Twitter 'should be considered for the Nobel Peace Prize'

via brandrepublic.com

According to Mark Pfeifle, a former aide to George W Bush, Twitter should be considered for the Nobel Peace Prize (former winners include Martin Luther King and the Dalai Lama) for it's recent role during civil unrest in Iran.
And I thought it was dubious when Al Gore won it...

Posted via web from lauren's posterous

Online catalogue of books is the library that never closes | Technology | The Guardian

via guardian.co.uk

The Open library attempts to bring together the printed word and the electronic word with a web page for every book

Posted via web from lauren's posterous

The Book Seer...

I just tried The Book Seer, a neat little tool that recommends a book for you to read, based on what you've been reading.

I like the styling on it - a distinguished, whiskered gentleman appears on your screen - complete with a speech bubble, saying something along the lines of 'Salutations. I've just finished...... by......What should I read next?' You fill in your details and the Book Seer makes its recommendations.

I put in Wide Sargasso Sea, and among others, it came up with Jane Eyre, (which I was going to read next anyway) Things Fall Apart, Foe, Midnight's Children & Heart of Darkness - I've read all of them, which I thought was quite impressive!

I'll definitely have to give it a try next time I can't think of what to read next.

Experiments with Google Squared

I've been playing around with Google Squared today, the new offering from Google Labs which they describe like this - 'Google Squared takes a category and creates a starter 'square' of information, automatically fetching and organizing facts from across the web.

I thought I'd share my findings with you - I thought they were kind of interesting and pretty funny in places.

So, let's start simple - I'll enter 'books'....

OK 1984, Naked Lunch, Ulysses not bad....but Little Black Sambo? Jesus Christ Google! That's appalling.


And what about the director and cast categories - nonsense! Sometimes a book is just a book, not a film too...

Next, I'll try 'great books'....

Absolutely amazing - we've got Homer...accompanied by an image of Lenny, Homer's friend from the Simpsons, but not Homer himself. Fantastic.

And why do we have all those Greeks and one solitary Roman? Surely there's been a great author since the year 180?

Next, an issue dear to my heart, 'Salman Rushdie'...

Now here's where I think Google Square starts to come into its own - the list is pretty standard, nothing I don't know and haven't read before, except for the last entry 'In Good Faith' an essay which I've never even heard of before. I gues what's its really intended for is compiling statistics and making comparisons, but I think that using it against the grain could potentially be interesting too...

We Think: Mass Innovation, not mass production

I started trying to read We Think: Mass Innovation, not mass production by Charles Leadbetter this weekend - it looks at the culture of mass-participation and sharing that is developing online, & as such is loosely related to what I do for a living and my blog obviously too! I don't often pick up work-related books, but I thought it'd be interesting...I didn't get too far with it but I will persevere. It's also very topical, with so much talk around at the moment about the possibility of some newspapers making their online content available only to paying subscribers, in a climate where we expect just bout everything online to be free....