Via Creative Commons: LibriVox has released their 1000th free audiobook.

LibriVox takes public domain books and creates freely downloadable audiobooks from them. Unlike hard or impossible to use audiobooks from OCLC, these do not have any DRM technology to stop you from hearing them. LibriVox makes their books available in MP3 format and Ogg Vorbis. Ogg Vorbis produces smaller files for the same quality as MP3 and is not encumbered by patents or DRM issues.

During the RIPE 55 meeting in Amsterdam last week, a community statement was issued on the future of IPv4. Basically they say that we will run out of IP addresses in two to four years and we need IPv6.

To drive the point home, Gary Feldman performed a song titled “The Day the Routers Died” (sung like “bye bye american pie”).

Exciting news from Meebo, the web-based Instant Messaging application. They have announced the availability of their platform for meebo application development. The platform provides access to the Meebo API and allows developers to create new applications that integrate with Meebo.

I think this has interesting possibilities for virtual reference services. Meebo is already famous in the library world for its MeeboME Widget. The Meebome Widget lets you add an IM client to any webpage. Users visiting your site can chat with you and they do not need any kind of special IM software or even have an IM account. Libraries have been using this to implement chat reference services.

Now imagine this. Imagine that whenever you, as a reference librarian, were chatting with a client via Meebo that you had a special window that let you enter in citation info for articles. Imagine that each time you entered citation info that it constructed a link to either your citation linker (e.g. SFX) or your remote access system (e.g. ezproxy). As you chat with the client and find articles and resources answering their questions, you could store each link on a “bookshelf”. When you were done you could click a button and send it to the chat session and also save it for future reference.

I am sure that we can come up with much more impressive ideas as well.

I love Creative Commons. You’ll see that my recent Netspeed 2007 presentation titled Widgets, Gadgets, and Badges are released under a Creative Commons license

Creative Commons has released a widget of their own to help with fundraising. The CC Widget is customizable so you can change the size and layout to fit your site and it encourages awareness and donation to Creative Commons efforts. Cut-paste-share-donate.

The slides for my Ecommerce lecture for MIS 311 are now available for download.

Note that if you view the slides in Powerpoint, that there are detailed notes for most slides in the “notes” area. These can be viewed in powerpoint, or you can print out the “notes” view of the slides to see them. The end of the slides includes many slides from previous versions of the presentation that have been removed for this term. You might find them interesting out of curiousity.

There is also a light reading list including both fiction and non-fiction sources that relate to this topic. I highly recommend the fiction books “Pattern Recognition” and “Rainbows End”

If you have any questions, please feel free to post them as a comment to this post (below) and I’ll be happy to answer them. You can also email if you prefer or use the contact information on my contact info page.