Annotum

ANNOTUM.ORG automates the peer-review process for scholarly academic publishing. On May 1, 2012, Google is discontinuing a similar project called Knol. Documents created using Knol may be transferred to ANNOTUM without a charge.

-DD

e-Hoarding

Jeff Vance prepared a short presentation for Network World titled "10 Signs You're An e-Hoarder". In the related article, Vance mentions that the typical knowledge worker handles over a hundred emails each day.

Vance cites research indicating the flood of information has a negative effect on decision making:

Besides legal troubles, e-hoarding is also creating huge problems for IT and even executives, problems that go well beyond the costs associated with storing and later finding all of that information. According to IBM, the result of exponential data growth is that most organizations operate with serious blind spots.


IBM found that one in three business leaders frequently make decisions based on information they either don't have or don't really trust. Shockingly, one in two business leaders admit that they don't have working access to the information they need to do their jobs.


Business leaders and knowledge workers usually know they have the data they need somewhere, but they can't put their finger on it. They don't know how to find it, and if they do find it, they're not sure how current or accurate it is.

Vance also notes that data hoarder Elliot Solloway was helped with desktop search software. A commentator noted that destop search solutions do not index removable media such as DVDs.

-DD

The Joy of Books

Paul McNamara shared some video clips celebrating books in his January 10 article "'The Joy of Books' Tap Dances Over Your Kindle."
-DD

A Slow Memory Card Can Slow A Smartphone

Lucas Mearian, ComputerWorld reporter, authored an article titled "Slow Smartphone? It's Not the Network, It's NAND Flash." According to the provided chart, upgrading from a class 4 SD card to a class 10 card can roughly double mobile performance speeds if apps write a significant amount of data to the phone.

-DD

Mobile Data Usage

Mobile devices are becoming a common tool for retrieving information from the Internet. JR Raphael has posted Smartphone Data Shake-Up: The End of 'Unlimited', which explores the 80% growth in average smartphone data usage over the past year. Raphael's report compares the data plans currently being offered by the major carriers in the US. A key factoid for those considering purchasing a smartphone plan is that in the 3rd quarter of 2011, a typical user consumed roughly 0.6 Gigabytes of data each month.

-DD

Browser Wars

According to a report filed by Gregg Keizer, Google's Chrome web browser was determined by German information specialists to be the most secure browser.

-DD

Fifty New Tech Tools

Victor Hernandez reports in CNN Tech on "Fifty New Tech Tools You Should Know About".
The applications for both traditional computers and mobile platforms promise to provide shortcuts for individuals in their daily life.

-DD

More Of It

MoreOfIt.com allows one to find sites similar to a specific Web site.

-DD

Searching Delicious.com

Carol Walker also has a video on searching DELICIOUS.COM

-DD

QR Codes

Carol Walker, a Scottish educator, shares examples of how QR codes are used in higher education in a video developed in late 2010:

-DD

Travel Websites / Apps

Michelle Mastin penned "Sixteen Free Smartphone Apps for Hassle-Free Travel" for PC World. Most of these apps point to websites providing invaluable resources for the airline traveler.

-DD

Time Magazine's Fifty Best Websites

Time Magazine presents The Top Fifty Websites of 2011.

-DD

Top Ten Tech Trends

Peter Cashmore listed these Top Ten Tech Trends for 2012 on CNN:

1. Touch computing (seen in Windows 8 and Mac Lion operating systems)


2. Social gestures (automatic posting of your activity without your intervention)


3. Near Field Communications and electronic payments


4. Kindle Fire will outsell the iPad because it has content


5. TV everywhere on the new tablets


6. Voice control


7. Spatial gestures to control your computer


8. Apps that will automatically display content playing on your TV


9. Flexible screens


10. HTML5

-DD

Android App Allows Remote Search of Macs and PCs

James Niccolai reported in the December 15 issue of NetworkWorld that Wyse Technology has developed Pocket Cloud Remote Desktop for iPhone and now Android phones (video).

-DD

Tech and Learning Top Ten Lists

Tech and Learning magazine contributer David Kapuler has provided a number of top-ten lists that would be of interest to a librarian or educator in a K-12 environment:

• Alternatives to YouTube


• Creating Word Clouds


• Educational Games


• Educational Resources


• Images and Clip Art


• iPad Tips and Tricks


• Self Help Sites for Technology


• Social Networks for Education


• Video Editing


• Web 2.0 Sites for Education

If you enjoyed these, you might also enjoy Digital Storytelling Tools and Web Tools that Every Educator Should Have In The Bag by Özge Karaoglu, The Ultimate Web2.0 Smackdown at Tech Forum, Boston (April, 2011) by Lisa Thumann, A Catalog of iPad Apps for Teachers and Students and Back to School [iPad] Apps for Teachers by Vicki Windman or 25 Free Resources from Discovery Education by David Andrade.
-DD

David Kapuler's Top 100 Sites of 2011

Educational Consultant David Kapuler has posted a list of the Top 100 Sites of 2011 in Tech and Learning.

-DD

The History of Google Search

The following video provides a history of Google search, with a look toward future technologies.

-D.D.

Communication Appropriate to the User

Hype over social media and new tablet technologies is rebuffed in "Tools, Not Trends," a blog post by academic librarian Wayne Bivens-Tatum. He cites the "National Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology, 2011," which indicates that 99% of students are using email for communication.

-DD

Web 20.11 From DiscoveryEducation.com

DiscoveryEducation.com has listed some nifty educational for school educators.
-DD

Digital Hoarding

Bob Sprankle has raised the issue "Are We Digital Hoarders?" With over a thousand emails in a couple of my accounts, I need to evaluate myself.

-DD

Browsys

Browsys.com is a metasearch tool with a chaotic group of tools. It promises to "folders" of searches to be shared without requiring a login, which should help librarians and scholars in passing information to one another. It also offers links to a number of sites I have not previously explored.

-DD

Microsoft on YouTube

Microsoft's YouTube Channelwas hacked on October 22, according to an article by Computerworld reporter Lucian Constantin. It appears that someone had or obtained a password to the site and replaced Microsoft's content with their own. Constantin encourages readers to use strong passwords and to check their user profiles periodically.

-DD

SWEETSEARCH

Sweetsearch.com is advertised as a search engine for students. I believe it uses Google as its search engine, but limits results to those judged to be quality sites.

-D.D.

Retreiving Erased Data

Network World has been offering videos on technical issues, such as this one on restoring lost files.

-D.D.

Microsoft Academic Research

Microsoft's Academic Research appears to be the software giant's answer to Google Scholar. To see its full capabilities, observe its treatment of the scholarly article co-authored by Bill Gates. Presently Academic Research is still in the "beta" stage of development, and at this point it seems to focus on scholarship in technical or information processing fields, as my searches for humanities scholars at my institution only showed a couple entries compared with Google Scholar.

-D.D.

Mapping Scholarship

Jennifer Howard, in an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that mapping the relationship of cited works in JSTOR databases revealed interesting patterns in academic scholarship.

-D.D.

Not All Statistics Are Valuable

Sharon Machlis noted in her ComputerWorld blog that minor usage changes are often statistically insignificant.

-DD

Time's Websites of the Year

Time has announced its choices for the 50 best website of the year. A new search site that supposedly has a tiny staff is Duckduckgo. The site offers view privacy and other configurable settings, but is saddled with such a funny name....

-DD

Arguements For Document Scanning

Lincoln Mullen recently posted "Using DocScanner to Scan on the Go" in the "ProfHacker" column of The Chronicle of Higher Education. User comments gave mixed reviews about DocScanner iPhone software (user comments recommended other products) but the discussion and links did provide some rationales for digitizing academic work.

-DD

Open Information Extraction

Bob Brown noted in NetworkWorld that Oren Etzioni, the CEO of Decide.com believes that keyword search techniques will be obsolete in a few years. Etzioni believes that computers will be smart enough to answer our verbal questions on general topics, a technology he dubs Open Information Extraction (IE). Etzioni on his corporate blog cites an opinion piece he wrote in Nature where he said that "we will soon view keyword search 'with the same nostalgia and amusement reserved for bygone technologies such as electric type-writers and vinyl records.'”

We will have to wait and see how quickly this technology impacts our handling of knowledge. I suspect that Etzioni's "soon" may be at least a decade in the future, except for some very crude searches or targeted applications.

-DD