i202 Fall 2009 School of Information, UC Berkeley

You'd think, after finishing the final and the course, adding to the 202 blog would be the last thing on anyone's mind. But I saw this article and reflexively fired up the "Create Content" form, because this is essential 202, in my mind. It helped me realize why I've never been comfortable with music subscription services (I have a curated library that I don't want to get stuck behind a pay wall) and how musicians and industry would be better off if they could all agree to agree, for once.

Google has integrated a new search feature into Google Search which it calls Translated Search.

Foolishness reigns in the Old World.

Interesting post about how India’s days of vertical growth in outsourcing are coming to an end.  Why?  As Andrew McAfee noted in his talk “The Revolution Will Be Digitized” yesterday, IT systems are getting smarter and more powerful, allowing customers to interact directly with systems, and increasingly, systems interacting directly with other systems.

Every bleeping bean, indeed.

Icann, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, just decided to allow top-level domains to be written in Unicode rather than ASCII, which will for the first time enable a full URL to be constructed out of non-Latin characters, which should improve accessibility for users in Asia, the Middle East and Russia.  It will also open up a new trove of domains to register; some Icann officials claim there are so many .com Web addresses that it has become next to impossible to find an English word or an intelligible combination of two English words not already in use.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/11/business/11unboxed.html

Collecting information is not the same everywhere. This article by The Economist reveals different methods used to collect information for digital maps: from using sophisticated GPS systems in England, to note-taking in India and voluntary contributions in Nigeria. There is no single way to get data from every place, and different information is needed by different users in a variety of contexts. The following questions arise: How do we standarize all these different data-collections?

This Economist article describes the use of bar codes in conjunction with mobile phone cameras to provide users with real-time, context-sensitive information. An example of this is the traveller photographing a barcode at a railway station with his mobile phone to obtain train timetables. Despite of varying bar code standards, the author suggests their free, open standard nature will encourage wider adoption.&#1