Type a novel on your mobile

I am intrigued to discover the phenomenon of mobile novels or keitai shousetsu in their native Japan where they have become a new publishing media. These novels are not only downloaded at a cost of about $15 to a mobile phone for reading, the authors also use their SMS keyboarding skills to write the novels [...]

The Hypertexters have their history told, again

Peta Hopkins points us to a gem of a talk by Alex Wright on YouTube in the Google Tech Talk series. Alex also has a new book, ‘Glut‘, that must repay its investment in reading time.
In his talk Alex takes us back almost a century to some notable precursors of information science before the information [...]

Dabbling in Dapper

I finally was able to have a look at Dapper.net which is a free service that allows you to extract, summarise and redisplay information from other web sites in your own site or RSS reader.
The screencast on the Dapper site shows how easily it is to extract a customised list of video information dynamically searched [...]

Student Attitude to Finding Information

A recent article by Lorenzo et al in the latest Educause Quarterly (vol 30 no 1 2007) provides a summary of the results of a study into ”college students’ perceptions of libraries and information resources”:

72 percent of college students ranked search engines as their first choice for finding information;
2 percent use library Web sites as [...]

Massive Multi-authored Online Book Takes Off

Following on the heals of my blog entry on facilitating book writing from voluntary online expert contributions we see the emergence of the ‘A Million Penguins‘ book project. This is joint project between Penguin Books and De Montfort university in the UK. It is naturally set up on the free MediaWiki platform that is used [...]

Have the Knowledgeable Public Write Your Book?

In yet another insightful article by Brock Read in Wired Campus entitled “A Business Book, Wiki-Style” the concept of having the public write your next book is exposed. The process is simple:

Think of a title: We Are Smarter Than Me, a new book that tries to help businessmen make sense of blogs, online communities, and [...]

Impressions of RefWorks

The first time I logged in to the RefWorks trial I was impressed. The user interface is clean and response times are surprisingly good, such a change from the complexity of EndNote. I like the RefWorks menu system and the layout. The keywords are simple and meaningful. Yes I can happily work with RefWorks. I [...]

DotWikIE scores best paper at AusWeb 2006

I attended the AusWeb 2006 conference in Noosa during 1 to 5 July and caught up with fellow web researchers in technology, education and information science. The keynotes covered a wide variety of web topics as usual and the quality was generally high. There was high interest in Amanda Spink’s keynote on web search engine [...]

Relief - my publication deadlines are met

A week ago I managed to submit my paper entitled ‘Ultra Lightweight Web Applications: A Single-Page Wiki employing a Partial Ajax Solution’ to AusWeb 2006. Writing this paper was an enjoyable, but time-consuming, mix of Ajax development of DotWikIE and describing the tool and its uses in the paper.
This was followed by a frenetic 10 [...]