One of the books I'm delighted to have had the chance to read here is Bruce Schneier's latest, Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly About Security in an Uncertain World. I reviewed three or four drafts of this while Bruce was working on it, and I am completely delighted with how it turned out.

In Beyond Fear, Schneier has utterly demystified the idea of security with a text aimed squarely at nontechnical individuals. He takes his legendary skill at applying common sense and lucidity to information-security problems and applies it to all the bogeymen of the post-9/11 world, and asks the vital question: What are we getting in exchange for the liberties that the Ashcroftian authorities have taken away from us in the name of security?

This is possibly the most important question of this decade, and that makes Schenier's book one of the most important texts of the decade. This should be required reading for every American, and the world would be a better place if anyone venturing an opinion on electronic voting, airline security, roving wiretaps, or any other modern horror absorbed this book's lessons first. Link Discuss [Boing Boing Blog]

7:45:15 PM    

Bloglines Worth A Look for Blog Directory and RSS Subscription Services

So the real advantage is the ability  to subscribe to your favorite blogs using your RSS reader, instead of going to each blog to track the articles.

Here is the URL for Bloglines:

http://www.bloglines.com/

URL for New Blogs posted there:

http://www.bloglines.com/newblogs

Top Blogs:

http://www.bloglines.com/topblogs

Blog Directory:

http://www.bloglines.com/dir

here is the email blurb I got once I had registered:

Now that you have a Bloglines account, you can subscribe to blogs
easily. Go to http://www.bloglines.com/topblogs to see a list of the
most popular blogs on Bloglines. Also see http://www.bloglines.com/newblogs
for a list of new blogs, updated daily. If you already have a list of
subscriptions in OPML format, you can import them automatically. Go to
http://www.bloglines.com/manage for more information. For an easy way
to subscribe to new blogs that you find, see
http://www.bloglines.com/help/easysub

3:30:45 PM    

Bookmarklets, Favelets and Things

"...With some creative thinking, there are many other library functions that could use the technology as well. InfoWorld analyst and writer Jon Udell started creating bookmarklets for library catalogs that would grab an ISBN out of the URL at a site like Amazon or Barnes and Noble and search it in a library catalog....

Not all library systems will support this, but Udell has quite a list on his Library Lookup page [www.snurl.com/w9j] for several main library systems along with links for hundreds of libraries. If yours is not listed, he even has a Library Lookup Generator that may be able to create one that works.

While the number of library lookup bookmarklets available is quite amazing, there are some caveats. For one thing, these only work for ISBN searches from pages that contain an ISBN somewhere in the URL. So while bookmarklets can work quite nicely for users at the Amazon or Barnes and Noble sites, they are not very helpful at the many Web pages that may only cite a book with a standard citation or even less information. If it is just a book title, and the book is no longer in print, it may be difficult to find a page with its ISBN at the online bookstores.

Even more problematic is the variety of ISBNs available for a single title. For one publication there can be separate ISBNs for the paperback, hardback, deluxe leather-bound, book on tape, and many other versions and editions. Consequently, a search just on a single ISBN may not pull up a copy of the work that is available in the library but in a different format.

Because of this, it may be best to consider Udell's laudable effort as a very useful beginning point. The bookmarklets can be adapted to do a catalog search with other criteria. James Howison, a graduate student at Syracuse University and FreelancePropaganda.com blogger, modified the library lookup bookmarklet for the Syracuse University library catalog so that it could do a keyword search of the catalog on selected text on an existing Web page [http://snurl.com/kwlookup], but realize that 'Bird' is the name of the main library at Syracuse and not an ornithological search limit.

Consider some related uses. In browsing the Web, a citation to an article shows up on a page. Select the periodical title and click on the local library bookmarklet that will do an accurate search for a print or electronic version of the periodical. Or from within a library's bibliographic database or a commercial online service, a bookmarklet could check against a list of full-text subscriptions.

Any library or lab that has public computers could set up bookmarklets for printing, e-mailing, accessibility, Web searches, catalog checks, full-text availability searches, and other linking. The potential is there even though the bookmarklets still need to be written and adapted to local situations for most of these examples." [Online, via TVC Alert]

2:41:17 PM    

Seems pretty darn draconian, but here you have it!

Feds Want to Track the Homeless. The Department of Housing and Urban Development wants local governments to track lots of data about the homeless -- including their whereabouts and medical histories. Critics charge the mandate would lead to abuse. By Julia Scheeres. [Wired News]

2:16:04 PM