U.S. Supreme Court Looks at File Swapping

Supreme Court May Redefine File Swapping. John Borland. CNET News.com. March 29, 2005.
The U.S. Supreme Court is listeing to entertainment industry proposals to kill file swapping networks such as Grokster.

Blue Gene/L Beats Own Record Speed

Fastest Supercomputer Gets Faster. BBC News. March 25, 2005.
Blue Gene/L, the world's fastest supercomputer, surpassed the record it set last year in Japan after attaining a speed of 135.5 teraflops.

Recommender Systems

Joseph Konstan on Human-Computer Interaction. Ubiquity. ACM. March 24- April 4, 2005.
Konstan, of the University of Minnesota, describes his work with recommender systems, its use at MovieLens, and other applications of the technology, including uses digital in libraries and online communities.

Leading Search Engines Profiled

The Battle to be the Fastest Fetcher on the Web. Richard J. Dalton, Jr. Newsday. March 28, 2005.
Search engine competition has heated up and Dalton sees how Yahoo, Microsoft and Google are faring.

The New and Improved Ixquick

Ixquick Now Combines 10 Search Engines In One. TechWeb (via Yahoo News). March 24, 2005.
Surfboard B.V. has improvd its popular metaserch engine Ixquick, adding an international phone directory, price comparisons and a picture database to its origina web metasearch. Searching in 17 languages is offered as well.

Yahoo's Creative Commons Search

Yahoo Offers Creative Commons Search. Tim Gray. Internetnews.com. March 24, 2005.
Yahoo! has released the beta version of a new service that searches Creative Commons for works whose authors permit them to be shared or reused. [Creative Commons Search]

Music Downloading Trends

Reports: Technology & Media Use. Mary Madden and Lee Rainie. Pew Internet & American Life Project. March 23, 2005.
About 27% of Internet users in America say they have downloaded music files, some of them via e-mail or the portable devices of others.

Google Removes AFP from Google News

Google Removing Agence France Presse from Google News. Juan Carlos Perez. IDG News Service (Infoworld). March 21, 2005.
Following Agence France Presse's lawsuit, Google is removing all AFP links and content from Google News.

Jimmy Wales on Wikipedia

Reference Revolution. Roxanne Khamsi. News@nature.com. March 18, 2005.
Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, explains the rationale for his collaborative encyclopedia.

CNET Interview with Robert Gundlach

An Inventor at Heart. Richard Shim. CNET News.com. March 17, 2005.
CNET interviews Robert Gundlach, the physicist who helped make the photocopier invented by Chester Carlson more affordable and useful. [The Story of Xerography]

Publishers Concerned About Google Library Project

Harvard-Google Project Faces Copyright Woes. Beau C. Robicheau. The Harvard Crimson Online. March 15, 2005.
Google is proceeding with its digitization plans while the copyright issues remain unclear.

France to Start Own Online Library Project

Chirac Rivals Google with French Online Book Plan. Reuters (via Yahoo! News). March 16, 2005.
As part of France's effort to combat the influence of Google's library digitization plan, President Jacques Chirac told the French national library to draw up a similar plan of its own.

New Type of Computer Memory Developed

A 30-year Memory Problem Solved? Michael Kanellos. CNET News.com. March 16, 2005.
Royal Philips Electronics has devised a way to use phase change memory in computers, which could replace the dynamic random access memory technology currently in use.

Revising Metcalfe's Law

Researchers: Metcalfe's Law Overshoots the Mark. Stephen Shankland. CNET News.com. March 14, 2005.
Metcalfe's Law, the rule-of-thumb that describes a network's value, has been found by two University of Minnesota researchers to be an overstatement. [Metcalfe's Law and Legacy (George Gilder)]

Clusty Search Engine for U.S. Government News

Vivisimo’s Clusty Government Search Engine. Loren Baker. Search Engine Journal. March 14, 2005.
Vivisimo has added a new component to its Clusty search engine that searches and clusters U.S. Government-related news stories. [Clusty]

Search Industry (part 3)

Future of Search Promises Many New Developments, Ideas. Jennifer LeClaire. E-Commerce Times. March 11, 2005.
LeClaire concludes her series with a look at niche search engines, which are beginning to gain momentum in competition with the sarch giants.

Search Industry (part 2)

Search Industry Facing Evolution. Jennifer LeClaire. E-Commerce Times. March 10, 2005.
The second article in the series examines ways in which search engines are expanding their businesses through the development of new products and features.

What's Ahead for the Search Industry (part 1)

Experts Predict Where Search Will Go in 2005. Jennifer LeClaire. E-Commerce Times. March 9, 2005.
This first of three articles looks at ways in which search engines are adding value to their results.

New Search Engine Features

Search Engines Build a Better Mousetrap. Tim Gnatek. New York Times. March 10, 2005.
As search leader Google continues to innovate, its competitors have been forced to add new features in order to keep up. Gnatek summarizes them nicely in this article.

Slashdot as a Public Sphere

Mechanisms of an Online Public Sphere: The Website Slashdot. Nathaniel Poor. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. 10(2), article 4.
The author evaluates the website Slashdot in the light of public sphere theory. Originally identified by Habermas in 1962, the public sphere originated in the salons and coffee houses of Europe during the 18th and 19th century as the forum for discussion of current issues by people not involved in governance. Poor examines Slashdot to see if it shares the same characteristics.

EU Ministers Approve Software Patents

EU Ministers Approve New Software Patent Draft L. Tobias Buck and Raphael Minder. Financial Times. March 8, 2005.
The European Union has approved a draft law which allows companies to register patents for software that makes a "technical contribution."

Internet Becoming Essential Part of American Politics

The Internet and Campaign 2004. Lee Rainie, Michael Cornfield, PhD, John Horrigan, PhD. Pew Internet & American Life Project. March 6, 2005.
A new study shows that the number of Americans who used the Internet for information on the 2004 election grew dramatically since 2000.

Using GIS in Library Collection Development

Using GIS to Establish a Public Library Consumer Health Collection. Elizabeth M. LaRue. Biomedical Digital Libraries. November 18, 2004.
The author describes how U.S census data was used with a geographic information system to produce detailed demographic portraits of the neighborhoods surrounding branch libraries. The resulting maps were useful in tayloring consumer health collections to their communities' needs.

Co-Inventor of the Internet

Getting the Net Off the Ground. BBC News. March 4, 2005.
Robert Kahn, system designer of the Arpanet, tells the BBC's "Click Online" program about his work designing the world's first computer network.

Latest Search Engine Rankings

Majority of Searchers Use Multiple Search Engines. Rob McGann.
Internetnews.com. February 28, 2005.
NetRatings has released its latest rankings of the leading search engines, and revealed that most searchers use several search engines.

Historical Images Available for Download

N.Y. Library Hangs Gallery of Images Online. Dawn Kawamoto. CNET News.com. March 3, 2005.
The New York Public Library has opened its NYPL Digital Gallery, making thousands historical images available for free downloading.

Number of Internet Hosts Still Growing

The Ever-Expanding Web. Sean Michael Kerner. Internetnews.com. March 2, 2005.
Data published by the Internet Systems Consortium indicates that the number of Internet hosts is showing an annual growth rate of 36.3 percent.

E-Journal Economics

Digital Savings. Roger C. Schonfeld and Eileen Gifford Fenton. Library Journal. March 1, 2005.
The authors, summarizing their report "Library Periodicals Expenses" (link to full rdocument provided), examine nonsubscription costs and savings associated with academic libraries' transition from print to electronic journals.

Gates Receives Honorary Knighthood

Knighthood for Microsoft's Gates. BBC News. March 2, 2005.
Bill Gates was made a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire and had a private audience with the Queen.

A Look at Google Architecture

Peeking Into Google. Susan Kuchinskas. Internetnews.com. March 2, 2005.
Google's top engineer, Urs Hoelzle, recently described how the company's success is built on a lot of cheap servers that fail every day, backed up by a lot of redundancy.

Gordon Moore Awarded Marconi Prize

Father of Moore's Law to Receive Marconi Prize. Michael Kanellos. CNET News.com. March 2, 2005.
The Columbia's Guglielmo Marconi International Fellowship Foundation as awarded a lifetime achievement award to Gordon Moore, a co-founder of Intel and originator of the law bearing his name. [Moore's Law]