Librarian of Fortune

Harnessing your spare brain cells

I recently ran across a news item about a creative use of the CAPTCHA utility. A computer scientist from Carnegie Mellon looked at the way CAPTCHA boxes work and thought that this ability of humans to recognize characters that machines can't read might be applicable in other situations. Just as the SETI@Home project harnesses computers' unused CPU cycles to search for signs of extraterrestrial life,  reCaptcha.net uses CAPTCHA boxes to get web users to help decipher scanned text that an optical character reader was unable to read.

I wonder what other cross-overs there are between the virtual world of electronic content and the real world, such as we know it. One that comes to mind is Second Life and the real-world entities that have a presence there. Now that we have retailers, news bureaus and libraries in Second Life, we can expect to see a closer relationship between the world of bytes and the world of atoms. Will SL libraries start providing access to real-world e-content? Will we see Dialog selling articles with Linden dollars, the virtual currency of Second Life?

NY Times gets a clue

For the last couple of years, the New York Times has been charging $4.95/article for its archive. Today, they announced that, duh, they'd make a lot more in online advertising than they do from finding people willing to fork out $5 an article. So... free access to almost all of the NYT archive! Woo hoo!  (And just because they are apparently smoking crack and can't entirely catch a clue, they are still going to charge for some articles published between 1923 and 1986. Whatever.) See the article here, and go do your own search here.

Cool cross-engine search tool

I recently discovered Intelways, a nifty way to search a number of search engines sequentially. It's not a metasearch engine; it lets you click from one resource to another. Its main claim to fame is that it categorizes the tools by broad type of search -- general, images, video, news, social (blogs, social networking sites, social bookmarking sites, etc.), file-type searching, reference, academic, business, tech and (natch) shopping.

I review it in more detail in my September Info-Tip.

Write a perfect email

Wired has a typically geeky How-to wiki; a recent one on how to write a perfect email
rocked my small part of the world. I can't count how many emails I delete or nearly delete that don't have a subject line, or have one that sounds like yet another Nigerian inheritance scam. 

Now that I've gotten with the Getting Things Done program and don't use my inbox as a filing cabinet, I've become a lot more irritable about emails that take time.

Among the tips:

• Give me context. If you're asking a question, anticipate any missing details that could cause me to ask for clarification (and move your response to the bottom of my email queue).
• Keep it short. We're both busy people, so don't spend your time blathering on... get to the point. That gives us both more time to do stuff we love to do.
• Make requests clear. "If you sent an email, you have a point. Get to it."

I can't help being a flaming liberal

According to a recent article in New Scientist, liberals' and conservatives' brains work differently. In a study that required a bunch of poor stiffs to sit and stare at letters flashing on the screen, liberals did better dealing with unexpected events than conservatives. Any correlation between these findings and politicians' positions on Iraq is entirely coincidental.

"Liberals had twice as much activity in a deep region called the anterior cingulate cortex. This area of the brain is thought to act as a mental brake by helping the mind recognize "no-go" situations where it must refrain from the usual course of action."

PostSecret - everybody has one

PostSecret is one of my guilty pleasures. PostSecret started a bazillion years ago by Frank Warren, as a community art project. People were invited to anonymously send postcards to him, sharing a secret that hadn't been shared with anyone before. Frank posts some of them on his blog, and has created four book compilations of some of these postcards. (A Lifetime of Secrets, My Secret, PostSecret: Extraordinary Confessions from Ordinary Lives and The Secret Lives of Men and Women)

These postcards are amazing windows into people's hopes, dreams, regrets, sorrows and hatred.

There's a nice article on Frank here.

E-Newsletters

Factiva hosted a webinar that I gave today on creating and marketing electronic newsletters. I based the talk on the white paper I wrote about this, but added some info on Factiva's Newsletter Builder. It's a neat tool if you want to produce a newsletter that has title, summary and hyperlink to the full text of published articles from Factiva. Not as useful for folks like me who send the full text of our own content.