"I noticed that Yahoo is now including an RSS 2.0 feed with every Yahoo Group.  Nice.  It even includes an orange XML icon." [John Robb's Weblog]

I note this functionality in my presentations and classes on RSS, but I didn't realize Yahoo was actually providing the little icon on each page now (at least for publicly-accessible archives).

Route Finder Software Uses Power of Latest Phones

"Privately-held Dutch firm Route66, one of Europe's biggest sellers of CD-ROM-based car navigation kits for use on personal computers, said it would sell road maps of an entire country and the necessary navigation software on a tiny memory card that can be inserted into the latest advanced phones, reports Reuters....

As part of the 399-euro package, which includes a satellite positioning module, users can opt to receive free traffic information, which the route finder can use to avoid busy areas. " [textually.org]

I'm guessing that the license on these things would exclude libraries from circulating them, let alone the Digital Rights Managment (otherwise known as "no digital rights for you!").

"Glenn Fleishman raves about the new Seattle library (and has pictures)." [Scobleizer]

115 photos, to be exact, and they're annotated. My inner geek loves this one, while this one surprised me but made me smile.

The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci

"I want to read the Notebooks, but there are 1,565 pages and I have too much else to read.

At a page a day it would take a little over four years, but be manageable.

Fortunately Project Gutenberg (who make freely available online out-of-copyright books) has created a text version of the Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci. You can download it. It lacks the illustrations of the original, but it's Good Enough.

Using this site, I can read one page a day using my RSS News Reader. Find an RSS News Reader. I started at page 1 on May 30th, 2004. I'm now on page 3. You can either read along with me, or start reading at page 1 today.

Subscribe to one of the following two feeds (copy and paste the URL into your Reader):

�¨ Start reading today (starts at page 1): http://interconnected.org/home/more/davinci/2004-06-01.rss
�¨ Read with me (starts at page 3): http://interconnected.org/home/more/davinci/2004-05-30.rss" [Interconnected, via del.icio.us/tag/rss]

I am thoroughly intrigued by this, and my first thought is how similar this is to what the Chapter-A-Day folks do. Of course, publishers could also offer this service directly to readers, but wouldn't it be great if libraries did? Or if we start providing RSS feeds of new materials from our catalogs, what if we could also provide the first paragraph of each book in the feed?

Wikipedia Reinvents

"Wikipedia has reinvented itself. It now supports discussions about any article, and provices an easy way for users to look at previous article versions. Maybe it could do this before -- but my memory and the Google cache lead me to think not. To the jaded eye, this looks like just a software upgrade. But the implications are greater than that. Wikipedia is the great white hope for free (as in freedom) information on the web, and this ups the ante. My big questions: Can they handle the load? And how long before anyone notices?" [MetaFilter]

While I understand the legal obstacles to libraries supporting open discussion forums, it still saddens me to see how we don't allow communities to build up around our own web sites and resources. Imagine how cool it could be for a library to use a wiki for a local history project, book reviews, book discussions, patron-based bibliographies, and even additions to our directories of web resources.

I know library administrators everywhere are cringing at the very thought, but with the recent trend of consumers becoming publishers (journalism, politics, blogs, wikis, etc.), I think it's sad that we don't even think of our own patrons as publishers.

Addendum: If you're not familiar with wikis, BusinessWeek has picked up on them and explains the idea. [via John Robb's Weblog]

Show RSS Feeds Inside PowerPoint

"PowerPoint presentations can now easily integrate RSS feeds and news headlines. The Take-off RSS news reader from DataPoint gathers RSS news and sends them directly into a Mircosoft Access database. From there they can be easily pulled inside one or more presentation slides. Find out more or download your free trial now."  [Lockergnome's RSS & Atom Tips]