DigitalKoans

Google has released the Google Book Search Book Viewability API.

Here's an excerpt from the API home page:

The Google Book Search Book Viewability API enables developers to:

• Link to Books in Google Book Search using ISBNs, LCCNs, and OCLC numbers
• Know whether Google Book Search has a specific title and what the viewability of that title is
• Generate links to a thumbnail of the cover of a book
• Generate links to an informational page about a book
• Generate links to a preview of a book

Read more about it at "Book Info Where You Need It, When You Need It."

John Tehranian, Professor of Law at the University of Utah, has written a paper for the Utah Law Review titled "Infringement Nation: Copyright Reform and the Law/Norm Gap."

Here's an excerpt from the paper where Tehranian summarizes the infringement activity of a hypothetical U.S. law professor during a single day:

By the end of the day, John has infringed the copyrights of twenty emails, three legal articles, an architectural rendering, a poem, five photographs, an animated character, a musical composition, a painting, and fifty notes and drawings. All told, he has committed at least eighty-three acts of infringement and faces liability in the amount of $12.45 million (to say nothing of potential criminal charges).

If copyright holders were inclined to enforce their rights to the maximum extent allowed by law, he would be indisputably liable for a mind-boggling $4.544 billion in potential damages each year. And, surprisingly, he has not even committed a single act of infringement through P2P file sharing. Such an outcome flies in the face of our basic sense of justice. Indeed, one must either irrationally conclude that John is a criminal infringer—a veritable grand larcenist—or blithely surmise that copyright law must not mean what it appears to say. Something is clearly amiss. Moreover, the troublesome gap between copyright law and norms has grown only wider in recent years.

Here’s a list of a few Web/Web 2.0 resources and tools that developers may find useful.

• "20 Tools for Working with Fonts"
• "20+ Tools for Working with AJAX"
• "100 (Legal) Sources for Free Stock Images"
• "CSS Menu Generator"
• "CSS TOOLBOX: 20+ Tools for Working with CSS"
• "DOMAIN TOOLBOX: 30+ Places to Buy and Sell Domains"
• "HTML TOOLBOX: 30+ HTML Tools and Tutorials"
• "JAVASCRIPT TOOLBOX: 25+ Tools & Tutorials for JavaScript"
• "The PHP Toolbox: 20+ PHP Resources"
• "Tools to Compare Fonts Online"

Here’s a list of a few Web/Web 2.0 resources and tools that developers may find useful.

• 20 Great 3-Column Drupal Themes
• 20+ Tools for Perl Development
• 20+ Tools for RoR Development
• 80+ Free 2-Column Website Templates
• Browser Tests, Services and Compatibility Test Suites
• JAVA TOOLBOX: 20+ Java Tools
• PYTHON TOOLBOX: 25+ Tools for Taming Python
• SQL TOOLBOX: 20+ Tools and Lessons about SQL
• Top 10 Free E-Books for Bloggers
• Who Is Your Visitor? An Average Profile

Here’s a list of a few Web/Web 2.0 resources and tools that developers may find useful.

• 10 Micro-Blogging Tools Compared
• 10+ Awesome Firefox Extensions for Developers and Bloggers
• 25+ Recommended Tools For Movable Type
• 40+ Free One-Column Website Templates
• 50 Great Widgets For Your Blog
• 50 More Beautiful Blogger Templates
• 170+ Expert Ideas From World’s Leading Developers
• BLOGGER.COM TOOLBOX: 30+ Templates & Tools for Blogger
• Creating Google Custom Search Engines
• WEB HOSTING TOOLBOX: 130+ Resources for Your Web Hosting Needs

Here’s a list of a few Web/Web 2.0 resources and tools that developers may find useful.

• "6 Online Photo Editors Compared"
• "10 Designer’s Checkpoints to Be Aware of"
• "30+ Tools for Working with Wordpress Posts"
• "30+ Tools to Turn Wordpress into a Personal Hub"
• "30+ WordPress 2-Column Themes"
• "30+ WordPress 3-Column Themes"
• "30+ WordPress Plugins for Statistics"
• "30+ WordPress Plugins to Get More Blog Readers"
• "40+ Free Blog Hosts"
• "80 Beautiful Typefaces for Professional Design"
• "The Best 80 Photoshop Text Effects on the Web"
• "Blueprint CSS"
• "COLOURlovers"
• "EMAIL NEWSLETTERS: 30+ Mailing List Services"
• "Fuzzwich"
• "The Open Source Web Design Toolbox: 100 Web Design Template Sources, Tools and Resources"
• "Top 10 PDF Tricks"
• "WordPress Automatic Upgrade Plugin Update"
• "WORDPRESS GOD: 300+ Tools for Running Your WordPress Blog"

After a year-and-a-half of development effort, the Institute for the Future of the Book has released the open-source CommentPress 1.0 theme for WordPress, which allows paragraph-level comments that are displayed side-by-side with the associated paragraph.

Here’s an excerpt from the announcement:

This little tool is the happy byproduct of a year and a half spent hacking WordPress to see whether a popular net-native publishing form, the blog, which, most would agree, is very good at covering the present moment in pithy, conversational bursts but lousy at handling larger, slow-developing works requiring more than chronological organization—whether this form might be refashioned to enable social interaction around long-form texts. Out of this emerged a series of publishing experiments loosely grouped under the heading "networked books." . . .

In the course of our tinkering, we achieved one small but important innovation. Placing the comments next to rather than below the text turned out to be a powerful subversion of the discussion hierarchy of blogs, transforming the page into a visual representation of dialog, and re-imagining the book itself as a conversation. Several readers remarked that it was no longer solely the author speaking, but the book as a whole (author and reader, in concert). . . .

We can imagine a number of possibilities:

— scholarly contexts: working papers, conferences, annotation projects, journals, collaborative glosses
— educational: virtual classroom discussion around readings, study groups
— journalism/public advocacy/networked democracy: social assessment and public dissection of government or corporate documents, cutting through opaque language and spin (like our version of the Iraq Study Group Report, or a copy of the federal budget, or a Walmart press release)
— creative writing: workshopping story drafts, collaborative storytelling
— recreational: social reading, book clubs

Here’s a list of a few Web/Web 2.0 resources and tools that developers may find useful.

• 40+ Firefox Add-ons for High Speed Blogging
• Developer’s Alarm: 200+ Hotkeys to Boost Your Productivity
• Google Webmaster Central Blog
• Help-Key: How to Optimize Your Video for YouTube
• RSS To HTML—How To Convert RSS Feeds Into Published Web Pages—A Mini-Guide
• Script Repetitive Actions with iMacros
• So You Want to Create WordPress Themes Huh?
• The Tagging Toolbox: 30+ Tagging Tools
• The Wiki Toolbox: 30+ Wiki Tools and Resources
• WordPress & Sproose Facebook Applications

Here’s a list of a few overviews of Web/Web 2.0 tools and techniques that developers may find useful.

• 60 Best CSS Directories You Would Die to Watch!
• Blog Platforms Head to Head: Six Apart & Automatic Compared
• Fresheezy! Stupid Name. Fresh Themes!
• Podcasting Toolbox: 70+ Podcasting Tools and Resources
• tlbox: Web Design Tools
• Video Toolbox: 150+ Online Video Tools and Resources
• Web Developer (Firefox plug-in)
• Web Domains: Tools To Use, Articles To Read
• Wordpress Plugins & Tutorials: Your Pick

The newly established Code4Lib Journal has issued a call for papers.

Here’s an excerpt from the call:

The Code4Lib Journal (C4LJ) will provide a forum to foster community and share information among those interested in the intersection of libraries, technology, and the future.

Submissions are currently being accepted for the first issue of this promising new journal. Please submit articles, abstracts, or proposals for articles to c4lj-articles@googlegroups.com (a private list read only by C4LJ editors) by Friday, August 31, 2007. Publication of the first issue is planned for late December 2007.

Possible topics for articles include, but are not limited to:

* Practical applications of library technology. Both actual and
hypothetical applications invited.
* Technology projects (failed, successful, proposed, or
in-progress), how they were done, and challenges faced
* Case studies
* Best practices
* Reviews
* Comparisons of third party software or libraries
* Analyses of library metadata for use with technology
* Project management and communication within the library environment
* Assessment and user studies . . . .

The goal of the journal is to promote professional communication by minimizing the barriers to publication. While articles in the journal should be of a high quality, they need not follow any formal structure or guidelines. Writers should aim for the middle ground between, on the one hand, blog or mailing-list posts, and, on the other hand, articles in traditional journals. . . .

The Journal will be electronic only, and at least initially, edited rather than refereed. . . .

Code4Lib Journal Editorial Committee

Carol Bean
Jonathan Brinley
Edward Corrado
Tom Keays
Emily Lynema
Eric Lease Morgan
Ron Peterson
Jonathan Rochkind
Jodi Schneider
Dan Scott
Ken Varnum