Plunder!

Originally uploaded by derb.

A once in a lifetime opportunity came up for me – well-known academic publishers Routledge moved from central London yesterday and rather than pack up all their books they selected some and left the rest for hungry scholars to grab (charities didn’t want most of them for some reason). This was my haul. But they aren’t exactly free – given a bookshelf six shelves high I figure the space they take up in our flat would still be worth about 55 pounds given the cost of London real estate these days.

Still I’m not nearly as much of a book hoarder as some friends of mine – and with easy access to ‘one of the largest libraries in the world devoted to the economic and social sciences‘ I don’t really need to be.

Hmm… I seem to be turning into a book stack photoblogger – something of a dull niche! I promise if I put up more pictures they will be a little more interesting. Meanwhile take a look the few pictures I “have made public so far”:http://www.flickr.com/photos/derb/…

P.S. On the whole ‘buy vs sign out from library’ issue, I just came across a terrific little (free) tool described and linked to on the “43 folders”:http://merlin.blogs.com/43folders/2004/09/request_a_libra.html weblog. It lets you look up a book on Amazon then check to see if it is available at your local librar(ies) before buying. Mind you if your library has the book but with a different ISBN it won’t turn up. Definitely worth trying though – particularly if you prefer Amazon’s search to your library’s search.

For Canadians who want to be annoyed by what they read

Originally uploaded by derb.

A great store display I came across about a year ago in a major chain bookstore in Victoria BC.

Incidentally, Flickr (which I used to add this picture to my blog) now supports drag and drop uploading of files from Windows XP, 2000, ME and 98 as well as MacOS and someone has hacked together a Linux uploader for Gnome as well.

I now have qualified to have a free Flickr Pro account (only for three months though I discovered!) so I don’t need you to ask me for invites any more – just sign up on the site or find someone who already uses Flickr and ask them to invite you. More info on Flickr and why you might be interested is here.

I’ve been hoarding lots of search engine related postings waiting to put them up but my list of un-posted and rapidly ageing postings is getting out of hand. Here then without (much) comment are some links:

*Google gives free ads to non-profits* – See “Google Grants”:http://www.google.com/grants/. Charities must be based in the United States (at the moment). Thanks to Aaron Swartz’s Google Blog for the link

*A search engine for discussion forums* – Pandia alerted me to this new “Lycos search feature”:http://discussion.lycos.com/default.asp. It’s good to see some search innovation coming from outside the ‘big two’. Seems to me that other search engine companies may be able to carve out a role delivering specialised searches that the big boys don’t do (or don’t do as well).

*A new search engine specialising in business information* – “find.com”:http://find.com/matchpoint.aspx
Thanks to Tales from the Terminal Room

Directory of Open Access Journals (free, full text, quality controlled scientific and scholarly journals) now has a search facility for 319 of the 1219 supported journals. Thanks for the heads-up Pandia

*Interesting source of Google-related info* – Google Metrics Watch – it ‘daily queries Google for a set of terms. The number of pages returned is stored in a database. The idea behind this is that an increase or decrease in the number of web pages refering to a subject COULD INDICATE (or will probably be associated to) the popularity of this subject.’

*How to find pages linking to your own site* – Link search with Yahoo! and Google

*Google Groups (finally) supports mailing list creation* – Check out the new “Google Groups”:http://groups-beta.google.com/ Thanks to Google Weblog for the link

*Yahoo search to access “deep web”* (for a price – selected partners only) – Yahoo crawls deep into the Web – News – ZDNet

Cory says, ‘I don’t know where he [Dennis Hastert, GOP house speaker] gets his money from’.

I thought it would be easy to find out but I haven’t found a free site that provides an index of politician’s interests in the US the way “They Work for You”:http://www.theyworkforyou.com/ does here in the UK. “Open Secrets”:http://www.opensecrets.org/ seems to be down and “Fundrace 2004”:http://www.fundrace.org/ only deals with the presidential race. Anyone fancy spending some money with “Political Money Line”:http://www.tray.com/ to find out where Hastert does get his funding? Anyone know a good site that would let you find out for free?

P.S. This is sparked off by the “row”:http://joi.ito.com/archives/2004/09/01/soros_responds_to_drug_money_insinuation.html over Hastert’s seeming claim that George Soros could be receiving funds from ‘drug groups’.

Copernic has just made a free “desktop search tool for Windows”:http://www.copernic.com/en/products/desktop-search/index.html available that searches your files, email and the web. It has already been “reviewed favourably”:http://www.searchenginewatch.com/searchday/article.php/3401711. From the looks of it this is the best desktop search tool yet for many – especially at the price! If I ever get my email store back (see “this heartbreaking tale”:https://blog.org/archives/cat_personal.html#001218) I will be sticking with “X1”:http://www.x1.com because unlike Copernic’s product it indexes Eudora email (which I prefer).

Thanks to John Battelle for the link

See “earlier”:https://blog.org/archives/cat_search_engines.html#001202 for more coverage of hard disk indexing programs.

There are lots of photo sharing services around – (two years ago I did a “little comparison”:https://blog.org/archives/cat_useful_web_resources.html#000385 of several of them which offer photo printing as well) – but “Flickr”:http://www.flickr.com/ – which I started to try out yesterday – seems to be the Internet geek’s best choice (they’ve got Cory Doctorow, “renaissance geek”:http://www.craphound.com/bio.html advising them so it’s “turning up a lot on boingboing”:http://www.boingboing.net/cgi-bin/mt/mt-search.cgi?IncludeBlogs=1&search=flickr).

If after reading the description below, Flickr appeals to you and you want to try it out (basic membership is free), instead of visiting the site right away and signing up I would appreciate it if you could “email me”:http://davidbrake.org/contact.htm and I will invite you. There’s an offer available at the moment – if I successfully invite 5 new people to join Flickr I will receive a Flickr Pro Account (valid until September 15th, 2004). Yes I have therefore a small interest in selling you on the idea but I already have other photo library accounts so it’s not a huge deal for me one way or another. Anyway…

The Flickr feature that first caught my attention is that it has an automatic ‘post to your blog’ feature (which I used yesterday). It also lets you post photos to your Flickr site and/or weblog via email and directly from camera phones. What’s more intriguing though is that it has a number of creative ways of organizing photos. Most photo sites make you sort pictures into albums. This one lets you attach pictures to several different groups, tag them by keyword, lets you and your Flickr-using friends pool and organize your pictures in interesting ways etc etc.

Geekily enough it also supports RSS in different ways so people can automatically know you have added more pictures and they have built in chat and messageboard facilities so people with similar interests can share pictures (yes there are porn-related groups as you’d expect but also groups like “Bonsai lovers”:http://www.flickr.com/groups_view.gne?id=36521982934@N01). I’m a sucker for organizations like this one that just don’t seem to know when to stop adding new features on the off chance that someone will use them. “ICQ”:http://www.icq.com/ was a bit like that – it’s a pity the full version isn’t seeing much development any more. Anyway…

There’s a quick overview of Flickr’s features “here”:http://www.flickr.com/learn_more.gne and a longer “get the most out of Flickr”:http://www.flickr.com/get_the_most.gne guide but the best way to figure it out is to sign up and try out its features.

Signup is free. For the moment you can only sign up for their free account which lets you share either your most recent 100 photos or photos uploaded in the last 3 months (whichever comes first). It must be said this is not over-generous – “photo.net”:http://www.photo.net/ has a 100Mb quota, “Webshots”:http://daily.webshots.com/scripts/signup.fcgi lets you store 240 photos. Also at the moment the only software available for bulk uploading of photos is for Windows XP and MacOS X. Later they will have software available for more operating systems and premium accounts with more storage and capabilities (they are in beta testing at the moment).

P.S. I just discovered “Phil Gyford”:http://www.gyford.com/ has also recently “taken a shine to Flickr”:http://www.gyford.com/phil/writing/2004/08/25/seeing_the_light.php.

Following on from my brief mention of “blogs from US troops in Iraq”:https://blog.org/archives/cat_current_affairs_world.html#001217 I have discovered a collection of “pictures taken by troops in Iraq with picturephones”:http://www.yafro.com/frontline.php – you need to click on the ‘comments’ part or mouse over the photos to see the context they give them.

Incidentally (and probably not coincidentally) the blogger who was interviewed on NPR I mentioned earlier has now had to pull his weblog down.

Thanks to Torill Mortensen for the link

Ping-o-Matic! automatically notifies “Weblogs.com”:http://www.weblogs.com/, “Blo.gs”:http://blo.gs/, “Technorati”:http://www.technorati.com/ and ten more weblog update services when you’ve made a new post so people know to come and see it. Saves you having to put all of them into your ‘urls to ping’ box (assuming it works as advertised).

The Living Room Candidate is a fascinating site which archives campaign commercials from 1952 to the present including “‘independent’ ads”:http://livingroomcandidate.movingimage.us/desktop/shadow.php from interest groups like the “Swift Boat Veterans”:http://livingroomcandidate.movingimage.us/player/index.php?ad_id=1152 one which disgracefully tries to call Kerry’s war record into question. It even includes a “Desktop Candidate”:http://livingroomcandidate.movingimage.us/desktop/index.php section which links to various Internet-based ads.

P.S. To track the veracity of claims made in campaign ads on both sides of this year’s race, check out “Factcheck.org”:http://www.factcheck.org/ which has done a thorough analysis of that “controversial swift boat ad”:http://www.factcheck.org/article.aspx?docID=231.

I learned about “Biblioexpress”:http://www.biblioscape.com/biblioexpress.htm and “Scholar’s Aid 2000”:http://www.scholarsaid.com/aboutsafree.html from the “PhinisheD advice pages”:http://www.phinished.org/faqs/ which might be good bibliographic options if you can’t afford “Endnote”:http://endnote.com/ as both of them are free software. I’ve not tried them myself as the LSE has a site license to Endnote.