Publishers' Widgets

It seems Random House, world's largest publisher of trade books, and  Harper Collins, want more control over the presentation and searching of their products than they are getting from the Search giants Google, Yahoo and Windows Live.  Therefore, they are presenting their own publisher's widgets: snippits of code that can be embedded in web pages, blog posts and other web-based marketing tools to search and present limited content from selected books, allowing, of course, the option to buy the book. 

Click here to learn how to use the Random House "Browse and Search" feature, called "Insight," which was officially launched last Tuesday.  

Earlier in the week, Harper Collins announced their own widget, called "Browse Inside."  Click here for a description of Harper Collins' "Browse Inside."  The Harper Collins "Browse Inside" catalog is much smaller than the Random House "Insight" catalog, and it is a weaker product because it does not allow keyword searching on the text of the book.  It's viewer is also less friendly, in our opinion.

Newspaper-readers, a la Microsoft

Also from Microsoft, in concert with Associated Newspapers, Inc., Forbes.com, and Hearst Corp. Microsoft has announced free reader software that can be used to read those periodicals with their original look and feel. 

The software is built on the Windows Presentation Foundation, Microsoft's new advanced graphics technology.  The three periodicals join the New York Times, whose truly excellent ereader we have been using for some time.  Tech types are asking, why should I install a separate application to read each journal.  They underestimate reader loyalty, though, to the look and feel of the originals.  (Click here for the Microsoft press release.)

Blackboard Scholar

Also new this week, Blackboard on Wednesday announced the launch of Scholar, a social bookmarking service designed to connect faculty and students.  Since November (see our episode 40 - Training Opportunities) Blackboard has been working on Scholar, their first "Blackboard Beyond" service.  "Scholar allows members of the Blackboard community to save and classify bookmarks and searches, share resources with faculty, students and administrators from other institutions, automatically update courses with dynamic content feeds, and enable student contributions to course collections" (Blackboard press release).  It seems to be modeled on Technorati and/or del.icio.us.  Scholar can be accessed publicly at http://www.scholar.com.  We expect to be installing the Scholar building block in our Blackboard soon, and once we do, it will be optionally available within our online learning environment.

Darwin Day

February 12 is Charles Darwin's 198th birthday (and Abraham Lincoln's birthday, incidentally, both men being born on the same day).  The day has become known world wide as Darwin Day, and celebrations of science and humanity are occurring around the globe to commemorate it.  The complete works of Darwin are online from Cambridge University (see our review in episode 38).

Daylight Savings Time

While there is plenty of time to prepare, daylight savings time will be early this year, three weeks earlier than last year, in fact, and it will be extended one week later.  It will begin on March 11, 2007 and end November 4, 2007.  How will your calendaring applications and operating system take all this?  Microsoft has prepared a thorough summary: "Preparing for daylight saving time changes in 2007."  Many Microsoft products are affected.  Some patches have been released, some will be continuing through March.  As long as you have automatic updates turned on, you should not have to worry.  If not, you may want to dig in to the dirty details of the Microsoft summary web site.  Mac users should consult the Apple support site, and search on "daylight savings time 2007" to find instructions for your OS and platform version.