I’ve mentioned Quora a couple times before. It’s a community-based Q&A site built by two ex-Facebook employees that some project will be bigger than Twitter and Wikipedia. The site lets you follow different topics as well as individual questions. This approach gives you a pretty high degree of personalization and the weekly e-mail digest of […]
Noted library leader, Ken Haycock, has a regular e-newsletter which contains columns on a wide variety of library and related topics. I don’t always agree with these columns (I’m still percolating a response to one he sent out in recently about why public libraries should be open on Christmas Day) but do find them thought-provoking […]
A friend just posted this (and I know we’ve all been there after an all-nighter with Mr. Potter or Ms. Everdeen or whoever)… I nearly called in book for work today: “I’m really sorry but I’m feeling really book today and I don’t think I can come in. I really don’t feel my work will […]
I love this time of year for all the “Best of the Year”-type lists that come out. And one of my absolute favourites of these type of lists are the “Top Tech Trends for the Coming Year” ones. For 2012, a writer for Mashable.com is predicting the following as the big trends: Touch Computing Social […]
An article about the decline of mail-order record clubs claims that it was the “12 for a $0.01” record clubs that conditioned consumers to pay little to nothing for music (and though they don’t phrase it this way, the related joy of having a large “download” of music provide (relatively) instant gratification too.) There’s probably […]
Yet another patented Reddit book recommendation thread.
An interesting infographic from the National Post. Cancer is the leading cause of death at 30% while heart disease comes in second at 21%. (I don’t see that common library killer, “death by papercut” listed anywhere!)
There are a lot of recommendation engines out there – Amazon, GoodReads, LibraryThing, Novelist, etc. etc. etc. – but BookLamp is one of the most unique I’ve found in that it tries to use pure mathematical algorithms to choose the books it recommends for users, similar to what Pandora does for music. Their biggest fault […]
A great article giving a few examples of how libraries have used crowdsourcing to manage large projects that are beyond the scope of their regular workforce and/or which take advantage of the “Wisdom of Crowds”.
…this guy pulled this out of his bag. (via Reddit)
