Internet

More Potential Bad News for Amazon.com...

birdie — Fri, 16 May 2008 09:41:00 -0500

...in the Lone Star state?

Taking a tip from the Empire State, here's a report that The State of Texas Comptroller's Office is currently investigating whether the presence of an Amazon.com-run distribution facility in the Dallas suburb of Irving means the online retailing giant has a physical presence in the state. If the Comptroller's Office determines that Amazon.com does have nexus, the retailer would be responsible for collecting and remitting sales tax for purchases made by Texas residents and potentially would be liable for back taxes.

Amazon.com's website notes that it runs fulfillment facilities in Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Kansas, Texas, Nevada, Delaware, Arizona, and Indiana. The company lists customer service centers in North Dakota, West Virginia, and Washington. At present, Amazon only collects sales tax in Kansas, Kentucky, North Dakota, and Washington. Delaware does not charge sales tax.

Bookweb, a publication of the American Booksellers Association has the story.

Maps: Views from above.

Bibliofuture — Thu, 15 May 2008 22:12:23 -0500

Google Maps has satellite views but Microsoft Maps has bird's eye views. Excellent tool for giving directions to your library. You can drag the picture with the mouse and fly-over a city. Look up your house. If there is a bird's eye view you can even spin the picture and see your house from different angles.

Some examples:

Seattle Public Library

Powell's in Portland, Oregon

Strand bookstore in New York

A Bean Bag That Delivers Web Widgets

Bibliofuture — Thu, 15 May 2008 00:03:44 -0500

David Pogue article in the New York Times about the Chumby.

And to beat David Rothman to the punch might I suggest that the Chumby could be used as an ebook reader.

Value for Money

StephenK — Wed, 14 May 2008 18:37:25 -0500

As I write, Twitter has been unreachable for a little over forty minutes. The outage is starting to stretch into an hour. Frankly I question what will come first tonight, the return of Twitter or the kick-off to Uncontrolled Vocabulary #42. This ping shows that the machine lives but is just not responsive:

PING twitter.com (128.121.146.100): 56 data bytes 64 bytes from 128.121.146.100: icmp_seq=0 ttl=245 time=315.044 ms 64 bytes from 128.121.146.100: icmp_seq=1 ttl=245 time=219.245 ms 64 bytes from 128.121.146.100: icmp_seq=2 ttl=245 time=447.906 ms 64 bytes from 128.121.146.100: icmp_seq=3 ttl=245 time=221.922 ms 64 bytes from 128.121.146.100: icmp_seq=4 ttl=245 time=238.351 ms 64 bytes from 128.121.146.100: icmp_seq=5 ttl=245 time=216.497 ms 64 bytes from 128.121.146.100: icmp_seq=6 ttl=245 time=233.835 ms 64 bytes from 128.121.146.100: icmp_seq=7 ttl=245 time=227.089 ms 64 bytes from 128.121.146.100: icmp_seq=8 ttl=245 time=276.421 ms ^C --- twitter.com ping statistics --- 9 packets transmitted, 9 packets received, 0% packet loss round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 216.497/266.257/447.906/71.099 ms

This has given me pause to think. Yes, online services that are free can be nice things. As CNet's Charlie Cooper has noted in a column, there is even some talk about nationalizing Twitter. The biggest question is what people want and how is it going to be paid for?

Free services online truly are not free. There are fixed overheads to consider such as connections between the server and the rest of the world let alone the electricity to keep the server running. Without an influx of cash regularly, such things do burn out. This is a fear expressed over Twitter.

While Twitter is a nice thing, I have migrated more of what I do over to Pownce. On Pownce I do have my own site where I can post Twitter-like things but can also do more. For the things that Twitter needs extensions to do, Pownce seems more readily equipped to handle such.

Why do I bring this up? The key question in dealing with free services is their reliability. Is Twitter something that is necessarily reliable for what one might do on a day-to-day basis? Do you truly get what you pay for with Twitter? Think about that for a moment.

I am not against micro-blogging. As a way to promote comity it serves a good purpose. I would almost be more in favor of a subscription site being created for library types using WordPress and the micro-blog template known as Prologue. A subscription rate of USD$1 per month per participant would certainly not pay for all costs but it would defray some.

As we enter into what will be the second hour of the Twitter outage, I can only wonder if this makes more sense than what we're in now. After all, doesn't this outage show we've gotten our money's worth? My pinging of Twitter will likely continue until they're back up.

If they're back up today...which may be according to Lynx. They're perhaps just getting crap-flooded right now. Then again, maybe I am too optimistic.

Charter Will Monitor Customers’ Web Surfing to Target Ads

Bibliofuture — Wed, 14 May 2008 15:10:01 -0500

Charter Communications, the fourth-largest cable system in the United States, has started telling its high-speed Internet customers that it is going to keep track of every site they visit on the Web.

The cable company will sell the data to a firm called NebuAd, which in turn will use it to show ads to Web-surfing Charter customers that are meant to be related to their interests. (Visit a knitting site yesterday and see yarn ads today.)

Charter started sending letters out to several hundred thousand customers in four markets: Fort Worth, Tex.; San Luis Obispo, Calif.; Oxford, Mass.; and Newtown, Conn. (The letters were first reported by DSLreports.com.)

Charter said it will start testing the system within 30 days and will make a decision whether to roll it out to its 2.8 million Internet customers a few months after that.

Full story here.

8 Top Alternative Search Engines

Blake — Wed, 14 May 2008 13:09:18 -0500

Web Worker Daily Points out 8 Search Engines you might not use. One neat thing they point to is altsearchengines.com. If you want to experiment with a whole slew of alternative search engines, try Altsearchengines.com. If you click on the “Verticals” tab there, you’ll find a huge collection of search engines focused on specific industries.

LISWire - The Librarian's News Wire

Blake — Tue, 13 May 2008 08:31:59 -0500

Robin K. Blum (aka Birdie) and I started a new site a few week ago, LISWire - The Librarian's News Wire (http://liswire.com), and I'm doing my best to spread the word (again, you may have already seen this). I'll keep this as short as possible, since you can probably guess what the site is all about from the name.

We also have 2 mailing lists, and a bunch of RSS feeds.

We are looking for press releases and other news items of interest to librarians to get things going. You can sign up for an account and submit things you'd like to announce to the library world.

It's just out of beta, so there might still be some bugs floating around. Let me know if you spot something that needs fixing! I'd love any and all feedback you can provide.

You Can’t Be Anonymous Online If You…

Blake — Tue, 13 May 2008 07:06:22 -0500

You Can’t Be Anonymous Online If You…
1. Join virtually any social network
2. Post a photo of yourself anywhere online
3. Share key identifying information about yourself
4. Use the same pseudonym or email address as your identity on multiple communities
5. Sign a guestbook or add a Facebook application to your profile.

Once shunned by academics, Wikipedia now a teaching tool

Blake — Mon, 12 May 2008 19:43:05 -0500

Wikipedia, the upstart Internet encyclopedia that most universities forbid students to use, has suddenly become a teaching tool for professors. Recently, university teachers have swapped student term papers for assignments to write entries for the free online encyclopedia. "Sometimes it's a disaster," said Beasley-Murray. "But in some ways it's good news ... this was a great learning experience for students."

Craig (of the List) Looks Beyond the Web

Bibliofuture — Sun, 11 May 2008 22:48:44 -0500

Article in the New York Times:

Imagine what it might have been like to be Dr. Kleenex. You invent a modern miracle, the cheap paper handkerchief, and suddenly you become the person blamed for America’s disposable culture, praised for a more convenient life, or both.

There never was a Dr. Kleenex, though — the product was created by a team of researchers at Kimberly-Clark laboratories in the 1920s. But there is a real Craig in Craigslist, and lately he is looking at life beyond his little list that happens to be the seventh-most-popular Web site in the United States.

It is also a site that is deeply tied up with the fate of newspapers — indeed, many in the newspaper industry blame the site’s founder, Craig Newmark, for the downturn in their classified-advertising business.

Full article here.