The Scout Portal Toolkit
This is a very interesting software release with some nifty features. In addition to the usual search request features, it allows user annotation, user rating and user agents. It also adds an intelligent metadata tool to assist submissions. More...

Del.icio.us
It's still a usability disaster (people need more than just headlines), but it has been getting a lot of press, and rightly so. The service is, as it asserts, "a social bookmarks manager. Using simple bookmarklets, you can add bookmarks to your list and categorize them." The software is "pre-pre-alpha" and changing almost daily. More...

4 Colleges Collaborate on Open-Source Courseware
You have five days to read this before the Chronicle lowers the silicon boom and charges you for access, so copy it now and send it to your friends(*). More...

You Got Google mail - Report
Because of spam, the future of emails and email newsletters is that there is none. Enter Google. Google forbids the use of AdWords in email newsletters (where it would be remarkably effective). Why? Suppose Google created an email service, made it spam free, and allowed it to support advertising. More...

How Dynamic Categories Work
People in the wider community are finally discovering dynamic categories, something I've been plugging for a couple of years now, and which you can view (as always) on my research page and on Edu_RSS Topics. What is a dynamic category? Think of it as a predefined search. More...

Best Practices and Case Studies: Be Very Afraid
I'm not sure I would recommend the fear expressed by the author, but it's easy to forget that reference to best prctices is a form of inductive inference, and therefore, subject to the same constraints as prediction or analogy. More...

The Next big Thing?
Worthy of note is the list of terms used to describe the emerging technology, a list, notes the author, consisting of more hype than description. Well, sure. Ubiquitous computing is not here yet and it will be a long time before the computer fades into the background. More...

Camera Phones Help Buyers Beware
The CueCat - a bar code scanner magazine readers would use to get more information from advertisements - was an unmitigated disaster. This next device may be a little more successful - it is an attachment to a cell phone that reads bar codes on products in stores and returns information about the product. More...

Pattern Recognition
"Google is disintermediating the library." This is one of the observations that led the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) to take a new look at the landscape and reassess its vision accordingly. More...