Wikipedia Blackout - Protest against SOPA & PIPA Laws

Wikipedia, the popular collaborative free encyclopedia and other popular social media websites are  protesting against the Stop Internet Privacy  Act SOPA and Protect Internet Privacy Act PIPA  Laws by blacking out access to their websites for 24 hours, beginning at midnight January 18, Eastern Time. For example, readers who visit Wikipedia during the blackout will not be able to read the encyclopedia. Instead, they will be able to read  messages intended to raise awareness about SOPA and PIPA, thus encouraging readers to share their views with their political representatives, and hold open discussions with others on the role of social media.

Wikipedia provides information on SOPA and PIPA:
SOPA and PIPA represent two bills in the United States House of Representatives and the United States Senate respectively. SOPA is short for the "Stop Online Piracy Act," and PIPA is an acronym for the "Protect IP Act." ("IP" stands for "intellectual property.") In short, these bills are efforts to stop copyright infringement committed by foreign web sites, but, in our opinion, they do so in a way that actually infringes free expression while harming the Internet. Detailed information about these bills can be found in the Stop Online Piracy Act and PROTECT IP Act articles on Wikipedia, which are available during the blackout. GovTrack lets you follow both bills through the legislative process: SOPA on this page, and PIPA on this one. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to advocating for the public interest in the digital realm, has summarized why these bills are simply unacceptable in a world that values an open, secure, and free Internet.

Wikipedia also explains its role in the blackout:
Wikipedians have chosen to black out the English Wikipedia for the first time ever, because we are concerned that SOPA and PIPA will severely inhibit people's access to online information. This is not a problem that will solely affect people in the United States: it will affect everyone around the world.

Why? SOPA and PIPA are badly drafted legislation that won't be effective at their stated goal (to stop copyright infringement), and will cause serious damage to the free and open Internet. They put the burden on website owners to police user-contributed material and call for the unnecessary blocking of entire sites. Small sites won't have sufficient resources to defend themselves. Big media companies may seek to cut off funding sources for their foreign competitors, even if copyright isn't being infringed. Foreign sites will be blacklisted, which means they won't show up in major search engines. And, SOPA and PIPA build a framework for future restrictions and suppression.

OCLC 2010/2011 Annual Report

OCLC recently published its annual 2011 report to its membership. In the report, Jay Jordan, OCLC President and Chief Executive Officer commented that the economic downturn notwithstanding, libraries maintained their strong use of OCLC systems and services in fiscal 2011.

Here are some highlights of the report:

Members of the OCLC cooperative used OCLC to:

• catalog 449.9 million items online and via batchload

• add 38.9 million records to the WorldCat database

• arrange 9.6 million interlibrary loans

• perform 58 million end-user reference searches on the OCLC FirstSearch service

• perform 160.7 million click-throughs from partner sites on the Web to the WorldCat.org landing page

• add 12.4 million records to WorldCat for digital objects via the WorldCat Digital Collection Gateway.

Jordan also noted that the cooperative’s strategic initiative to build new Webscale management services with libraries continued to grow. Thirty-seven libraries acquired these services in fiscal 2011, and 24 of them went live.

Link to the report

Wize.com - great site for product comparisons and reviews

If you are thinking about purchasing a product (printer, camera, television, tablet) and need to check available brands on the market or look at reviews Wize.com is the resource where this information is readily available. This free website collects millions of product reviews and brings them all into one place. This not only saves you time, but gives you rankings and personal reviews to help you make a purchasing decision.

This Wize.com does by harvesting feedback from all over the web and assigning a score to each product between 1 and 100 that is based on user reviews and rankings from independent sources. The advantage of this approach is that Wize is not selling the products so this information is somewhat unbiased.

For example, if searching for digital scanners, type in the word "scanner" in the search box, or go to the category lists (electronics, home and garden, health & beauty, computers & office, video games) to find your product of choice. Once the search has been conducted, on the the Wize review page searchers can view a  ranking score, with the top-ranked scanners first, and the number of recommendations and reviews  displayed prominently. Users are also allowed to sort by other filters (most recommended, newest, lowest price, highest price).

How mainstream media outlets use Twitter

Journalism.org  recently published a report on how mainstream media outlets use Twitter Among the findings of this new study: ·         The news outlets studied varied widely in the number of Twitter feeds or channels offered and in how frequently they posted. On average, the news organizations offered 41 different feeds. The Washington Post, at the top of the list, offered 98, more than twice the average. The Daily Caller, on the other hand, offered a single Twitter feed. The level of activity also ranged widely. While as a group the outlets in the sample averaged 33 tweets a day on their main organizational Twitter feed, that number ranged from close to 100 a day to fewer than 10. ·         These news organizations were much more similar in the focus of their Twitter activity. The vast majority of the postings promoted the organizations’ own work and sent users back to their websites. On the main news feeds, fully 93 percent of the postings over the course of the week offered a link to a news story on the organization’s own website. ·         News organizations rarely used Twitter as a reporting tool or to curate or recommend information that originated elsewhere. Just 2 percent of the tweets from the main news feed analyzed were information-gathering in nature—seeking views or first-hand accounts from readers. And only 1 percent of tweets studied were “retweets” that were reposted from a Twitter feed outside of the organization. View the report »

New trend in reading: the immersive experience: built-in video, audio and other interactive features

 Rather than writing another thriller, best-selling author, Jeff Buick decided to give readers an experience. Readers of One Child will be immersed in the story, learning more about characters, their interests, their connection and even their work places.

As the story unfolds, readers of One Child discover rich media content including audio, video and interactive social media allowing readers to interact and experience the book's characters in greater depth:

• Social media profiles (Facebook, Linkedin, Youtube etc.) have been created for many of the characters as well as websites for the corporations in the book. If you send a character a message (by e-mail, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter) they will respond directly to your message.
• At the end of each chapter, readers are encouraged to discuss the happenings in the book online. A meeting place on Facebook has been created where readers can discuss their findings and chat about where they see the story going.
• To set the tone, each new day in the story is greeted with a radio broadcast from WKIO News 510 AM, an fictitious online radio station, based in "New York".
• Topping off the reader's experience are 4 segments of the book that have been dramatized by professional actors and filmed on a set resembling Afghanistan. You can view these video segments as you read the story on your computer or iPad.

Publisher's blurb: http://onechildonline.com/the-immersive-experience

Pew Research Center to study role of public libraries in the digital age

On October 17, the Pew Research Center announced plans to study how the role of public libraries is changing in the digital age and how library patrons’ needs and expectations are shifting. The new research is funded by Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation with a 3-year, $1.4 million investment and will be conducted by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project.

Through national surveys, a series of focus groups in a diverse mix of communities, and special surveys of library patrons, the Pew Internet Project will examine how library users’ habits and tastes are changing in the age of e-books, widespread mobile connectivity and the existence of vast digital collections.

The new research will be launched as the Pew Research Center, a nonpartisan fact tank based in Washington, DC, expands its research on the issues, attitudes and trends shaping America and the world.