Internet Crime Jumped by a Third Last Year

"Internet-based rip-offs jumped 33 percent last year over the previous year, according to a report from a complaint center set up to monitor such crimes. The total dollar loss from those crimes was $265 million. That's $26 million more than the price tag in 2007, the National Internet Crime Center said. For individual victims, the average amount lost was $931."

The Facebook Generation vs. the Fortune 500

"The experience of growing up online will profoundly shape the workplace expectations of 'Generation F' – the Facebook Generation. At a minimum, they’ll expect the social environment of work to reflect the social context of the Web, rather than as is currently the case, a mid-20th-century Weberian bureaucracy. If your company hopes to attract the most creative and energetic members of Gen F, it will need to understand these Internet-derived expectations, and then reinvent its management practices accordingly. Sure, it’s a buyer’s market for talent right now, but that won’t always be the case—and in the future, any company that lacks a vital core of Gen F employees will soon find itself stuck in the mud."

Hackers Enlist Search Engines for Phishing Attacks

"Hackers are increasingly attempting to influence search engines to misdirect users to spurious Web sites."

YouTube Creates New Section to Highlight College Content

It had been difficult to find college lectures on YouTube, since they are generally far less popular than the site’s humorous and outrageous clips, and so they do not show up in lists of the most viewed videos on the site. Although YouTube has long had an educational category, it relies on users who post videos to decide whether to categorize their videos as educational, and as a result the definition of education is very broad. The new YouTube EDU page includes only material submitted by colleges and universities.

Blackboard Releases iPhone Application

"Blackboard unveiled a free application for the iPhone today to let students check their grades and get updates about their courses at colleges that use the company’s course-management software."

Discovering American Women’s History Online

"This database provides access to digital collections of primary sources (photos, letters, diaries, artifacts, etc.) that document the history of women in the United States. These diverse collections range from Ancestral Pueblo pottery to Katrina Thomas’s photographs of ethnic weddings from the late 20th century."

Stateline.org: State Data Resources

"Stateline.org has put together a comprehensive list of state data available online. Organized by issue, you will find useful links to essential information from government, academia, and think tanks."

Meta Search for Video Content: OvGuide.com

"This database aggregates video content from YouTube, Hulu, Blinkx, and more than 3000 other sites." (Comments from Resourceshelf.com)

"With a unique interface, OVGuide.com categorizes and organizes more than 3,732 online destinations, offering both short- and long-form videos integrated into an editorialized directory and search engine. The site receives more than 35 million visitors, 150 million pageviews, and 36 million searches per month. A team of experienced editors review all content prior to publishing it to OVGuide.com, ensuring all sites are valuable and categorized appropriately." (From the site)

Top 5 Semantic Search Engines

"A semantics search engine attempts to make sense of search results based on context. It automatically identifies the concepts structuring the texts. For instance, if you search for 'election' a semantic search engine might retrieve documents containing the words 'vote', 'campaigning' and 'ballot', even if the word 'election' is not found in the source document.

An important part of this process is disambiguation, both of the queries and of the content on the web. What this means is that the search engine — through natural language processing — will know whether you are looking for a car or a big cat when you search for 'jaguar'."

Vadlo: Biomedical and Life Sciences Search Engine

"Vadlo is brought to you by two biology scientists who wish to make it easier to locate biology research related information on the web."

More Than 112,000 Newspaper Pages Added to Chronicling America

"The site now provides free and open access to 977,440 pages from 112 titles, that were published between 1880 and 1910 in 9 states (CA, FL, KY, MN, NE, NY, TX, UT, VA) and the District of Columbia. Six additional states–Arizona, Hawaii, Missouri, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Washington–will be contributing content later in 2009. Chronicling America is a project of the National Digital Newspaper Program, a partnership between the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Library of Congress."

A Collection of Social Network Stats for 2009

A Collection of Social Network Stats for 2009

Also, A Collection of Social Network Stats for 2008

Study: Technology Can Overwhelm Even 20-Somethings

"They are comfortable with gadgets, yet shudder sometimes as the cell phone rings. This group — primarily male and in their late 20s — is called the 'Ambivalent Networkers' in a study released Wednesday by the Pew Internet and American Life Project. Pew found this group notable because its members have lived with the Internet and other technologies for much of their lives."

Google Draws Upon Rival Ideas with Search Changes

"Google prides itself on setting trends, but it appears to be copying some of its smaller rivals with the latest refinements to the way it displays Internet search results. After months of testing, Google tweaked its technology Tuesday to occasionally display longer descriptions of websites in response to search requests consisting of several words. The expanded snippets will contain three or four lines from websites instead of the usual one or two lines. The switch is designed to give Google's audience a better sense of what information a website has even before users click on the link. It's something lesser known search engines already have been trying to do, either by posting longer descriptions or providing capsule snapshots of the Web pages that show up in their results."

Where 'Undo Send' and Other Gmail Ideas are Born

"Instead of hitting 'reply' to an e-mail, we accidentally push 'reply all,' sending a potentially embarrassing or insulting message to those we didn't intend to see it. To address this problem, Google Inc.'s Gmail Labs has launched an experimental feature called 'Undo Send' that gives users a chance to rewrite their message, correct settings or simply fix typos. . ."

Justice Department Favors Recording Industry's Position in Copyright Case

"The U.S. Department of Justice rejected over the weekend the argument that the recording industry’s litigation against alleged copyright infringers is unconstitutional. Charles R. Nesson, a professor at Harvard Law School defending Joel Tenenbaum, a student at Boston University being sued by Sony BMG Music Entertainment, had asked the Justice Department in February to prevent copyright holders from collecting statutory damages except from offenders seeking commercial gain."

Asian Youths Can't Live Without TV, Web: Poll

"Want to get across to Asia's youth? Do it through media or music, with a survey revealing that most spend on average 10 hours a day watching TV, on the Internet, reading magazines or listening to the radio."

Microsoft's IE8 Catches Most 'Social Malware'

"A study by NSS Labs of 6 major web browsers shows a large difference in their ability to block 'socially engineered malware.'"

New e-Book Pricing Comparison Site: Ebookprice.info

"ebookprice.info allows you to compare ebook prices"

What Today’s College Students Say about Conducting Research in the Digital Age

"A report of preliminary findings and analysis from student discussion groups held
on 7 U.S. campuses in Fall 2008, as part of Project Information Literacy. Qualitative data from
discussions with higher education students across the country suggest that conducting research is
particularly challenging. Students’ greatest challenges are related to their perceived inability to find
desired materials. Students seek “contexts” as part of the research process. A preliminary typology
of the research contexts is developed and introduced. Finding contexts for 'backgrounding'
topics and for figuring out how to traverse complex information landscapes may be the most difficultpart of the research process. Our findings also suggest that students create effective methodsfor conducting research by using traditional methods, such as libraries, and self-taught, creative workarounds, such as 'presearch' and Wikipedia, in different ways."

Microsoft releases Internet Explorer 8

"Microsoft is set to publicly launch Internet Explorer 8 early on Thursday, the latest version of its market-dominating Web browser. The application, an integral part of Microsoft's eagerly awaited Windows 7 operating system, can be downloaded from Microsoft's website from 9 a.m. Pacific time, free for people using licensed Microsoft operating systems."

Sony e-Book Reader Bets 500,000 Books From Google

"Google is making half a million books, unprotected by copyright, available for free on Sony's electronic book-reading device, the companies were set to announce Thursday.
It's the first time Google has made its vast trove of scanned public-domain books available to an e-book device, and vaults the Sony Reader past Amazon.com's Kindle as the device with the largest available library, at about 600,000 books."

Hadoop, a Free Software Program, Finds Uses Beyond Search

"In the span of just a couple of years, Hadoop, a free software program named after a toy elephant, has taken over some of the world’s biggest Web sites. It controls the top search engines and determines the ads displayed next to the results. It decides what people see on Yahoo's homepage and finds long-lost friends on Facebook. It has achieved this by making it easier and cheaper than ever to analyze and access the unprecedented volumes of data churned out by the Internet. By mapping information spread across thousands of cheap computers and by creating an easier means for writing analytical queries, engineers no longer have to solve a grand computer science challenge every time they want to dig into data. Instead, they simply ask a question."

Web Dictionary Plans to Outdo Print Cousins

"Harnessing the native capabilities of the Internet, Wordnik definitions include images scraped from Flickr, audio recordings of pronunciations, and ratings of definitions by other users. The project includes 4 billion words and offers sample sentences plucked at random from the web."

Website-Infecting SQL Injection Attacks Hit 450,000 a daD

"Cybercriminals are spreading invisible infections far and wide across the Internet by hammering hundreds of thousands of websites each day with so-called SQL injection attacks. The trend started last summer and has continued to accelerate. IBM Internet Security Systems says it identified 50% more infected Web pages in the last three months of 2008 than it did in all of 2007. Click on one and you won't notice anything. Your PC gets turned into an obedient 'bot,' short for robot, deployed to attack other computers. All of your sensitive data get stolen."

As Cities Go From Two Papers to One, Talk of Zero

"'In 2009 and 2010, all the two-newspaper markets will become one-newspaper markets, and you will start to see one-newspaper markets become no-newspaper markets,' said Mike Simonton, a senior director at Fitch Ratings, who analyzes the industry." New York Times article

Why US Broadband is So Slow

"In terms of broadband, the US seems to lag behind the international pack, with slower, more expensive, less available Internet. . . ."

Social Networks More Popular Than Email

"This probably won't come as a shock to anyone hanging out on Facebook, but social networks and blogs have moved ahead of personal e-mail among the most popular online activities, and are fourth most popular overall. That's according to a report released Monday from The Nielsen Company."

Book Industry Trends: College

"In 2007, higher-education publishers continued to grapple with price resistance to textbooks and competition from the used-book market. What is new is that they are finally making real progress in offering their wares in electronic format and moving to resolve the pricing dilemma, at least in part. While publishers know that critical mass with electronically delivered textbooks will not be attained in the near-term future, they moved closer to that goal last year. And all major publishers have made strides with their popular “born digital” supplemental and assessment programs, such as Pearson’s MyLab.com series and Wiley’s WileyPLUS."

Institutional Repositories: Thinking Beyond the Box

"In February 2008, the faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University made history, unanimously passing a revolutionary open access mandate that, for the first time, would require faculty to give the university copies of their research, along with a nonexclusive license to distribute them electronically. In the press, Harvard University librarian Robert Darnton proudly spoke of reshaping 'the landscape of learning' and fixing a damaged, overly expensive system of scholarly communication. And the very fulcrum of Harvard's vision is a library-administered institutional repository (IR). 'In place of a closed, privileged and costly system,' Darnton told the New York Times, Harvard's mandate—and its IR—would lead the way toward 'a digital commonwealth in which ideas will flow freely in all directions.'"

Academic Libraries Foster Key Skills in Next Generation

"Libraries are invaluable cornerstones of college and university life. They have become vibrant spaces where students can access digital information or pull classics from the shelves. In 2006, nearly 1 billion students used the library as a modern meeting place to exchange ideas or to take a study break at an in-house coffee bar. At the University of Washington, students can be found in the Learning Commons or in Suzzallo Espresso sipping lattes while deeply engaged in collaborative projects and, in response to its popularity, Seattle University's Lemieux Library is expanding and will soon have innovative learning spaces, a cafe and more spots for Internet access. Or, libraries can be a resource to tap from the convenience of a dorm room or faculty office via the Internet 24/7."

100 Useful Tips and Tools to Research the Deep Web

"Experts say that typical search engines like Yahoo! and Google only pick up about 1% of the information available on the Internet. The rest of that information is considered to be hidden in the deep web, also referred to as the invisible web. So how can you find all the rest of this information? This list offers 100 tips and tools to help you get the most out of your Internet searches."

Amazon's Kindle E-books Now on Apple iPhone, iPod

"iPhone and iPod Touch users can now read books on their devices using software from Amazon.com Inc's Kindle electronic reader, boosting shares of the online retailer 5 percent.
The news on Wednesday dispelled speculation that Amazon plans to compete more directly with smartphone providers by adding more functions to the Kindle, which represents a tiny fraction of the company's business."

YouTube Tops 100 Million U.S. Viewers

"Whether it’s the recession keeping people searching for cheap entertainment or just the gradual shift of consumer eyeballs to the Web, YouTube’s popularity continues to grow. The Google-owned site topped 100 million U.S. viewers for the first time in January, industry tracker comScore said on Wednesday. YouTube viewers in the U.S. dialed up more than 6 billion videos in the month. Overall, more than 147 million U.S. Internet users watched an average of 101 videos each in January. The average viewer watched around six hours, comScore said."

YouTube: The Reference Tool

". . .YouTube, conceived as a video hosting and sharing site, has become a bona fide search tool. Searches on it in the United States recently edged out those on Yahoo, which had long been the No. 2 search engine, behind Google. (Google, incidentally, owns YouTube.) In November, Americans conducted nearly 2.8 billion searches on YouTube, about 200 million more than on Yahoo, according to comScore."

2009 Christianity Today Book Awards

"Our judging process began with 436 titles submitted by 67 publishers. CT editors selected finalists in each category, and then our panels of expert judges — one panel per category — sorted out the cream of the crop from 2008. Here are the 10 winners and 11 notables that best shed light on the people, events, and ideas that shape evangelical life, thought, and mission, with comments from our judges."

‘Social Bookmarking’ Site for Higher Education Makes Debut

For the tech-savvy, social bookmarking is old hat: Log on to a Web site like Delicious.com, save a few links, and share them with a network of friends. It’s a tool that some students and faculty members have used in the classroom for years. Now a software developer hopes that a new social-bookmarking site, designed for higher education, will become an indispensable tool for academics. Critics, however, say limiting a networks’s membership in that way actually limits the power of bookmarking and defeats its purpose. Brainify.com, the brainchild of Murray Goldberg, creator of WebCT course-management software, was quietly started in beta form last week, after more than a year in development. Like other social-bookmarking sites, it lets users save, share, and rate bookmarks on the site’s network.

Colleges Get Poor Grades on Teaching Web Fundamentals

"Colleges do a poor job preparing students for careers designing Web sites or for related positions in Web development, often because they teach out-of-date curricula and fail to hire instructors with recent experience in the field, according to a survey of top Web designers and developers."

Free Forum Helps Grad Students Reach Out to Each Other

"Proquest has launched a free online community specifically for graduate students. GradShare provides a forum where graduate students can share challenges and advice and find solutions offered by their library or graduate school. Topics are expected to include dissertation subject selection, grants and financial aid, and work-life balance. ProQuest provides specialty information resources and technologies to support libraries and researchers. Offerings include RefWorks-COS, and CSA."

Google and Amazon to Put More Books on Cellphones

"More electronic books are coming to mobile phones. In a move that could bolster the growing popularity of e-books, Google said Thursday that the 1.5 million public domain books it had scanned and made available free on PCs were now accessible on mobile devices like the iPhone and the T-Mobile G1."

Instant Messaging Site Meebo Adds Facebook Chat

"Today, Meebo is getting even more useful, adding the popular Facebook Chat to the list of instant messaging systems it supports. Meebo tried this before, in December, without asking for a little thing called “permission.” Facebook promptly asked the company to desist, citing security reasons, and to redesign the service using a tool called Facebook Connect, which Meebo now has."

Survey: Identity Theft Up to 9.9 Million

"The number of Americans ensnared by identity theft is on the rise, but victims are striking back more quickly and limiting how much is stolen. In 2008, the number of identity theft cases jumped 22 percent to 9.9 million, according to a study released Monday by Javelin Strategy & Research. The good news is that the cost per incident — including unrecovered losses and legal fees — fell 31 percent to $496."

Google Opens New Chapter With iPhone, Android Book Search

"Can the wide-open vistas of the imagination that were unlocked by famed authors Edgar Rice Burroughs, Rudyard Kipling and Charles Dickens really be enjoyed on a 3.5-inch smartphone screen? Will the wit of Mark Twain's Roughing It or the subtle comedy of manners found in Jane Austen's Emma come across well when the device you're reading those books on interrupts you for a phone call? Bookworms who are also Googlehounds are about to find out. The search company announced Thursday that it would begin offering a mobile version of Google Book Search; 1.5 million of the public domain books Google has already scanned for PC users are now available free to those with Apple iPhones and T-Mobile G1s using the Android operating system."

A Digital Window into the Medieval World

"Thousands of medieval manuscripts have been digitized by libraries around the world. The trick has been finding them. Matthew Fisher, an assistant professor of English at the University of California at Los Angeles, thought up a solution: the Catalogue of Digitized Medieval Manuscripts, a centralized online archive of holdings around the world."

Yahoo Search Puts New Research Assistant to Work

"Yahoo introduced a new feature Wednesday designed to help make online research easier. Dubbed 'Search Pad,' the new companion search tool will enable users to keep track of Web sites and take notes when conducting online research. Currently in beta, Search Pad will allow students, information workers and Internet surfers on a mission to do away with cutting and pasting content to a word-processing document or email; bookmarking the search results or a bevy of sites; or simply writing pertinent results down on a sticky pad or notebook. These extra steps, in addition to being sometimes unwieldy, consume a good bit of time and can prove to be a distraction, according to Yahoo."

New From YouTube: Free Downloads of College Lectures

"YouTube began testing a new feature that lets users download videos posted to the site from partner institutions — including colleges — rather than just watching the videos in a streaming format. That means people can grab lectures from Duke and Stanford Universities and several institutions in the University of California system to watch any time, with or without an Internet connection."

Academic Freedom, Christian Context

"Academic freedom at religious institutions has always been a vexed and complex subject. Many religious colleges assert that they have academic freedom, while also requiring professors to sign statements of faith in which they subscribe to a certain worldview -- and there is not necessarily a public attempt to reconcile these principles. One evangelical Christian college has tried to change the conversation – reframing limitations on inquiry implied by signing a statement of faith, for instance, as opportunities."

Country-Based Search Engines

Country-Based Search Engines

More Than Half The World Has Cell Phones

"More than half of the world can hear you now -- 60 percent of the world's citizens own a cell phone, according to a recent United Nations report. That increase is due in large part to cell phone growth in poor, developing countries. In 2002, just less than 15 percent of the world's population had cell phones. The report shows that mobile technology is becoming the most desirable means of communication -- especially in poor countries. The numbers show dramatic growth: By the end of 2008, there were an estimated 4.1 billion subscriptions globally, compared with roughly 1 billion in 2002, according to the International Telecommunication Union, one of the specialized agencies of the United Nations. The study also looked at the Internet, and found that worldwide, usage has more than doubled: Approximately 23 percent of the population uses the Internet, up from 11 percent in 2002. Still, poor countries are far less likely to surf the Net. For example, only 1 in 20 people in Africa went online in 2007."