A trip down to Oxford awaits David and Iain at the end of May. They will be attending two meetings during the visit. The first is with representatives from Oxford University and the second may prove to be very exciting indeed.

It is with a company from Virginia named Visionary Technology in Library Solutions (VTLS) who are currently working with both Google and the University of Oxford libraries. VTLS are supplying the University of Oxford with software for the use of Fedora in a library context and in turn the Oxford library is being given a virtual makeover with the help of books digitised by Google. The partnership between Oxford and Google is of such considerable significance that Google now have offices based on the Oxford University campus.

The advent of World Book Day on March 1st of this year provided the perfect opportunity for VTLS, Oxford and Google to provide an example of the kind of work they have been carrying out. To celebrate the day the Bodleian Library displayed original letters as well as manuscripts and special illustrated editions of the classic children’s book ‘The Wind in the Willows’. However for those that couldn’t physically visit the manuscripts it was and is still possible to explore the classic story through Google Book Search where the first 1908 edition and other in-print versions have been digitised and are available to look at online.

This partnership also opens up significant possibilities for the work that the Spoken Word is involved in. Our user licence agreement with the BBC would mean that the manuscripts of work could be supplemented with rich audio and video resources. In the case of ‘The Wind in the Willows’ a user could read the manuscript and then watch or listen to various BBC adaptations ensuring that the following of the adventures of Mr Toad, Ratty and Mole become all the more vivid for future generations.

Photo Courtesy of: ConnieG

The concept behind Googalyzer is interesting, though it’s probably not for everyone. It’s basically an open-source, tabbed web browser with built-in note-taking, web-clipping, outlining and bibliographic tools. The idea is to consolidate these different aspects of web research into one application.

This way you can have multiple research projects with all the relevant information kept in one place, without getting data from different project intermingled (this reminds me of the thinking behind Panic’s recent Coda web design application). If you do a lot of research online, and are not already using something like DEVONthink, this might be worth a look.

Googalyzer 3.0 beta 1 has just recently been released and is a free download from Funkware.

Via The Unofficial Apple Weblog

Google recently announced My Maps, a new feature that makes it quick and easy to create your own custom Google Maps just by pointing and clicking. You can add place marks, draw lines and shapes, and embed text, photos and videos, all using a simple drag and drop interface. Your map automatically gets a permanent URL that you can share with your friends and family, or you can publish your map for inclusion in Google Maps search results.

I laughed at the Monster Sightings, but the The Googleplex photo tour is probably a better demo of what can be done.

More info at Google Blogoscoped

Following hot on the heels of their acquisition of the video sharing site YouTube, Google’s quest for world (wide web) domination continues. I noticed today for the first time that my Writely account at http://www.writely.com now redirects to http://docs.google.com - ‘Google Docs and Spreadsheets’, complete with lots of new features. Import and export features are very strong. So far using office type software online is working for me, although I still find myself opening Microsoft Word out of sheer force of habit

Google Literacy Project

Reuters reports that Google has launched a new website solely dedicated to literacy. The article reports that the project will allow teachers, organizations and those interested in literacy from around the world to access and share information pertaining to reading resources. According to the article, the service seeks to combine a rich set of resources to combat global illiteracy. It also uses Google’s mapping technology to help literacy organizations find each other, and provides links to reading resources. The article reports that the website was unveiled in Germany during the Frankfurt Book Fair; the United Nations and a literacy campaign organized by fair officials have also joined the project.

Full story at Reuters ‘Google launches literacy project to link resources‘

Via Rights.com news briefing

A friend just brought this to my attention:

Google Apps for Education.

I didn’t realise that google offered this service: “With Google Apps for Education, you can offer all of your students innovative email, instant messaging, and calendaring, all for free”

This is related to Google Apps for Your Domain which allows an organisation to offer services such as Gmail, Google Talk, Google Calender and Google Page Creator to its users.

Iain picked this up. Potentially significant appointment of Google CEO Eric Schmidt to the Apple Board…

On August 29, 2006, Apple Computer, Inc. (the “Company”) appointed Dr. Eric Schmidt to its Board of Directors (the “Board”). A copy of the press release issued by the Company on August 29, 2006, announcing Dr. Schmidt’s appointment to the Board, is attached hereto as Exhibit 99.1.

(Via Ben Metcalfe Blog.)

Another week, another exciting press release from Google. The latest announcement sees the launch of the Google News Archive search service. More from BBC News

…The web-based tool allows users to explore existing digitised newspaper articles spanning the last 200 years and more recent online content. People using the search are shown results from both free and subscription-based news outlets. Partners in the project include the websites of US newspaper the New York Times and the Guardian from the UK.

…The launch of the news archive search extends Google’s influence over how the world’s information is indexed, searched and accessed.

According to online research firm Nielsen/NetRatings, more than 380 million people used the search engine every month in 2005. The earliest known searchable story is, he said, from “somewhere in the mid-1700s” - considerably older than the current 30-day archive offered through Google News.

The service is accessed through the news archive website or the Google news page. It is also activated when it can provide relevant results to a user’s search on google.com.

Story via BBC News

It would be exciting to see if we can pass date queries from Padova to this archive, in the same way that we currently pass people queries to Google Scholar. I also propose again that we consider passing date queries to the BBC ‘On This Day‘  and ‘The Time When ‘ services to offer our users a range of supporting resources for their own timeline of interest.

Get your freely-downloadable versions of public domain books here. Some interesting titles available - and all in PDF files made from scans of the original volumes. Unfortunately, the PDFs appear not to include texual information - they seem to be only graphical representations - leaving the added value of full-text search for the Google Books site.

BoingBoing’s story on the development:

Google Books offers PDFs of public domain books:

Cory Doctorow:
Adam sez, “Google Books has just started offering downloads of their public domain books as PDF files. You can search for ‘free view’ books to find other ones. (disclaimer: I’m the engineer who did this, but I’m nothing to do with PR)” Link

(Via BoingBoing).

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Blogged this piece of Iain’s out of Writely - could not resist - which he has been trying out. Really interesting. Could we blog directly to “Extended” pages which might be more appropriate for the longer texts we write as collaborations?

Grateful to Iain for bringing this to our attention. does it move us towards our objective of “writing on and for the internet”? How do we identify authors? I wrote the para. which starts “That was one of the issues…” - but how would we know that?

Hi guys,
I’m very taken with Writely - upload of a variety of file types is easy, including HTML, Word and Open Office docs. Documents can also be saved in many different formats including XML and PDF. The autosave and revision comparison featues are good. Style and formatting features seem just as good as Word. You can organise your documents using tags. RSS feeds are available for documents, tags and users.

Is this something you think you would use? It’ll be interesting to see how Google incorporate Writely within their existing services.

That was one of the issues I raised with Iain this morning - how will they integrate this? Can anyone add to the list of collaboraters - I have just tried adding my Gmail identity… How do we see edits like this

I’ve created this document to test out the collaboration features - I’m not sure how this will work? Will I be able to edit/delete your comments? How are certain document areas protected?

Graeme I’d like to try posting directly to the new blog using Writely - could you run over the settings with me when you have a minute.

Thanks,
Iain