February 2005 Archives

I entered myself in a dog show yesterday. I actually meant to enter my DOG in the dog show, but when I looked at the entry confirmation after registering on the web, I realized that under "name of dog" it said "Cindy L. Chick." Now, that's a problem. My dog is considerably better bred than I am, and I simply don't have the qualifications specified in the Belgian Tervuren standard. So how did someone who is fairly web literate do something so stupid?

Here's the story. When I clicked on Roboform to have it enter my credit card number, it also blanked out my dog's name and popped my name into the "name" field. Why didn't I notice? Since I was only able to see a few of entry boxes on the screen at any one time, it was easy to lose context. So I didn't notice the error because I was at the bottom of the screen, while "name of dog" box was on the top, invisible to me because it had scrolled out of sight. While on a hard copy form you could easily see all of it at a glance, a long web page just isn't quite as scan-able.

Why am I sharing this lapse with you? Because I think it's illustrates the inherent difficulty in scanning information on a computer screen. There's a limited amount of text you can get on one screen. And I think this is also the difficulty in using treatises online. I wonder if anyone has studied the speed with which one can scan a treatise, jumping quickly from the table of contents to the index to the text, versus scanning it on a computer screen. I was particularly thinking about this issue after reading "Out of the Jungle: How to get beyond the digital v. print debate - and deal with the fact that digital won" by James G. Miles. (AALL Spectrum, Feb. 2005.)

I was wondering just last week which email web service would be the first to offer RSS feeds. Yahoo, perhaps? Hotmail? Ah, I should have known. How about Google's Gmail!

But we're not there quite yet. Though this article is from October, I still don't have a button for an RSS feed on my account. And I tried to get Bloglines to recognize http://gmail.google.com/gmail/feed/atom as reported on a few blogs, but it was a no go.

But still, it looks like we're closer! Now if only Gmail would pick up POP email from my other email accounts, I'd be ready to give it a real test!

Is it paranoia if everyone is truly is out to get you? Because it's safe to say our PCs really are constantly under attack. There are phishing schemes, viruses, keylogging programs, identity theft and computer hijacking to worry about. And then there's spyware. If you spend any time at all on the web, you will likely have at least some spyware on your computer. When EarthLink and Webroot Software surveyed 1 million computers last year, they found an average of almost 28 spyware programs running on each one. A study by AOL reported spyware on 80% of the computers surveyed. So the odds are against us.

What is spyware and how can you avoid it? For spyware basics, read my article, Be Aware of Spyware, originally published on the Informed Librarian.

The Seattle Public Library is offering RSS feeds that will alert users to overdue books and notify them when a new book is available by their favorite author according to NPR's Future Tense, Libraries Get Hip to RSS.

Sirsi is pointed to as the first library automation vendors to offer RSS feeds with their catalog software. Any search that can be run in the Sirsi catalog can be saved as an RSS feed.

Also quoted is Steven Cohen, of Library Stuff, who points out that while there is limited demand for RSS feeds right now, it will likely increase significantly in the near future. How much better to be in front of the curve rather than behind it!

And once RSS is more commonplace, both public and private libraries could deliver new book lists on specific topics as customized RSS feeds. Let's just hope the REST of the library automation vendors catch up with Sirsi.

The people that brought you the Desktop Search Matrix, the Goebel Group, have another comparison you might find useful, the Search Appliance Matrix. Search appliances, which are epitomized, but not limited to, the Google Search Appliance, are search engines for your intranet in a package complete with everything that you need to easily implement them.

The matrix compares software from Google, Thunderstone, and Vivisimo and includes the file types indexed, the number of documents, and cost. It's definitely very handy if you're in the market.

Did you ever want to be the guy/girl in the white hat, fighting the bad guys and making the world safe for democracy? If you have a web site, you, too, can be a hero by participating in Project Honey Pot to help rid the world of spam.

Here's how it works. You sign up for an account with Project Honey Pot, and they issue you a dummy email address. You include this email address on your site. (Of course, you don't use this email address for any correspondence.) When the spam starts rolling in as a result of email harvesting by spammers, Project Honey Pot collects it, and reports the spammers to the authorities.

That's it in a nutshell. For more information, see the Wired article, Turning the Tables on Spammers and the Project Honey Pot web site.

I like using PDF to package my research results. It's easy to deliver via email and I can use bookmarks and annotation tools without disfiguring the original. Using Adobe Acrobat I can combine search results from other resources on the web, and even incorporate scanned items. Now I just want the major online services to make things even easier for me.

These days it seems like the Internet is connecting everything to everything else. So it follows that you should be able to connect to your home computer whether you're home or not. And so you can. Gotomypc.com has been the gold standard for remote access software for some time now. But there's a new challenger out there, MyWebEx.com.

The Webex people are known for creating a web conferencing service, which connects any number of computers together for training, presentations, sales meetings, collaboration, etc. Since they do a good job of web meetings, it follows that it should be a piece of cake to use that same technology to allow you to connect to one computer with another.

I've been a GoToMyPC.com fan for some time. Unfortunately, my firm's web filter now blocks access. But they haven't found MyWebEx.com yet. (Shhhhsh...don't tell.) MyWebEx.com works just like GoToMyPC, but there's one big difference...it's free. At least for now.

MyWebEx.com isn't all goodness and light, at least not for me. The plug-in seems to be crashing my computer upon shutdown. But that's a small price to pay for free remote access.

For more information see: WebEx Readies Remote Access App.

[Spotted on TVC Alert.]

Open Stacks offers what may be the first library-related podcast! In honor of the occasion, I thought this would be a good opportunity to briefly discuss podcasts, so if you're unfamiliar with the term, or think that they somehow relate to a popular, but hokey, 50's horror film, I recommend that you read on.

You all know how an RSS feed works. Podcasting is a similar concept, but instead of distributing text, podcasts distribute audio recordings via what is essentially a RSS feed for audio files. Blogs allow anyone to be a publisher. Podcasts allow anyone to be a broadcaster.