Librarian of Fortune

latest BatesInfoTip

I just posted my latest InfoTip, Cool Uses For Google Maps. I'm starting to get addicted to searching for local user-created overlays.....

David Foster Wallace's commencement speech

Today's Wall Street Journal had a polished-up version of David Foster Wallace's Commencement Speech at Kenyon College from 2005. Wow, is all I can say. If you haven't read it yet, find five minutes of quiet time and read it.

IMO, the WSJ version is better; don't know how long the WSJ link will be live, so go read (or at least download) it now.

Google Map fun

I've always loved maps... maybe because we moved all the time when I was growing up. Every map held the promise of a new start, new people, new school, and - most interestingly - new terrain to explore.

So, imagine my delight when I started playing around with the user-generated overlays/mash-ups for Google Maps. It requires that you sign in, but you've given up all those privacy concerns anyway... So, click the "My Maps" tab, then "Browse the Directory", and geek out. On top of a Google Map, you can overlay topo map elevation contours, pointers to any current earthquakes, population density, indication of land affected by rise in sea level, weather maps, even the results of an eBay or CraigsList search.

And another cool feature -- click the "Popular User-Created Maps" link, and it shows the most popular overlays for the area you are currently viewing. So, for example, I'm going to be in Charlotte NC next week. I brought Charlotte up on my Google Maps, selected Popular User-Created Maps, and now I see stuff I wouldn't have known to look for: parks and bike trails, neighborhoods, local churches, and where the Cub Scouts Pack 97 goes hiking.

As I'm looking through these, I can think of all kinds of uses -- the "Earth at night" overlay would help me see how likely it will be to see the stars when I travel; the population density overlay is a way for an out-of-town company (or individual) to decide where to relocate; I can map out my stops to all the office rentals on CraigsList...

Word Clouds

Wordle.net provides a cool way to analyze the frequency at which words occurred in a text. See this page for word clouds of all the major speeches from the Democratic and Republican national conventions. I love this application of something that's been around since people could count. Now I can immediately see the main focus of a speech, once you get past the hyperbole and mean jabs.

Here's the Declaration of Independence and Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech (word cloud shown).

Tired of Political Spin?

I'm going to spare you my rant about political campaigns. Just gonna say, if you see a political ad, go next to FactCheck.org, and see how much is. you know, actually true.

I found it on Google, so it must be true...

Forbes.com has a quick synopsis of today's debacle involving a reporter who should not be allowed to use a browser without adult supervision. The "reporter" for Income Securities Advisor, an investment info service, found a 6-year-old article about United filing for bankruptcy when using Google to search for news about distressed companies. The old story somehow appeared on the Florida Sun-Sentinel, and the reporter - for reasons known only to himself and God - decided to run the story without contacting UAL or otherwise verifying the story.

Within 10 minutes, UAL's stock had fallen from $12.45/share to $3/share before trading was halted. When Richard Lehmann, CEO of ISA, was asked about his responsibility in this matter:

Lehmann said his employee was not negligent in picking up the  Sun-Sentinel story because it had no date on it and appeared current beside new content tracking Hurricane Ike in the Southeastern U.S.

Hellooooo? BECAUSE there wasn't a date on it, we assume that it must be current? We don't double-check anything?

And a few weeks ago, I read a long self-flagellation by the editor of the Rocky Mountain News. Apparently, a profile of Barack Obama on their web site included un-verified information from either  biography.com, Internet Movie Database, or the Atlanta Journal Constitution. (And, worse yet, they chose to remove the incorrect information from their web site the next day without adding a correction.) Another candidate for training wheels on his web browser.

Let's hear it for mandatory information literacy courses in every school!

Update: MarketWatch has a good summary of the issues involved here, and manages to spread the blame around. What I found most interesting was Google's call to the MSM to do better jobs at self-documenting articles (my paraphrase); right now, a newspaper article can easily be scraped without capturing details like the publication date.  Note to every value-added online service: in essence, Google is suggesting that publishers include controlled fields (date, publication, corrections, etc.) to each article. What an interesting acknowledgement that all the indexing that aggregators provide really makes a difference.

Google's new browser

Google just announced that they are rolling out a new browser Sept. 2. You can see a comic book about Google Chrome here with nerd-speak:

["What if we have multiple processes? Each having its own memory and its own copy of the global data structures." I'm telling ya, this is good stuff.]

Google Chrome is still in beta, of course, so what it's missing now may be available later. And I'm hoping that their FAQ is not in graphic novel format...