Monday, May 26, 2008

Faviki: Step Closer to Controlled Vocabulary?

This social bookmarking tool has structured tagging. Seems like a move towards what cataloging librarians have been doing for years: creating subject headings.

Description from their homepage:

"Faviki is a social bookmarking tool which allows you to tag webpages you want to remember with Wikipedia terms. This means that everybody uses the same names for tags from the world's largest collection of knowledge.

Thanks to DBpedia, which extracts structured information from Wikipedia and represents it in a flexible data model, these tags are reference to objects which are categorized automatically, keeping your and your friend's bookmarks and interests well organized."

Wednesday, February 27, 2008

New Research Says "Google Generation" a Myth

A new report, commissioned by JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee) and the British Library, counters the common assumption that the ‘Google Generation’ – young people born or brought up in the Internet age – is the most adept at using the web. The report by the CIBER research team at University College London claims that, although young people demonstrate an ease and familiarity with computers, they rely on the most basic search tools and do not possess the critical and analytical skills to asses the information that they find on the web. The report ‘Information Behaviour of the Researcher of the Future’ also shows that research-behaviour traits that are commonly associated with younger users – impatience in search and navigation, and zero tolerance for any delay in satisfying their information needs – are now the norm for all age-groups, from younger pupils and undergraduates through to professors.

Wednesday, January 23, 2008

PBS FrontLine: Growing Up Online

This program investigates the private worlds that kids are creating online and the risks, realities, and misconceptions of teenage self-expression on the Web. Watch the entire program online.

You Tube Video on Boolean Operators