from Easter eggs to Amazon

Just last week, my family & I were discussing Easter eggs in video games and DVDs. Somehow, the conversation turned to Google bombs like Find Chuck Norris, French military victories,
and the now defunct miserable failure.

So, when Amazon laid another kind of egg this Easter weekend, I wasn't surprised when the following Google bomb had immediate and huge success: Amazon Rank. [Enjoy! Kudos to the gals at Smart Bitches, Trashy Books. And don't forget to vote for their definition of amazon rank at Urbandictionary.com, and use it in your everyday speech. As in, "My principal amazon ranked me and removed the copy of And Tango Makes Three from my library."]

So, anyway, now they're blaming it on catalogers?! [No wonder RU removed the word library from one of its top-ranked programs! But I digress.] Nice try, but ahem, and #glitchmyass.

Aside from my moral outrage [and, yeah, my growing annoyance with the garbage showing up in my #Amazonfail clogged Twitter stream], I am ticked that now I can't keep up with my gadget girl neighbor and get a Kindle. How can they do this do me. Darn you evil corporations!

found in class: FlashEarth.com

We were looking at online geographical resources for my online Reference Sources & Services class. (Hmm... my online course is very different than the one posted on the RU site.) Anyway, I surfed around and found FlashEarth which lets you switch between different online map services (Google Maps, Microsoft VE, Yahoo! Maps, Ask.com, Open Layers and NASA Terra). When fully zoomed out, click on NASA Terra to see cloud cover. When zoomed in - especially on a mixed use area that you know has changed recently - click on the different providers and check out which one is most up to date, and look at the differences between the satellite images (Google Maps and the aerial photo maps from Microsoft VE or Ask.com). Cool!

mission vs ambition

What do you do when your lofty, altruistic mission conflicts with your naked ambition? Well, if you're Google, apparently, you cave.

"Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."

Sounds great, except someone forgot to tell the folks at Google that China happens to be part of our universe.

Where librarians fight for intellectual freedom and access to information, Google fights for its right to earn money in a restrictive environment. In an online article in The Register, a San Francisco attorney states, "This a simple matter of Google adhering to the Chinese dictate...China is a sovereign nation, and they can set their own laws. You can't force a company to go up against a country." But the company can choose whether or not to do business there.

In the same article, Google spokesman Gabriel Stricker is quoted as saying, "By being in China, we help people access more information, and when we do restrict information, we make clear that we've done so." The problem is when you start making these kinds of rationalizations, where does the line drawing end?

[Article found at Library Link of the Day]