Visualization (article)

An interesting article on visualization of ‘the net … Under socialnetworking, LastFM is mentioned a couple of times as is youtube, but fidgt is just way off of the map.

I remember seeing a LC project around 1998 or so (tied to American Memory? funny, I can’t remember!) which visually mapped parts of the collections, so that you could see the relationships between items. I’m not sure what happened to that.

Anyhow, here is the article intro :

The Best Tools for Visualization

Visualization is a technique to graphically represent sets of data. When data is large or abstract, visualization can help make the data easier to read or understand. There are visualization tools for search, music, networks, online communities, and almost anything else you can think of. Whether you want a desktop application or a web-based tool, there are many specific tools are available on the web that let you visualize all kinds of data.

Article in entirety
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/the_best_tools_for_visualization.php

Searching Internet Archive by CC Licensing

Because I can never remember where these is located on the webpage (FAQs, actually)
I’m snipping this out for myself with the search links, of course (i.e., just click the link to execute the search in IA). The IA has great stuff for digital collagists, movie makers, & other arty folks.
I used stuff from the Prelinger Collection to make my movie about cataloging and also for my digital collage on communication.

————–
Can I search by Creative Commons License?

Yes, you can. But it’s a little complicated.

Here’s how to break it down. See the license types at creative commons. When you want to find all of the items that have a certain license, you’ll plug their abbreviation for it into this search query:

/metadata/licenseurl:http*abbreviation/*

So if you’re looking for Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives (by-nc-nd), you’d put this in the search box: /metadata/licenseurl:http*by-nc-nd/* And you’d get about 33,000 items back.

If you want to use this in combination with other queries, like “I want by-nc-nd items about dogs” you’d do this: /metadata/licenseurl:http*by-nc-nd/* AND dog And you’d get 195 items. The AND tells the search engine all the items returned should have that license AND they should contain the word dog. AND has to be in all caps.

Just to make it easier, here are the basic searches:

Public Domain

Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives (by-nc-nd)

Attribution Non-commercial Share Alike (by-nc-sa)

Attribution Non-commercial (by-nc)

Attribution No Derivatives (by-nd)

Attribution Share Alike (by-sa)

Attribution (by)

Flickr & the Library of Congress

Library of Congress announced today that it has partnered with flickr, putting up 3,000 photos from two of their most popular collections.Only images for which no copyright restrictions are known to exist are included.

The LOC blog post about it is here:
http://www.loc.gov/blog/?p=233

The flickr page is here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/library_of_congress/

opensource alternatives to common commercial products

Although the introduction of this article is overly simplified in terms of the changes in library technology (I couldn’t help but laugh a little in a couple of places) , once you’re past that, the rest is a good little overview of some of the more popular opensource products. I’ve hotlinked and listed the products below, the article gives a more indepth overview.

The products are:
ubuntu (ms windows alternative based on linux)
firefox (web browser; ms internet explorer alternative)
openoffice (productivity suite with wordprocessing, presentation, and spreadsheets; ms office alternative)
thunderbird (e-mail + rss reader; ms outlook express alternative)
songbird ( media player; windows media player alternative?)
gimpshop (image editing; adobe photoshop alternative)
pdfcreator (pdf creator; adobe acrobat alternative)
Audacity (audio burning software)
avidemux (video creation)

Other stuff (web publishing, etc.):
wordpress
drupal
mediawiki and also twiki.

As far as libraries go, there is
koha
evergreen
vufind
liblime

I’ve talked a little about evergreen and vufind here. At home, I still run MS for the operating system and commercial stuff for my server; but then everything else is opensource or web based services (Firefox, gimp, ghostwriter+pdf, openoffice, etc.) Setting up these products on a small personal computer is fairly easy (really!). I’m not sure how that would translate to a large network, which could possibly be a hidden cost factor: installing these, configuring them as needed, and upgrading. Of course, admins already have to do that for any programs that they support. Training issues (oh the fun of trying to teach a group of web editors to use Drupal…) as well as potential security risks given the opensource nature would be other potential costs.

http://www.degreetutor.com/library/managing-expenses/open-source-library

7 things you should know about ….

series of articles from educause regarding new technologies, impacts of technology, etc. including

–creative commons
–open journaling
–digital storytelling
–map mashups

as well as the common suspects (facebook, youtube, virtual communities, blogging, etc.)

interesting that opensource as a community and force hasn’t been addressed yet.

http://www.educause.edu/content.asp?page_id=7495&bhcp=1

if you are tired of flickr, del.icio.us, and youtube, other fun things to do on the ‘net…

dappit
http://www.dappit.com/
extract content from websites

google image namer
http://images.google.com/imagelabeler/
Basically, it’s a fun way for google to help improve their image search results.

and of course, 43places.
http://www.43places.com