i202 Fall 2010 School of Information, UC Berkeley

Marc Hedlund, co-founder of Wesabe, recently wrote a blog post offering insight into why Wesabe failed and its competitor, Mint, succeeded. The two web applications, which launched within a year of each other, both aimed to help users manage their personal finances. While Wesabe enabled users to tag stores and transactions and took a more community-oriented approach, Mint automatically categorizes information as it is imported from various financial institutions.

"Finally, Professional Dictation Software for the Mac"

According to the article, Andrew Taylor worked on creating speech recognition software for the Mac for 10 years while his competitor, Dragon NaturallySpeaking, made their own version.  In February of 2010 Dragon, now Nuance, bought Andrew's company and gave his team access to all of the company's dictation-software expertise, marketing power and other resources.

NYT story on July 28^th, 2010, (http://gadgetwise.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/28/why-dont-more-cameras-offer-gps/) suggests that cameras with GPS functions have been in the market for a year or two. These cameras will provide either built-in or stand-alone add-on devices to capture the latitude and longitude of the location, and ‘geo-tag’ any photo with such information.

Books are important for I-Schoolers. Not just because the School of Information resides on the ground where the Library School once stood but also because libraries were the first to propose and partially solve the organization of information. Libraries are where it all started. The first information organization, the first information retrieval systems and the first document management systems. We discussed some of it in our classes, got our mind imploded with the "Library of Babel". We saw with amazement the old book catalog card Bob showed us in class.

Several weeks ago, the Oxford University Press conceded that because of the internet, there probably won't be a physical print version of the next edition of the Oxford English Dictionary: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/booknews/7970391/Oxford-English-Dictionary-will-not-be-printed-again.html

http://chronicle.com/article/Googles-Book-Search-A/48245/

I dug up this almost year old op-ed published in The Chronicle of higher education because it highlights some of the most challenging problems associated with metadata, classification and describing collections.

I came across the following article: "Ev Williams: Twitter Will Actually Help Information Overload" 

http://gigaom.com/2010/09/02/ev-williams-twitter-will-actually-help-information-overload/

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/09/google-health-update.html

Strategic Content Management - Jonathan Kahn

Harvard Law School professor Jonathan Zittrain and his team showcased Collage at the Berkman Center today. What's Collage? It's a tool that facilitates the creation of "an online casebook that's free, remixable and that can be used not just for a specific class, but for instructors" in law schools.