence and new services are appearing that measure music success differently. One such services is Band Metrics that ranks popularity not by sales but by an aggregation of metrics, including social ones. Search is changing the economic model for music rankings. Big Champagne offers another service that measures rankings using social aspects. What is a credible or reliable metric is shifting from authorities like SoundScan or Billboard to services that look at social use of media.

Google Social Search
This experiment from Google looks at who is in your social graph (your collection of online friends) so that it can present you with search results that are refined by content that your friends have posted online.

Google Reader
We looked at the way that people who use Google Reader can friend others who use the service and share notable feed items with each other.

Google Site Search Tool
The Baruch College website today unveiled its new site search engine powered by Google. The library website will be changing its search site software to Google soon as well.

2D Barcodes
Following up on Arthur’s comments on an earlier blog post here, We talked about 2D barcodes, QR codes, and their potential uses by colleges and libraries. We looked at the barcode service from ScanLife and the video about how Case Western Reserve University used ScanLife codes.

Mobile Websites for Libraries
We talked about various strategies for creating library websites that would render well on browsers in mobile phones.

Amazon Kindle vs. Barnes & Noble Nook
While talking about basic differences between new Nook reader coming out in November, we also discussed the Kindle loan program at North Carolina State University and how the service also offers patron-driven acquisitions (hear all the details about this on the Library 2.0 Gang podcast from September 2009 in which Orion Pozo from NCSU was interviewed).

TinyURL vs. HugeURL
TinyURL is a well-known service that will shrink a long URL with a brief one that redirects you to the original site. HugeURL is a funny spoof that turns short URLs into obscenely long ones.

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Google Discover Music & Social Search

Google. Discover Music
Google just unveiled a landing page called Discover Music specifically designed for searching music. Google has partnered social media services like Imeem, LaLa, Myspace, Rhapsody, Pandora and music companies/label owners such as EMI, Sony Music, Universal and Warner Brothers to customize search results and provide music content. Users can search by band names, songs, albums, lyrics et cetera.

As with typical Google search, precision can be a problem when using common phrases or words as search terms. The first result in a search on my favorite band Low returns the Google Finance page for Lowe’s Companies. This is a surprising example given finance and music are separate search platforms. Another example is the search for the popular Manchester band Oasis. This yields results typical of a regular Google search with inclusions from a number of organizations using the O.A.S.I.S. acronym and even local search listing for businesses with the name Oasis.

But when the search is successful, and returns results as Google and the Discover Music partners have designed, the first results are options to listen to the band from music streaming sites like MySpace, iLike and so on. You can then listen and even buy songs. The remaining results consist of the band website, fan pages, additional social music networks, Wikipedia and so on.

Context of Social Search
What’s interesting about Google’s new search is the featuring of social networking tools in the results for users’ discovery of new music. Discover Music isn’t guiding users to traditional online music retailers to facilitate purchases but rather online networks for music discovery. Discover Music results are directing traffic to Pandora, MySpace, iLike which are designed to guide people to new music based on what other people are listening to.

Related to the results of Google’s music search, last week public radio’s On the Media focused on music in the digital age. Particularly, their segment on “Charting the Charts” explored current and upcoming methods of ranking music popularity given the multitude of avenues people are able to listen to music.

With the economics of the music industry shifting from stores sales, to digital sales and file sharing/streaming, some feel traditional sources for music rankings like Billboard Charts are failing to capture important aspects of music popularity.

The show featured two sources that are trying to capture music popularity in different ways. BigChampagne is a media measurement tool that tracks legal and illegal downloads, online streaming audio, tour merchandise et cetera. Band Metrics is a service that hopes to collect music data based on interest from social networking sites, radio and show attendance.

“Google Makes Searching for Music Even Easier Than It Already Is.” Pitchfork. October 29, 2009. Web.

“Charting the Charts.” On the Media. WNYC. October 23, 2009. Web.

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Tech Sharecase, 4 September 2009

Attendees
Ryan Phillips, Louise Klusek, Stephen Francoeur, Jin Ma, Arthur Downing, Randy Hensley.

We started this Friday’s Tech Sharecase with a discussion of the recent news that Amazon, Microsoft & Yahoo will join the alliance opposing the Google Book Settlement. The Guardian interviewed Peter Brantley, director of the Internet Archive, who heads The Open Book Alliance’s opposition.
See the Searchengineland post about these developments with links to the Wall Street Journal & New York Times articles.

Blog Posts: Reading & Written Language
Next we discussed a couple posts at the Newman Library blogs from the past week. First, we discussed Stephen’s post on Groups/Tribes with no Written Language at Reference at Newman Library and David Broderson’s response. The impetus for the post was a class assignment that was driving several students to the reference desk. I brought up an example I’ve seen illustrating the difference between the interpretation of an illiterate vs a literate seeing the FedEx logo. A literate person fails to see the arrow in the FedEx logo between the ‘E’ &’ x’ while this is the first thing an illterate person sees.
We then discussed the Newman Library Idea Lab post about Maryanne Wolf and the current state of reading. Louise mentioned the Sunday New York Times article on the future of reading. The article discusses giving students the ability to choose the titles in their reading curriculum. Instead of adhering to the standard, required classics like “To Kill a Mockingbird” or “The Great Gatsby” the article highlights one teacher’s effort to engage students interest in reading by allowing them to choose what they read.

Feed Readers

We revisited Feed Readers as a topic given a few of us have changed or are considering a change in our preferred reader. Stephen offered Feedly, a Firefox extension, as an alternative to the Google Reader format.

New EtherPad Feature

EtherPad recently introduced a
new Time Slider feature that displays the complete history of a document’s alterations. To demonstrate, the following link allows you to view Stephen and I taking notes for this week’s Tech Sharecase.
Google Books Metadata Trainwreck article
Stephen discussed the Language Log post concerning the multitude of metatdata errors found the the book records in Google Books. The Language Log post discussed the origin of the errors and also, featured in the comment section, has a response from an individual at Google Books.
The blog post was filed by Geoffrey Nunberg who also authored an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education on the topic.
Screenjelly
Stephen gave a quick tour and tutorial for Screenjelly which he’s used to build tutorials for “How to Look up Books on Reserve” and to display an online tours of the New Reference Wiki and New Reference Blog
View Stephen’s hands-on example from this Friday’s Sharecase.
Text Messaging Reference Service
The last topic of the day was SMS text messaging as a reference service. We discussed getting a smart phone for the library equipped with a QWERTY keyboard. The idea is similar to NY’s service where a phone is shared among the librarians with each scheduled a time to cover the service. We discussed the benefits of adding this service. If this extended service was still within the regular operating hours of reference service, might this be best wedded to the deskstop?

Stephen mentioned MyInfoQuest, cooperative service designed to meet the need for text message reference. To demonstrate the need, a survey of library services desired by patrons via cell phone/mobile device was conducted at Ryerson College. The results are below.
Meanwhile, Questionpoint is integrating SMS text service through twitter feeds into their system in order to accept and push out answers to patrons via text.
Another service mentioned at the Sharecase was Text a Librarian, powered by Mosio.
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The Science of Reading and the State of Reading in our Society.

This past weeks episode of “To the Best of Our Knowledge” on Wisconsin Public Radio focused on libraries and reading. The episode as whole is enjoyable and informative but the first segment is particularily relevant to our work as it covers the state of reading in our socety and the efficacy of the book as a format.

Maryanne Wolfe, director of the Center for Reading and Language Research at Tufts University and author of “Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain,” spoke of her concerns about the younger generations of readers who were brought up in a world of computers. According to Ms. Wolfe, students are not reading as well as in the past.

In the interview, Wolfe also referenced Nicholas Carr’s article in The Atlantic, “Is Google making Us Stupid?” Wolfe’s worry is that even though younger generations are reading and have easier access to information, they are only becoming “superficially smart.” They are learning in a manner that lacks in analysis and fails to manifest into inference and deeper knowledge of the subject.

“Libraries.” To the Best of Our Knowledge. Wisconsin Public Radio. August 29, 2009. Web.

Carr, Nicholas. ‘Is Google Making Us Stupid?” The Atlantic. July/August 2008. Web.

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Taking Another Look at the Google Book Search Settlement

An editorial in today’s New York Times notes that hearings will be held in the fall by a federal court that is looking into the settlement over Google Book Search that Google struck with the Author’s Guild and the American Association of Publishers.

For a good overview of the controversy over the Google Book Search settlement and the larger issue of the future of the book, this 29 May 2009 article by Sarah Glazer from CQ Researcher is great. You may also want to check out other Newman Library Idea Lab posts on Google Book Search.

Glazer, Sarah. “Future of Books” CQ Researcher 19.20 (2009): 473-500. CQ Researcher Online. Web. 29 July 2009.

“Google’s Big Plan for Books.” The New York Times, 29 July 2009. Web. 29 July 2009.

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Tech Sharecase, 9 July 2009

Attendees

Arthur Downing, Linda Rath, Stephen Francoeur, Rita Ormsby, Frank Donnelly, Louise Klusek

New Accounting Standards Codification

Rita Ormsby showed the various ways to access the new Accounting Standards Codification:

Google OS

Discussed the news about Google’s plan to release its own operating system next year. Louise Klusek noted this article from today’s Wall Street Journal that discussed Google’s strategy to compete with Microsoft.

Bing

We compared searches in Microsoft’s search engine, Bing, to those in Google and found some ways that it offered improved results for certain kinds of searches.

Compare “starbucks” in Bing to “starbucks” in Google, for example. Note that Bing automatically clusters results into topics in ways that may be useful (Google just offers a vanilla list of results).

FriendFeed

I discussed how I use FriendFeed to publish from all my web services that I use (Facebook, Twitter, blogs where I am an author, Flickr, YouTube, etc.) in one location that others can subscribe to and add comments. I highlighted the way that I use it for social recommendation of recent articles and blog posts and for submitting requests for help or advice to the librarians and others who subscribe to me in FriendFeed.

Harvard Business Review Curtailing Deep Linking to Articles in Business Source Premier

A number of blogs have commented lately on the Harvard Business School Press’ terms of service that forbid free linking to Harvard Business Review articles in Business Source Premier. It was suggested that maybe the journal may be thinking of moving its content exclusively to its own platform much as Institutional Investor did. We also discussed the way that most database vendors are trying to protect their brands by controlling the way that screenshots of their products are published (as in the case of a tutorial created by a library).

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What Data Do New Yorkers Want?

The City of New York is ramping up its efforts to make some of the vast amounts data it gathers and stores more easily accessible. A recent post on the New York Times blog, City Room, detailed major web initiatives that the city just announced it is working on:

  • Launch NYC Big Apps, an annual competition for technology companies to develop proposals for new applications to make data sets more usable (the city has selected eighty data sets from thirty-two different agencies for entrants to work with).
  • Create a 311 portal site that pulls together all the data on complaints that New Yorkers have left on the city’s 311 phone number.
  • Use Skype and Twitter as additional ways to communicate with the city (you’ll be able to call 311 via Skype and receive alerts from the city via Twitter)
  • Work with Google to get a better handle on how users are searching for information on NYC.gov and for city information generally in Google searches

You can read more about these initiatives on this press release from the city.

A number of outside companies are already scraping data from various city data sets and offering a friendly interface to that data. A great example of such an enterprise can be found in the EveryBlock service, which offers data harvested from municipal sources in fifteen cities, such as:

Chan, Sewell and Patrick McGeehan. “City Invites Software Developers to Crunch Big Data Sets.” City Room. The New York Times. 29 June 2009. Web. 8 July 2009.

City of New York. Mayor Bloomberg Announces Five Technology Initiatives to Improve Accessibility, Transparency and Accountability Across City Government. 29 June 2009. Web. 8 July 2009.

EveryBlock. Web. 8 July 2009.

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“Friday” Tech Sharecase, 25 June 2009

Beginning this week, the college will be closed on Fridays for summer. Since we usually hold the Friday Tech Sharecase on Fridays, this week’s meeting was on a Thursday (as will be the case for the rest of the summer).

Attendees

Louise Klusek, Ryan Philips, Stephen Francoeur, David Brodherson, Joseph Hartnett, Frank Donnelly, Jin Ma, Jean Yaremchuk, Linda Rath, Mikhail Gershovich, Luke Waltzer.

Scribd

Scribd is a service for sharing documents. Simon & Schuster will begin selling e-books on this site. Upload your own documents, then get an embed code that you can put in your blog or website to display that document in a viewer (see example below).

Francoeur Effective Chat Reference METRO 28 April 2009

100+ Alternative Search Engines You Should Know

List of search engines that focus on specific content or that search or present results in ways notably different from traditional search engines. via ALA Direct, 24 June 2009

“What is a Browser?” Video

People in Times Square interviewed by Google staff to see if they knew what a browser was. Much confusion ensues…

Library Mashup

The web site for the Manchester City Library (NH), which was spotlighted at a presentation at the recent SLA meeting, features content that is pulled in from a number of different sources and aggregated on the library’s home page.

VOCAT

A project of the Schwartz Communication Institute, VOCAT stands for Video Oral Communication Assessment Tool. It offers online rubrics for scoring oral presentations and videos of recorded presentations (there are 6400 scored and recorded presentations in the system now). Used by Zicklin, Wall Street Careers, and other groups/units in the college. The system generates reports; data can be output to Excel. Maybe we could pull out scores for citations to help us assess the library’s efforts to instruct COM 1010 students about doing research. The Schwartz Communication Institute want to add the abiity to score group presentations and to allow for peer evaluation. They are alsofiguring out how this system might be shared with other institutions.

WordPress and the New Blogs

Demonstration of how to login to the Reference at Newman Library blog, edit your profile so your full name is displayed next to any posts, change your password to something more memorable, and add a new post. The brand new blog, Newman Library Idea Lab, was also shown. This latter blog features an automated way to apply tags to posts using Tagaroo, a WordPress plugin from Calais (a Thomson Reuters company).

Feed2JS

The Baruch Blogs page and the LIS Blogs page (found on Reference at Newman Library and Newman Library Idea Lab) feature automatically updated displays of recent blog posts using a free service called Feed2JS, which gives you embeddable JavaScript based on any RSS URL you provide.

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Google Book Search Copyright/Monopoly Controversy

Recently a few articles have highlighted the ongoing Google Book Search controversy. The CNET article linked below does a good job of outlining the competing interests as pertaining to the copyright issues/proposed settlement and the monopolistic implications of the Google Book project.

One article I find really interesting is the second below from Reuters. This article glosses over the finer details of oppositions arguments to defend Google Books. The argument the author presents is that Google is advancing human knowledge, granting access to information where there was none, and in light of this the opposition concerns are either invalid or outweighed by Google’s lofty goal.

Shankland, Stephen. “Google’s digital-book future hangs in the balance.” CNET. 15 June 2009. Web. 24 June 2009.

Gimein, Mark. “In Defense of Google Books.” Reuters. 24 June 2009. Web. 24 June 2009.

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