New Google Labs!

"Google Labs has two new projects:

Google Viewer lets you view the web pages of your search results, in a slideshow fashion.

Google Webquotes annotates results with quotes from other sites." [Google Weblog]

Both of these are pretty fun (I especially like the slideshow), as well as innovative. Imagine a slideshow as a way to browse through titles in a library catalog. Not searching, mind you, but browsing (bestseller lists, new mysteries about chefs, etc.).

Oh, and the 2002 Year-End Google Zeitgeist is out!

Even in its currently somewhat foggy state, little mind bombs are going off in my head over Jon Udell's Library Services Experiment.

"Jenny's comment about my library adventure got me thinking. In particular, I was curious about the Innovative system used both by her library and mine. For North America, I found 538 unique instances of the service....

The general idea, which I may or may not pursue further, is to create some kind of microcontent companion in various contexts -- on the Amazon site, or at All Consuming, or in any other Web context where ISBNs are available -- so you can know what's available in your local library.

For now, here's a simple looker-upper."

Another "too damn cool" moment! More later as I wrap my mind around it....

"RSS feeds for online library technology journals:

Ed Summers has recently created RSS feeds for D-Lib and Ariadne. The RSS feeds are available at:
http://www.inkdroid.org/rss/ariadne.xml
http://www.inkdroid.org/rss/dlib.xml (Thanks, Ed!)" [Chi Lib Rocks!]

And check out this very cool script that Devon Smith created to display various RSS feeds on a web page. To view the contents of a feed, click on its name. On the client side, it does require Javascript, while on the server side it requires XML::RSS, CGI and LWP::Simple. Devon even provides a link to download the source code.

This is a very basic version of the aggregation of Library System headlines I want to implement in our forthcoming grant software. You can see something a bit closer to what I want at ReadingEd.com. To view it in action, click on any link in the right-hand column that has an exclamation point after the name. [first spotted by Phil Ringnalda, via Too Much News]