"Standards of truth" Compares Google to Library of Alexandria

"This essay at the 'Disenchanted' website includes the following summary:

A robotic descendant of an ancient library's servants forces a new generation to learn some skills that they just don't teach in school, these days.

But that doesn't do the article justice. The author begins by comparing the Library of Alexandria's practice of stealing books from incoming vessels to Google's spiders caching webpages. Later, he or she talks about common fallacies reported in schools and other reputable sources, and shows that Google often has more and better material refuting these than supporting them.

I don't know if I'm doing the article justice either, but trust me. You want to read this." [LISNews.com]

Dan Gillmor provides an overview of PopTech, Day One. You can also follow along on the PopTech blog (updates tomorrow?). All of today's presentations sound like they were interesting and thought-provoking, so I recommend you click over and read his summary. Hopefully I can attend next year!

I'm especially thrilled to hear from Peter Rukavina, the man that appears to have brought wireless internet access to Access 2002. I'll blog as much as I can (assuming my home PC and home internet connection stay up), but you can also follow along from the official Access 2002 blog!

Automatic Harry Potter News Updated Every 30 Minutes

"Jeff Guillaume writes 'I just wanted to introduce everyone to HPANA, the Harry Potter Automatic News Aggregator. It collects HP news from sources around the world, summarizes them and also repackages everything in RSS format! It was an idea I had because I'm lazy and didn't like surfing to all the different HP news sites for my 'fix'. Now they come to me. And I figured I'd let them come to other people too. :) Check it out and let me know what you think!' " [LISNews.com]

So, could a library display this aggregation on its web site?

This is a great illustration of what I want to do with library news within Illinois. Imagine a similar site that aggregates grant news, legislative updates, best practices papers, etc. Then imagine a public library aggregating local news in this way for its community. Pretty powerful stuff.