November 30, 2006
DOIs for Books Gain Ground
Digital Koans alerts us to the news that DOIs for books are gaining ground.
According to CrossRef, the official DOI registration agency, over a half-million DOIs have been assigned to books or book chapters, and twenty of its members are using DOIs in this fashion. What’s a DOI? Here’s a short description from …
Posted by Bill Trippe at 9:25 PM | TrackBack
November 26, 2006
Philippe Noiret
One of my favorite actors, Philippe Noiret, died. The New York Times headline calls him, "an Actor of Elegance and Dry Humor," and I couldn't agree more. He starred in two of my favorite movies, Cinema Paradiso (imdb.com, amazon.com) and Il Postino (imdb.com, amazon.com), playing a Sicilian projectionist in the former and the poet Pablo Neruda in the latter. Yet both characters were the same, decent, kind man at their core.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 11:13 AM
November 24, 2006
Raking
I have been remiss. Here, after a long hiatus on this blog, is the latest installment in the American Life in Poetry series.
American Life in Poetry: Column 87
BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006
The first poem we ran in this column was by David Allan Evans of South Dakota, about a couple washing windows together. You can find that poem and all the others on our website, www.americanlifeinpoetry.org. Here Tania Rochelle of Georgia presents us with another couple, this time raking leaves. I especially like the image of the pair "bent like parentheses/ around their brittle little lawn."
Raking
Anna Bell and Lane, eighty,
make small leaf piles in the heat,
each pile a great joint effort,
like fifty years of marriage,
sharing chores a rusty dance.
In my own yard, the stacks
are big as children, who scatter them,
dodge and limbo the poke
of my rake. We're lucky,
young and straight-boned.
And I feel sorry for the couple,
bent like parentheses
around their brittle little lawn.
I like feeling sorry for them,
the tenderness of it, but only
for a moment: John glides in
like a paper airplane, takes
the children for the weekend,
and I remember,
they're the lucky ones--
shriveled Anna Bell, loving
her crooked Lane.
Reprinted from "Karaoke Funeral," Snake Nation Press, 2003, by permission of the author. Copyright (c) 2003 by Tania Rochelle. This weekly column is supported by The Poetry Foundation, The Library of Congress, and the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. This column does not accept unsolicited poetry.
******************************
American Life in Poetry provides newspapers and online publications with a free weekly column featuring contemporary American poems. The sole mission of this project is to promote poetry: American Life in Poetry seeks to create a vigorous presence for poetry in our culture. There are no costs for reprinting the columns; we do require that you register your publication here and that the text of the column be reproduced without alteration.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 11:54 AM
November 22, 2006
Mixing MathML and SGML
Do you have any experience, or know of any instances, of mixing MathML within an SGML document instance? I have a client who is beginning the process of converting an extensive collection of SGML documents, and would like to go ahead and convert the equations first, into MathML, and then insert the equations back into the SGML document instances. One of their services providers is concerned about this. They are citing the SGML character entities in the current document instances versus the need--as they see it--to use Unicode in the MathML. However, as I read the MathML specification, you can still use SGML character entity references as long as you are using the MathML DTD and not the MathML XML Schema (see this section of the MathML recommendation).
Am I reading this correctly? Any experience with this?
I realize there are likely some other issues too, but this one came up in the first discussion...
Posted by Bill Trippe at 3:41 PM | TrackBack
C-List
So much for becoming rich and famous...
Posted by Bill Trippe at 12:55 PM
Writer's Block
Some good advice from Writing Information.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 12:52 PM
November 21, 2006
Web Analytics Packages
A client is looking at web analytics software for a fairly complicated operation. They would like to track behavior from a number of domains (~40), and produce custom reports for both internal audiences and for advertisers. To complicate things, of course, the systems are heterogeneous (mainly Windows and Linux, but some Macintosh sprinkled in). They will be migrating to a common platform (TBD) in the foreseeable future, but may want to put the new analytics package in place before the migration.
They have started with the following list of packages to examine:
ClickTracks
CoreMetrics
WebSideStory
Sage Analytics
WebTrends
Omniture
Does this look the right list? Any others they should be looking at?
Any and all comments welcome, and feel free to contact me off the list as well (though no sales calls please).
Posted by Bill Trippe at 11:04 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
Mashups
Every now and then I get buzzword fatigue, and I got it almost immediately upon hearing the word "mashup." (And it doesn't help that the Wikipedia definition has the word "seamlessly" in the first sentence.) Still, I am sure the word is useful for some people, and I am sure there are some good mashups out there. Then today I found one that combines maps and flickr photos really nicely, and I decided that maybe I like the word after all.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 11:45 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
November 20, 2006
Ether
What will they think of next?
 | billtrippe 1-888-MY-ETHER ext. 01809518  |
This service enables me to provide clients with a number they can call and talk to me at a rate I choose. The service, ether.com, charges the client and passes the money on to me. Apparently, there is an e-mail mechanism as well, so keep those calls and letters coming!
Posted by Bill Trippe at 11:18 AM | TrackBack
November 11, 2006
Currently Reading
Philip Roth's American Pastoral. I have written before about how I discovered Roth early on, and have read nearly all of this fiction, and some of his nonfiction. I like it from its opening paragraph (read more of an excerpt here):
The Swede. During the war years, when I was still a grade school boy, this was a magical name in our Newark neighborhood, even to adults just a generation removed from the city's old Prince Street ghetto and not yet so flawlessly Americanized as to be bowled over by the prowess of a high school athlete. The name was magical; so was the anomalous face. Of the few fair-complexioned Jewish students in our preponderantly Jewish public high school, none possessed anything remotely like the steep-jawed, insentient Viking mask of this blue-eyed blond born into our tribe as Seymour Irving Levov.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 10:09 PM
November 10, 2006
Digitization at HarperCollins
If you are curious what HarperCollins is doing in terms of digitizing its content, this presentation (PDF) from the Frankfurt Book Fair spells it out some. HarperCollins is being aggressive with this. They cited the costs of digitization as an element in their recent disappointing quarterly profit, and clearly are committed to the efforts.
In addition to lower sales, [HarperCollins CEO Jane] Friedman attributed the drop in profits to continued investment in digital and global projects. HC has now digitized 12,000 titles as part of its digital warehouse, and during the quarter it converted 125 books to its new Browse Inside feature, which enables consumers to search HC books from the company's Web site. Friedman estimated HC will be adding 200 to 500 titles a week to the Browse feature. The company's Digital Media Café also launched in the period. "I remain excited by the digital world," Friedman said. HC's China initiatives also ate into profits in the period.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 2:33 PM
November 6, 2006
Wikipedia Woes
Perhaps another reason Wikipedia should consider an authentication process for authors.
This is likely a solvable problem, though hackers are determined folks. But the more I think about Wikipedia authoring, the more I think it makes sense for authors to be authenticated.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 3:15 PM
November 2, 2006
StumbleUpon
Have you tried StumbleUpon yet? It's cool.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 8:10 PM
