I was just following orders: Canadian Department of National Defense computers used to edit Wikipedia

Here's a sad but true CBC News article about Department of National Defense computers being used to edit a Wikipedia entry about about "the [F-35] Joint Strike Fighter jet and the Conservative government's decision to spend as much as $18 billion on the aircraft. Those edits included the removal of information critical of the government's plan to buy the jets and the addition of insulting comments aimed at Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff." No doubt the culprit's defense will be, "I was just following orders."

Google Apps for Government

According to this ITI Newslink item (July 29, 02010), Google has announced its Google Apps for Government, "the first suite of cloud computing messaging and collaboration applications to receive Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) certification and accreditation from the U.S. General Services Administration." I wonder if that includes digital archiving/preservation measures and how that functionality will be enabled through cloud computing? Digital archiving/preservation is not one of the features that Google is promoting for this service. At $50 per user per year, you get what you pay for.

Et tu Snarkus

I read about "the rise of the ridicule" or "online snark culture" in a newspaper article by Melissa Martin of the Winnipeg Free Press on July 25, 2010. What was it comedian Rodney Dangerfield said, "Can't get no respect." The article is essentially a paen of praise for April Winchell's Regretsy.com. She mocks "the most hiedeous or head-scratching items on the handmade online marketplace, Etsy." Get it? Etsy + Regrets = Regretsy. Winchell, the article recounts, "was something of a connoisseur of really crappy art." So now she's laughing all the way to the bank with no regretsies. Did I mention she's also published a book titled Regretsy: Where DIY Meets WTF.

14th European Conference on Digital Libraries, Glasgow, Scotland, September 02010

The 14th European Conference on Digital Libraries, also known as the European Conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries (ECDL), has issued its call for participation. ECDL 02010 is organized by the University of Glasgow and is being held in Glasgow, Scotland, UK from September 6 to 10, 02010. There's already a fascinating array of accepted research papers, poster sessions and demonstrations.

TinEye Reverse Image Search

I have not tried a search with TinEye, "a reverse image search engine. It finds out where an image came from, how it is being used, if modified versions of the image exist, or if there is a higher resolution version. TinEye is the first image search engine on the web to use image identification technology rather than keywords, metadata or watermarks. It is free to use for non-commercial searching. TinEye regularly crawls the web for new images, and we also accept contributions of complete online image collections. To date, TinEye has indexed 1,630,532,499 images from the web to help you find what you're looking for." (http://www.tineye.com/about)