The Twittering of the Search World by David Mattison is online

My latest article for Searcher magazine, "The Twittering of the Search World" is available for free online.

Searcher magazine cover, September 02010

Ten Thousand Year Blog now available through syndication at Newstex

My Ten Thousand Year Blog was approved for syndication through Newstex. The company has begun marketing it. Details on the blog are available at

http://www.newstex.com/publisher-search/Blogs/Samples/The-Ten-Thousand-Year-Blog

Digital Humanities Now, a real-time, crowdsourced publication

According to the About page, Digital Humanities Now

"is a real-time, crowdsourced publication. It takes the pulse of the digital humanities community and tries to discern what articles, blog posts, projects, tools, collections, and announcements are worthy of greater attention.

Digital Humanities Now is fully automated. It is created by ingesting the Twitter feeds of hundreds of scholars followed by @dhnow (a list of scholars taken from this digital humanities Twitter list), processing these feeds through Twittertim.es to generate a more narrow feed of common interest and debate, and reformatting that feed on this site, in part to allow for further (non-Twitter) discussions.

Digital Humanities Now was created by Dan Cohen, assisted by Jeremy Boggs, and is a production of the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University."

And it's "passively edited by 350 scholars and organizations in the digital humanities and related fields."

Library of Congress to archive Twitter tweets

According to this CNN Tech story on April 14, 02010, the Library of Congress announced that it will be archiving all public tweets from Twitter. No doubt some Senators will go all Proxmire over this seeming waste of taxpayers' dollars.

Twittering in the ivory tower archives Manitoba style

As announced on ARCAN-L (02010 04 09):

The University of Manitoba Archives & Special Collections is now on Twitter. Follow us at http://twitter.com/umarchives and receive frequent updates on new acquisitions, descriptions, digital collections, upcoming events, YouTube and blog uploads and more.

City of Vancouver Archives does Twitter

The City of Vancouver Archives launched its Twitter feed on September 3, 02009. I'm fairly certain they are the first government archives in British Columbia with this distinction.

The RSS feed URL is http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/61024030.rss

Illinois shoulders ATLAS (Alliance's Trail to Learning-casts and Syndicated Sites)

Illinois, long a leader in the digital world, has put together another fascinating tool called ATLAS (Alliance's Trail to Learning-casts and Syndicated Sites). A project of the Alliance Library System and LearningTimes, ATLAS, according to announcement posted to various mailing lists,

"is a new set of social media tools ALS is using to promote information and historical photos about Illinois history. ALS and LearningTimes partnered to create this innovative and exciting new model of collaborative digital imaging collections using multimedia and social networking tools to bring historical times to life, and involving a community at large in its creation. The project debuted June 29th with an online conference. A recording of the event is available at http://www.atlaspodcasts.org/webcast-2009-06/. The Cullom-Davis Library at Bradley University will serve as the first partner library to produce additional podcasts on Illinois history to be added to the site. They were involved in the first set of ten podcasts, providing the material for the five from Peoria.

At the heart of the ATLAS project are digital images of historic people, places, documents and objects. The images are combined with audio descriptions and placed on a map of Illinois to produce an engaging new interactive learning model for libraries and their customers. The project began with ten short high-quality podcasts about nineteenth century Illinois and famous women from the first hundred years of statehood. Produced in association with LearningTimes, each podcast spotlights a specific person or topic area. ATLAS visitors are able to mouse over a city in Illinois and select a story of interest, featuring engaging commentary and information. A searchable database allows users to search sound files, narratives and photographs. The programs may be enjoyed right from the ATLAS site, or downloaded to a portable audio player."

The site includes an Add Your Podcast component for those wishing to participate in the building of more online history about Illinois and its people.

Google Wave generating a tsunami of interest

I guess you saw that one coming. Check out the official Google Wave preview. Lots of hype that you can read about through this Google search. Since it's dependent on this protocol, don't forget to go over the Google Wave Federation Protocol to learn even more. This is what the Google Wave API says about Google Wave:

Google Wave is a product that helps users communicate and collaborate on the web. A "wave" is equal parts conversation and document, where users can almost instantly communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more. Google Wave is also a platform with a rich set of open APIs that allow developers to embed waves in other web services and to build extensions that work inside waves.

Twitter 101 on SearchEngineWatch.com

Ron Jones is writing a multi-part article on "one of the most popular social media tools" that he calls Twitter 101. Part 1 appeared on March 30, 02009.