LISNews: Librarian News

Slashdot has a nice round up, that talks about all the alternatives and ideas. After reading the the Preliminary Injunction Brief (pdf file) it looks like Napster is in big trouble. Technically Napster was not shutdown, they are just not allowed to do anything that is even close to illegal (no major label music, no links to the music, etc...). Which is basically like saying, no one who will ever speed or run a stop sign is allowed to drive. It doesn\'t outlaw cars, but no one is driving.

On a realated note, check out DOCSTER a form of instant document delivery, that builds in copyright and organization for libraries.Read on for more stories from around the web. -- Read More

CNET has a Story that covers all the latest in the never ending world of internet lawsuits. Some of these cases challenge the very Existence of the Web

\"It all depends on how broadly the opinion is written,\" said Eugene Volokh, a law professor at the University of California at Los Angeles. \"If an opinion is quite broad, it would interfere with a lot of things on the Web. But I don\'t think it\'s likely that a court would issue such an opinion.\" -- Read More

Internet Week has a cool Story on how weak the internet may be. The trouble lies in relying on a couple large nodes that handle a significant amount of the traffic. The web isn\'t as webbed as we thought.

\"``The reason this is so is because there are a couple of very big nodes and all messages are going through them. But if someone maliciously takes down the biggest nodes you can harm the system in incredible ways. You can very easily destroy the function of the Internet,\'\' Albert-Lazlo Barabasi, a structural physicist, said in a telephone interview. \" -- Read More

CNET has a very Interesting Story on those net ranking we all read so much about. I\'ve always questions many of these ratings, especially Statmarket, which seems to have a very biased sample. If you ever read the rankings, check out This Story

Experts blame the problem in part on the fact that there are several large ranking companies, primarily Media Metrix and Nielsen/NetRatings, and each company calculates rankings differently. For other media, one large ranking company provides undisputed data: Nielsen for television, Arbitron for radio and the Audit Bureau of Circulation for many print publications. -- Read More