LISNews: Librarian News

When Jimmy Wales, the driving force behind the hugely successful Wikipedia, rolled out Wikia Search, a community-built search engine, 15 months ago, he said that his goal was to build a “Google-quality search engine” over time.

On Tuesday, Mr. Wales announced on his blog that he was pulling the plug on Wikia Search.

Full story in the New York Times

With Google having settled its copyright suit with authors and publishers, the company is now poised to be a modern Library of Alexandria with full texts of millions of titles online. Robert Darnton, director of the Harvard University Library, loves the access but wonders at what cost.

Seven minute interview with Robert Darnton, director of the Harvard University Library, on the radio program On the Media

The cloud computing concept takes another hit. Techcrunch dropped a story this morning on more holes found in the popular online application Google Docs. This news arrives right on the heels of another security problem discovered earlier this month.

In short, images embedded in Google Docs could be accessed outside Google Docs itself because the images are uploaded to another server. I've seen something like this myself because if you use Blogger, your uploaded images show up in your Picassa account.

If you share a document carrying a diagram, the person will be able to view previous versions of that diagram whether you want them to or not.

Finally, removing another user's access to a document doesn't always ensure that they can't access that document again later.

These flaws seem serious enough to put at risk the ability of libraries to comply with relevant privacy rules as to patrons if Google Docs is in the mix. Free (as in freedom and as in beer) alternatives like Citadel may prove profitable for libraries to evaluate.

Google's top designer Doug Bowman quit the company to join Twitter. Mostly, Doug didn't like how much Google depends on data to make design decisions.

His basic complaint: "When a company is filled with engineers, it turns to engineering to solve problems. Reduce each decision to a simple logic problem. Remove all subjectivity and just look at the data. Data in your favor? Ok, launch it. Data shows negative effects? Back to the drawing board. And that data eventually becomes a crutch for every decision, paralyzing the company and preventing it from making any daring design decisions." This is a portion of his blog post, find it at stop design.