http://www.onlineinsider.net Fri, 09 May 2008 14:17:30 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en It's not just Warren Buffett who headquarters his company in Omaha, Nebraska -- infoUSA is there as well. This database and marketing company will officially change its name to infoGROUP on June 1st. The name change reflects its increasing presence outside the U.S. It has offices in Canada (just opened ... http://www.onlineinsider.net/2008/05/09/infousa-to-become-inofgroup/ A story in the Wall Street Journal this morning caught my eye. Headlined "Source of House Data Skews Loan Losses," by Marshall Eckblad, it talked about the effect the source of data has on companies' financial reporting. My Dollar Sign column in the May/June 2008 issue of ONLINE was about ... http://www.onlineinsider.net/2008/05/08/data-sources-matter/ An interesting article in The Nation by R. H. Lossin, posted online yesterday, about Iraq's national library quotes Dr. Saad Eskander's comments from his keynote speech at the Internet Librarian International conference in 2004. I remember that as being an incredibly moving talk, leaving several delegates with tears in their eyes. ... http://www.onlineinsider.net/2008/04/10/the-nation-quotes-ili-keynoter/ I went to the PaidContent Mixer tonight in London. It's their third. ContentNext Media, Inc. now includes the sites paidcontent.org, moconews.net, contentsutra.com, and paidcontent.co.uk. The speaker at the mixer was Martin Stiksel, one of the three co-founders of Last.fm. Stiksel and company sold to CBS in one of the highest-profile start-up ... http://www.onlineinsider.net/2008/03/27/paidcontent-mixer/ We decided to give people another week to submit their proposal to speak at Internet Librarian International. With Easter holidays, it seemed like a good idea to allow a bit more time. The new deadline is the 4th of April. I'm really looking forward to examples of 2.0 stuff in ... http://www.onlineinsider.net/2008/03/26/ili-call-for-speakers-deadline-extended/ Every Monday, Cengage Gale (when will I get used to that Cengage appellation?) drops a little gem into my inbox. It's called "Funny You Should Ask" and is real-life questions asked at real-life reference desks of real-life libraries. Today's was more hilarious that usual: "I'm doing a demographic project. Can you ... http://www.onlineinsider.net/2008/03/24/funny-you-should-ask/ As a fan of mystery stories, I'm quite taken by a new Penguin initiative called We Tell Stories. I've been reading 21 Steps, a story by Charles Cumming, that starts at St. Pancras station where a man, Jack Kalba, is shot and drops dead at the feet of the story's ... http://www.onlineinsider.net/2008/03/23/21-steps/ Hitwise reported that U.S. visits to question and answer sites increased 118% from last year, with Yahoo Answers gleaning 74% of the traffic. In second place was WikiAnswers, from Answers.com. Third was Answerbag and fourth was Ask MetaFilter. Hitwise interprets the popularity of the Q&A sites as showing the importance ... http://www.onlineinsider.net/2008/03/20/qa-stats/ Great segment on the News Hour with Jim Lehrer about public libraries. Julia Keller talks about the impact of public libraries on peoples' lives. My favorite takeway line was that it doesn't matter as much what you come in looking for as what you actually take away with you. OK, ... http://www.onlineinsider.net/2008/03/16/the-horse-you-go-out-with/ It's the IOLUG (Indiana Online Users Group) spring meeting, titled Memory, Heritage, Visions: Digitizing Yesterday for Tomorrow. First speaker, Robin Crumrin, Associate Dean of Collections & Information Access at IUPUI Library, gives background, how State Library kickstarted in 2003, up to licensing OCLC's CONTENTdm and LSTA digization grants. There's a ... http://www.onlineinsider.net/2008/03/14/iolug-looks-at-digitizing-yesterday-for-tomorrow/