Some Quickies for Sep 5 2006

Still bogged down in beginning of semester problems but I’m hopeful to get some posts up soon.

• Jon Udell has a screen cast showing Amazon EC2 in use. I've read about some of the research labs and other people who are putting EC2 to use and I think there is a lot of potential. You no longer need to invest in a lot of hardware for periodic intensive programs. As I see more libraries moving to heavier indexing and text analysis, I can see EC2 coming in handy and keeping things cheap. Someone can experiment with cluster level operations without the large investment. This is something to watch.
• Yahoo is finally doing some integration with their purchases. Flickr now has Yahoo Map integration and Upcoming.org has added quite a few things including flickr photo integration.
• There's an article at UX Matters about data tables that goes over common practices regarding filter placement and sorting options. Worth a read.
• via darcusblog there's an update to the Firefox Scholar extension which is now called Zotero. From the site it looks like it definitely has some potential.
• The third episode of Library Geeks is out. This one focuses on LibraryThing which I've been playing with somewhat lately.
• It's apparently already the 10th year anniversary of Homestar Runner. Hard to believe.
• via Dave's Educational Blog, the "Open Source in Higher Ed - The Courant Report (pdf)" has been made available. Haven't had time to read but plan on doing so.
• via DeWitt Clinton it seems OpenSearch community has a new home at opensearch.org which includes the spec, a mailing list and more.
• And finally the ACRLog points out that it shouldn't be assumed that students will trust librarians just because they're librarians. Also check out the comments.