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Amazon Raises the Stakes in Your Reading Experience: The Platform War Continues
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by Jill O'Neill
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In the first half of February 2011, Amazon announced an upgrade to the Kindle software, consisting of four elements. The first was the enabling of share-able public notes; Kindle owners may now choose to reveal annotations made in a Kindle edition to others in the same way users had previously been able to share highlighted passages made on a Kindle. The second item was the availability of pagination that would correlate with a specific print edition of the same work. The upgrade would also encourage star ratings of a title as soon as the reader had finished reading it and the possibility of posting both the completion status and star rating to either one's Twitter or Facebook followers. Finally, a new graphical layout for magazines and newspapers on the Kindle better displays a single issue's contents. The upgrade was applicable to third-generation Kindles devices, and the same set of capabilities was subsequently added within the week to the broad range of Kindle apps for other devices.
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CCC Integrates Rights Delivery Platform On Copyright.com
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Copyright Clearance Center (CCC) launched its Rights Delivery Platform, allowing "one-stop shop" access to hundreds of millions of additional rights previously available only through RightsLink installations. For the first time, customers can order reprints from Elsevier, The New York Times, Springer, Emerald Publishing Group, Economist Newspaper Ltd., the American Institute of Physics, the American Chemical Society, the American Society of Microbiology, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science directly on copyright.com.
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New Report on How the Public Perceives Community Information Systems
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The Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project released a new report titled "How the Public Perceives Community Information Systems." The report, which is built around surveys in the three communities of Philadelphia, San Jose, and Macon, Ga., found some notable and surprising insights into the importance of government transparency, broadband adoption, and the rise of social media as tools for community conversation.
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Readex to Launch Digital Edition of JPRS Reports, 1957-1994
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A digital edition of Joint Publications Research Service (JPRS) Reports, 1957-1994, will be released by Readex, a division of NewsBank, in late summer 2011. This unique new resource, which is fully searchable for the first time, will feature English translations of foreign-language monographs, reports, serials, journal articles, newspaper articles, and radio and television broadcasts from regions throughout the world. With an emphasis on communist and Third World countries, JPRS contains a wealth of hard-to-find scientific, technical, and social science materials translated from many languages. Iin fact, few libraries or institutions outside of the Central Intelligence Agency and the Library of Congress hold a complete microform edition, especially for the first 2 decades following the founding of JPRS.
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Search Quality, Content Farms, and Conspiracy Theories
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by Paula J. Hane
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The blogosphere and media outlets have been abuzz lately with reports of low-quality search results from the major search engines. It started in December 2010 with a New York Times, story about an unscrupulous merchant whose bad treatment of customers and negative reviews pushed the site to prominence in Google searches. In response to the flap that arose, Google quickly addressed this with changes to its search algorithms. Since then, there have been a New York Times expose of J.C. Penney's SEO practices ("The Dirty Little Secrets of Search") and Google's subsequent changes to its algorithm, Google's assertion that Microsoft Bing was copying Google search results, Google's banning of spam from low-quality sites and so-called "content farms," and even a conspiracy theory about which company was launching a negative publicity campaign against Google. This has indeed been a wild and crazy time.
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If you regularly read blogs, add these to your reader:
ITI Books Blog – booksblog.infotoday.com – news, observations, and commentary from the authors, editors, and publishers of Information Today, Inc.'s many book offerings.
ITI Conference Blog – libconf.com – covering ITI's library conferences worldwide.
Library Stuff – librarystuff.net – the library blog dedicated to resources for keeping current and professional development, written by Steven M. Cohen.
InfoToday Europe Blog – infotodayeurope.com – The latest news, analysis and opinion on the information industry in Europe and the UK.
Business of Video blog – blog.streamingmedia.com – Daily posts about the online video industry, business trends and analysis, market data, and research as well as the online video business models in the media and entertainment, broadcast, publishing, advertising and enterprise industries.
destinationCRM Blog – destinationcrmblog.com – a blog from the editors of CRM magazine, dedicated to providing Customer Relationship Management information in a timely manner to connect decision makers and providers.
SpeechTech Blog – speechtechblog.com – updates on speech technology and its applications in daily life. Covers everything from ASR to VUI, with lots of links, threads, and even a few pictures thrown in for good measure.
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Paula Hane's New Chapter
Effective June 1, Paula J. Hane is giving up her assignment as News Bureau Chief at Information Today, Inc. (ITI), where she was engaged to provide editorial direction to the ITI NewsBreaks service hosted on infotoday.com. She also wrote for Information Today and the Cyberskeptic’s Guide to Internet Research. She has been associated with the company for 16½ years and was previously the Editor of Database magazine for Online, Inc. She will continue to accept freelance editorial and writing assignments.
The responsibility for producing news commentaries and in-depth analyses for the infotoday.com website will be integrated into the workflow of the Information Today newspaper, with Barbara Brynko as Editor-in-Chief/Editorial Director. Assisting Barbara will be Brandi Scardilli as Managing Editor.
Vendors should continue to send information industry and product news items to Information Today: Barbara Brynko (Editor-in-Chief/Editorial Director) at bbrynko@infotoday.com. Library technology news should continue to be sent to Computers in Libraries magazine at cilnews@infotoday.com. As always, freelance writers are encouraged to submit story ideas directly to the editors.
We wish Paula success in her new ventures and thank her for her many years of great work as News Bureau Chief at ITI. Paula can be reached at paulajeanhane@gmail.com.
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