EveryBlock is a new website that aims to collate localized information for major cities and urban areas. The site, which now includes information on New York, San Francisco, and Chicago brings together publicly available mapped information, such as Flickr photo feeds and restaurant inspections, with local news and other information from providers such as CraigsList entries.

Mapping is a larger trend on the Internet, with services such as GoogleMaps proving to be popular among users. EveryBlock, as it expands listings for other cities, could prove to be a useful resources for visualizing a wide range of information about cities for discussions and class activities.

http://www.everyblock.com/

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BiomedExperts.com, a social-networking Web site for health-care and life-science experts, was unveiled on January 11, 2008 at the American Library Association’s midwinter meeting, in Philadelphia. The site includes profiles of more than 1.4 million biomedical experts in 120 countries. Researchers can gain access to the site for free and search for colleagues based on their areas of expertise, where they live, or other variables. The site also allows scientists to share data and analyses, and view summaries of their colleagues’ research papers.

Article at the Chronicle of Higher Education

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The Chronicle of Higher Education (CHE) reports on a new study released by the Pew Internet and American Life Project that documents Web surfing habits. Not surprisingly, video sharing sites like YouTube are seeing a strong increase in viewership, and a Pew survey found last spring that more of these folks are looking at educational content when they visit these sites. Many institutions are taking advantage of this to make content available that’s been created by and about their faculty, staff and students. Duke has done this as well - visit the Duke University News channel on YouTube to see a variety of videos about faculty research, library activities, and other information about our campus.

See also:
Thanks to YouTube, Professors are Finding New Audiences (CHE)

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Google recently started an invitation-only beta test of a new service called “Knol”.

Pages at Knol are similar to Wikipedia entries, with expert authors writing articles on a variety of topics.  A columnist at ArsTechnica notes that despite being one of the top sites on the web, Wikipedia is the one space where Google can’t make money through ad placement - he speculates that Google’s motivation is to create a “Wikipedia-killer”.

Regardless of the motivation, Google’s approach is to highlight the authors of the articles.  They want to encourage individuals that are experts on a topic to write articles and let users examine information about the author to determine how trustworthy the information might be.  (Wikipedia, of course, works on a “crowdsourcing” model where multiple authors - sometimes anonymously - create and edit entries.)

Currently, Google doesn’t have Knol open to the public, but has posted a blog entry and sample screenshot.

blog entry at Google

sample screenshot at Google

A range of thoughts about Knols and the future of Wikipedia can be found on various blogs:

listing of posts at Buzzfeed

An article about Google’s Knol effort has also appeared at Wikipedia.

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The Chronicle of Higher Education (CHE) reports on a new search engine from MIT’s Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory that makes it possible to look for particular terms or phrases within a recorded lecture.

According to the brief news item, users can search for terms like “white dwarf” in a lecture on astronomy, rather than browsing the recording the old-fashioned way. Want to learn more? Go to the Lecture Browser home page and search for the desired term in one of more than twenty different disciplinary categories. The search engine will return a list of MIT lectures in that field which contain the term, with links to cue up the recording at the point(s) in each lecture where the term is found.

At present, this tool is available only at MIT, but the CHE report indicates it may be made available to other universities at some point in the future.

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Two professors are leading a project to produce and freely distribute 1,000 original open content electronic textbooks that will be freely available from a Web site. The goal is to make textbooks more available to those who are disadvantaged and cannot afford conventional textbooks.

Richard T. Watson, interim head of the department of management information systems at the University of Georgia, and Donald J. McCubbrey, a professor of information technology and electronic commerce at the University of Denver, have started what they call the Global Text Project. Professors and experienced professionals (including graduate students, in some cases) from around the world each write, pro bono, at least one chapter of a book. Each chapter is reviewed by a scholar. Editors then assemble the chapters into complete books. The books are written using wiki software which allows writers to frequently edit and update the material. Scholars and professors have the final word in the content, to avoid the criticism sometimes leveled at wikis, namely that the communal editing process can introduce errors or result in unsubstantiated information. The project leaders also plan to work with traditional publishers and relevant authorities to facilitate dissemination by other means when bandwidth is unavailable or inadequate.

The Global Text Project intends to publish books in Arabic, Chinese, English, and Spanish. The project leaders estimate that they will need 20,000 volunteers to write all the materials they have planned.

The Chronicle of Higher Education’s article about the project is here.

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The Social Science Research Network has announced the creation of the Humanities Research Network (HRN). Humanities Research Network is intended to be a world-wide, comprehensive online resource for research in humanities, providing scholars with access to current work in their field and facilitating research and scholarship.

HRN will begin with the following networks:

HRN CLASSIC RESEARCH NETWORK (Director: Lesley Dean-Jones, University of Texas at Austin)

HRN ENGLISH & AMERICAN LITERATURE RESEARCH NETWORK (Director: Susan Heinzelman, University of Texas at Austin)

HRN PHILOSOPHY RESEARCH NETWORK (Directors: Lawrence Becker, Hollins University and Brie Gertler, University of Virginia)

A list of the eJournals abstracted by each of these networks is at: http://www.ssrn.com/update/crn/crnann/annA001.html

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