One response to the analysis I did of the Google rank of mammal pages in Wikipedia is to suggest that Wikipedia does well for mammals because these are charismatic. It's been suggested that for other groups of taxa Wikipedia might not be so prominent in the search results. As a quick test I extracted the 1552 fungal species I could find in Wikipedia and repeated the analysis.
Playing a bit more with the Wikipedia mammal data, there are some interesting patterns to note.
One assumption I've been making so far is that when people search for information on an organism using its scientific name, Wikipedia will dominate the search results (see my earlier post for an example of this assumption). I've decided to quantify this by doing a little experiment. I grabbed the Mammal Species of the World taxonomy and extracted the 5416 species names. I then used Google's AJAX search API to look up each name in Google.
One of the many clever things that clever people can do with the Web is harvest it, aggregate it, classify it etc. Its not just Google that does this sort of thing! Egon Willighagen is one of those clever people. He runs the Chemical blogspace which does all sorts of amazing things with blogs.
Bernard Lang vom Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique hat sich in einem erstmals am 20. April 2009 veröffentlichten und am 23. Juli 2009 aktualisierten Papier mit dem Titel Orphan Works and the Google Book Search Settlement – An International Perspective mit der Auswirkung des in den USA erzielten gerichtlichen Vergleichs auf die verwaisten Werke auseinandergesetzt.
One thing I find myself doing a lot is creating Excel spreadsheets and filling them will lists of taxonomic names and bibliographic references, for which I then try to extract identifiers (such as DOIs). This is a tedious business, but the hope is that by doing it once I can create a useful resource. However, often I get bored and the spreadsheets lie forgotten in some deep recess of my computer's hard drive.
This story starts with an organic chemistry tutorial, when a student asked for clarification of the Finkelstein reaction. This is a simple S N 2 type displacement of an alkyl chloride or bromide, using sodium iodide in acetone solution, and resulting in an alkyl iodide. What was the driving force for this reaction he asked?
Short URLs have been a topic of discussion recently, perhaps sparked by the article URL Shorteners: Which Shortening Service Should You Use?. Many will have encountered short URLs in Twitter tweets. Leigh Dodds (@ldodds) asked I guess Leigh's talking about the need for short URLs in tweets, but I wonder about the more general question of why we need URL shorteners at all.
One advantage of flying to the US is the chance to do some reading. At Newark (EWR) I picked up Guy Kawasaki's "Reality Check", which is a fun read. You can get a flavour of the book from this presentation Guy gave in 2006. While at MIT for the Elsevier Challenge I was browsing in the MIT book shop and stumbled across "Google and the Myth of Universal Knowledge" by Frenchman Jean-Noël Jeanneney. It's, um, very French.
Wer wissen will, was deutsche Verleger zu der Einigung zwischen Google und den Buchverlagen in den USA sagen, möge den Blick auf die Website des Buchreports lenken. Dort kommen diverse Verleger zu Wort (2.11.). The post Buchreport: “Verlage müssen die Gestaltungsposition behalten” appeared first on iRights.info.