Enterprise Abstraction

RSS in Plain English

Darren Barefoot posted about this nifty video RSS in Plain English by Common Craft. 

There are two types of Internet users, those that use RSS and those that don't. This video is for the people who could save time using RSS, but don't know where to start.
I love the explanation, as well as the format of the presentation.  Probably not news for most of you, but a useful link when you're trying to explain RSS to people.  The web's not about web pages anymore.

At my organization we'd always talked about producing new technologies at the pace of "web time".  Perhaps we should be striving to get our information out in "blog time" instead?  Visiting web pages one at a time seems so old fashioned and slow these days.  It's amazing how perceptions change.

Drano Act

I love it when politicians and well meaning but probably misguided persons try to apply laws to clean up the Interwebs.  So confusing.  So many pipes.  I suggest a modification to C-427:

1. This Act may be cited as the Internet Drano(TM) Act.

What is with this need to control the Internet?

eBook Loans

From CISTI's press release:

The National Research Council's Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (NRC-CISTI) and MyiLibrary, the market leading eBook aggregator, have partnered to launch an innovative new service called eBook Loans, an electronic twist on the traditional library-interlending model. With the click of a mouse, eBook Loans offer instant access to tens of thousands of electronic books from major scholarly publishers, including Elsevier, Taylor & Francis, Blackwell and Springer.

I'm proud to have been involved in the development of CISTI's eBook Loan service.  Basically, the CISTI catalogue now contains the data for the books that MyiLibrary offers within the scientific technical and medical fields.  We worked with the guys at MyiLibrary to enable a decent linkage between CISTI and MyiLibrary's collection, and to provide a simple means to register, pay for and receive your ebooks.  The procedure is to search the CISTI catalogue, and if you get a hit for a book can can be electronically loaned, you'll be directed to login/register and pay for your loan.  You're then given a link that's good for 30 days to access the loaned material.

To peruse the available eBooks, you can click here to activate a eBook loan specific search of CISTI's Catalogue.  Thousands of eBooks are available.

Why library patrons often goto Google

Sent to me by a colleague.  The video speaks for itself:  How to find a magazine at Penn State.  As simple as possible, but no simpler!  I think libraries can be a lot simpler.

I'm a big fan of OpenURL.  However more choices certainly (absolutely?) do not make things easier to find.   

Stats Canada IT Conference 2007

John told me about a conference that Statistics Canada is hosting - the IT Conference 2007.  According to the call for papers and programme, it's very much about enterprise architecture and service oriented architecture this year.  I'm sorry I hadn't been aware of it earlier... oh well.

Looks like a good program.  You can register here.

Greg the Architect

I just discovered Greg the Architect over on ZDNet's SOA blog.  See Video 1 and Video 2 over on YouTube.  Hilarious.  It's funny cause it's true.