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Webliography: Social Networking Sites

Cliff Landis, a reference librarian at Valdosta State University, has organized an excellent compilation that not only lists social networking sites but also includes places to learn about social networking and keep updated with social net news.

Source: ACRL News

 

Search engines with wikis

Some of you may have seen the Msdewey.com search engine. But you may not have known that it is a test search engine launched by Microsoft to test users tolerance for a high resolution content.

Users submit comments about how they think the functionality works.

The Ms. Dewey website is an Adobe Flash-based experimental interface for Live Search. The interface features a modern-looking cityscape as a backdrop with the character on the left side, while the search results appear on the right. The cityscape backdrop changes depending on the time of day.

Ask X takes Searching a Step Further

 Ask X. It’s search engine from Ask.com which combines images, video and text in search results. It uncovers useful tidbits buried by other search engines.

Etsy

Etsy is an online marketplace for buying & selling all things handmade.

Social Networking Sites at Work

Using social networking sites like MySpace and LinkedIn at work leaves some corporate managers acting like Luddites. In order to truly embrace the 21st century and move forward, managers must resist the fear that social change may bring down established processes and consequently bring failure to an organization. Change can be good. Eric Sinrod’s article on CNet offers a fresh perspective.

Social-networking sites truly do provide robust features that provide a richer means of online communications. Rather than ban employees from using the medium, managers should think ahead how to turn it to their advantage. Careful thought should be given when considering the use of any networking features that could be detrimental to an enterprise. From there, policies can be crafted on a company-by-company basis to guide employees and gain their buy-in.

Read more.

Cloud Computing

Cloud computing is a computing paradigm shift where computing is moved away from personal computers or an individual server to a “cloud” of computers.

Google has big plans for cloud computing.

What will research clouds look like? Tony Hey, vice-president for external research at Microsoft, says they’ll function as huge virtual laboratories, with a new generation of librarians—some of them human—”curating” troves of data, opening them to researchers with the right credentials. Authorized users, he says, will build new tools, haul in data, and share it with far-flung colleagues. In these new labs, he predicts, “you may win the Nobel prize by analyzing data assembled by someone else.” Mark Dean, head of IBM’s research operation in Almaden, Calif., says that the mixture of business and science will lead, in a few short years, to networks of clouds that will tax our imagination. “Compared to this,” he says, “the Web is tiny. We’ll be laughing at how small the Web is.” And yet, if this “tiny” Web was big enough to spawn Google and its empire, there’s no telling what opportunities could open up in the giant clouds.

Read the article from Business Week.

Competitive Intelligence

Competitive Intelligence – A Selective Resource Guide – Updated and Revised

by Sabrina I. Pacifici
http://www.llrx.com/features/ciguide.htm

Historical Annual Reports

Reference from Coast to Coast: The Hunt for Historical Annual Reports

LLRX.com

http://www.llrx.com/columns/reference54.htm

So where do we go to find older company annual reports? The Library of Congress offers suggestions. University of Pennsylvania Libraries offers suggestions for finding older annual reports and their collection at the Lippincott Library includes a collection of historical annual reports. We won’t list all of the academic options for annual report collection, just highlight some that offer guidance. If you have a local university, by all means check their business collections first.

Technorati

The blog-search tool Technorati lets you subscribe to the results of keyword searches.

Here’s one for popcorn.