Archive for December, 2007

Austin the Top Blogging City!

December 29, 2007

Nielsen Media Research issued their Top Ten Lists for 2007. Within it, they cited a study of the number of adults who read or contributed to a blog in a 30-day period of time. The top cities were:

Austin, TX: 15%
Portland, OR: 14%
San Francisco Bay area, CA: 13%
Seattle, WA: 13%
Honolulu, HI: 12%
San Diego, CA: [...]

Best Practices for Web Site Accessibility

December 29, 2007

The Nielsen Norman Group is providing a report on web site accessibility at no charge.  Called Beyond ALT Text: Making the Web Easy to Use for Users With Disabilities.  It includes the results of usability tests with users that have various types of disabilities and a list of 75 detailed design guidelines.
[from Web4Lib]

Academic Library Website Benchmarks

December 28, 2007

A report published by Primary Research Group provides data on 82 North American college libraries concerning their website policies and development plans. Academic Library Website Benchmarks is currently available in PDF for $92.40 and will be available in print for $85.00 in early January 2008.
The 125+ page study presents detailed data on the composition [...]

One Laptop Per Child

December 28, 2007

The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project now has a real laptop — the XO-1.
The mission of One Laptop per Child (OLPC) is to empower the children of developing countries to learn by providing one connected laptop to every school-age child.
The XO-1 is a very sturdy, basic laptop that children can use to learn and [...]

Kindle E-Book reader

December 28, 2007

Late in 2007, Amazon put out an ebook reader called the Kindle. There is a lot of discussion about it on the library discussion lists, so I won’t duplicate that here. Suffice it to say that ebook readers really haven’t caught on for a variety of reasons. One of those reasons is [...]

Email Standards Project

December 28, 2007

There was a time when most of the email sent and received was in plain text.  Now, however, you can change fonts and colors, add backgrounds and even graphics.  This has led to email that is very much like reading web pages.  The problem with this is the same problem we’ve had with web pages [...]

Updated Guide for Building Digital Collections

December 28, 2007

NISO has updated their digital collection guide — “A Framework of Guidance for Building Good Digital Collections.”  Originally created in 2000, the last update was in 2004.  It’s definition of a “good” digital collection includes:

interoperability
reusability
persistence
 verification
documentation
support for intellectual property rights

The guide is divided into four major sections, each with a set of principles that includes discussion:

Collections
Objects
Metadata
Initiatives

Soon, [...]

Blogger Play

December 6, 2007

Many people upload pictures to their blogs.  Blogger, one of the largest blogging platforms, provides a way you can see a constant stream of pictures as they are added –  Blogger Play.  You’ll see pictures of families, cats, snow, things, kids, cats, sock puppets, Christmas lights, food, kids, cats . . . you get the [...]

Internet2 at 100gb/s

December 6, 2007

The Internet2, a parallel network to the Internet which includes primarily research institutions, has boosted its speed from 10 gb/s to 100gb/s.  According to CNET, that means downloading a high quality movie in just a few seconds.  It might take those of us on the Internet a couple of hours to do the same.
If you’re [...]