The Technology, Entertainment and Design 2006 conference has ended with its usual optimism about the power of creativity and innovation to meet the world’s challenges. It attracts an extremely high profile of speaker and delegate, all so successful in their respective fields, it’s no surprise that they feel able to resolve political problems with the latest technology and fresh ideas. Good luck to them, at least they are concentrating on the big issues: climate change, global health, and unacceptable poverty.
Here is an overview from the San Francisco Chronicle while Business Week got excited and posted 5 articles including this one with David Perry about the future of gaming. As the demographic of games players has got older, there is a great need for games that are less visceral and more emotional, with a plot and involving characters.
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It sounds like a joke but the author of this article makes the serious point that a commercial organisation sitting between all academic researchers and publishers would be in a stronger negotiating position and have the scale to develop new technology. What role then for librarians? And surely publishers are in the best position to develop solutions for end-users?
One can imagine commercial organizations entering the horizontal market by developing means to, first, put pressure upstream on journals publishers (Wal-Mart has an excruciating genius for this; just ask any vendor), and, second, by creating value-added services, perhaps through the application of sophisticated (and expensive) information technology services that tease out emergent properties in the growing collection of domain-specific publications. Neither of these strategies would work for a solitary library, but the combined buying power and financial muscle of an external commercial entity could alter the basic structure of this part of the marketplace.
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The number of blogs continues to rise exponentially. According to this analysis from the CEO of blog search engine Technorati, the blogosphere has doubled every 5 months or so for the last 3 years and they now track over 27 million blogs, posting about 50,000 comments an hour.
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Many libraries are considering the acquisition of Elsevier’s Scopus and Thomson’s Web of Science bibliographic databases. Both are significant purchases and competitive products. How well do they stack up against each other and against the (currently) free Google Scholar?
A medical librarian in Sweden has started a blog to assess them all in detail and inform acquisition decisions.
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Looks like US Blackberry owners will continue to recieve their regular fix as their maker Research in Motion claims to have found a way to avoid the threatened shutdown. RIM is facing an injunction from a software company, who say that Blackberry has infringed their copyrights, that may switch off the service to 3 million users.
Such is the level of addiction, importantly among government employees, that the Justice Department even got involved declaring a public interest.
And for some, such as this estate agent, the withdrawal might just get too much.
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