Librarian Way

There is a lot of great stuff over on the MassonBisson.com Web site. I am putting this link here so that I don’t forget about it. He has provided a number of links to papers and tutorials for Using XML in PHP5, which I may need in my current project.

I am currently enrolled in two classes in SJSU SLIS. One is a special projects class where I am doing back-end PHP coding for the redesign of the SLIS Web site. Having studied XML/XSLT, I am going to investigate if the PHP/XML option will be better for something that I need to do, rather than getting involved in setting up a MySQL database for something very lightweight.

I went to Casey Bisson’s blog because I am writing a paper about Web 2.0, and I wanted to clarify something I remember him writing about creating a search in Lamson Library using A9.com. I found what I was looking for in his NEASIS&T presentation posted on one of his blogs at NEASIS&T Buy, Hack or Build Followup.

Knowledge@Wharton has a couple of articles this past week that I find interesting: What’s the Next Big Thing on the Web? It May Be a Small, Simple Thing — Microformats and Podcasting: Can This New Medium Make Money?

The Next Big Thing article is part of a special section titled “Supernova 2005: It’s a Whole New, Connected World.” Wharton, of course, approaches topics from how it relates to business, which is not always relevant to a library. This article interviews Tantek Çelik, senior technologist at Technorati, about microformats. It is about making it easier to share and it is about social networking. The emphasis is on people, rather than the technology, but it is technology that makes it easier to network on the Web. As an example, Çelik says,

For the microformats for people and events, we said, “Let’s look at vCard and iCalendar. And let’s create a one-to-one correspondence in XHTML.”

We’re literally reusing vCard and iCalendar for two of the microformats. Now when all these event and venue sites publish their event information, people have already built open source software, plug-ins, that let you subscribe to that data that’s in [the] hCalendar [microformat], automatically converts it to iCalendar, and loads it into your calendaring program.

I am sure this will be important to the techies in the library world.

The Podcasting article gives a non-technical explanation of podcasting and discusses the business side of podcasting and whether it is a viable business venture.

The market for podcasts is growing quickly. A survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that more than six million people out of the 22 million who own iPods or MP3 players have listened to a podcast.

There appears to be a general agreement with comments made by Kendall Whitehouse, senior director of information technology at Wharton, who suggests that podcasting is useful and viable in niche markets:

podcasting in many ways is the audio version of weblogs, or blogs — online diaries that allow any amateur to report stories and give his or her opinion to a wide audience. …Add it up and broadcasting is quickly turning into “narrowcasting,” or producing audio and video to reach niches, such as 5,000 surfers in southern California.

Further Research
What are microformats Microformat.org
Museum of Broadcast Communications on Narrowcasting

Google Suggest, a beta-version Google front-end for searching , is useful for people looking for information that has popular interest. It may also be useful for finding combinations of search terms that may have worked for others in the past. Google intends for it to help with refining a search.

In Google’s Suggest FAQ, they explain that this is a bit like Google “Did you mean?” and also like Google Zeitgeist. Google Zeitgeist shows search patterns; there is an archive of past search patterns. As you type in Google Suggest, a drop-down menu of ten items gives suggestions; as you type additional letters, the menu changes. I was looking for Ajax to refresh my mind on this programming technique and to see if there is anything new. Though I found enough to satisfy me on the first results page, there was a mixture of pages that were not relevant to my search. Searching and Google Suggest are best when used with multiple, refining search terms. I had to type “ajax pr” before “ajax programming” with 36,500 results came up in the drop-down menu. When I released the mouse on the search string, I got a results page that said there were about 534,000 results, so I don’t know where that 36,500 came from. Does that figure come from some database built in the past, and can I conclude that interest in Ajax programming is growing?

Google Suggest is built using Ajax, which is a set of Web programming technologies. An article by Jesse James Garrett of Adaptive Path, Ajax: A new approach to Web programming, is still the best overview. He coined the word Ajax as a shortened form of Asynchronous JavaScript+CSS+DOM+XMLHttpRequest.

More recent articles on Ajax suggest that it is growing in interest. According to this June 28, 2005 article on Microsoft Watch, Microsoft Wants a Piece of the Ajax Action, Microsoft released “Atlas,” to simplify Ajax. Since my original posting Ajax a Web application, a Wikepedia Ajax entry has expanded and through that I discovered the Ajax matters Web site. Following links in an article, I found Mark Birbeck’s Internet Applications weblog and his article Xforms patterns: Incremental and Google Suggest, in which he explains and shows the code for doing a variation of a Google Suggest using Xforms.

A9.com and Flickr.com use Ajax architecture. There was even an Ajax Summit put together by O’Reilly Media and Adaptive Path, which was reported on May 11, 2005 in Silicon Valley Watcher. There is a paragraph in this article that I think clarifies AJAX:

AJAX applications do things like fetch data from the server without refreshing the screen, and use animation within a page to provide smooth transitions or reveal hidden fields. These tweaks to conventional web applications can create an experience that feels much remarkably faster and richer than a web page. One participant described the difference as being “like the difference between email and IM”.

It looks like most writers are settling on using all caps for AJAX, rather than first letter capitalized.

Since this is the day the new Harry Potter book comes out, take a look at Ajaxian.com posting on July 16, 2005, in which they post a link to Tom Riddle’s Magical Diary Comes to Life with Ajax. You need to click on the graphic link and on the diary, type a word or two into the right-hand page.

Google Suggest might be handy to librarians in the reference interview when they are hit with new terms from patrons.