EBlogger

Britannica Hollywood Handheld Edition, a film, actor, and award database for the Palm and Pocket PC platforms has been released. Available from
smartphone.net, palmgear.com, and others.

The product is also available as a Britannica Profiles Hollywood, a CD-ROM for Windows and Macintosh computers.

One of my co-workers has been pushing a similiar idea for a while, but it looks like Brockhaus has beaten us to it: Brockhaus’ 21st edition is now available on a 1 GM USB stick. Great stuff, but are they really charging 1,500 euros for it?

[Via Gizmodo.]

With all the talk lately about the new net revolution, Web 2.0, and all of that (e.g., point and counter-point), it is interesting to throw some actual research into the mix. Lowell Monke’s recent article in Orion Magazine does just that.

[R]ecent research, including a University of Munich study of 174,000 students in thirty-one countries, indicates that students who frequently use computers perform worse academically than those who use them rarely or not at all.

As the Arts & Letters Daily post put it, “and it gets worse” from there.

[via Arts & Letters Daily]

I’ve noticed that Britannica supports Amazon’s A9 OpenSearch protocol, by which you can obtain Britannica’s search results via RSS. For example, results for “Arunachal Pradesh” can be found at:

http://www.britannica.com/opensearch?ct=eb&start=0&count=20&query=arunachal+pradesh

See opensearch.a9.com for more information about the OpenSearch protocol. I don’t yet see an OpenSearch Description Document for Britannica.com, but it’s not difficult to see how to modify the query to get the results you are looking for.

About a month ago, I noted the official release of Britannica’s Ultimate Reference Suite 2006. In the first published review of the 2006 URS that I’ve seen, Sam Vaknin cites the “dozens of user-friendly alterations and enhancements” when he writes:

“The 2006 edition is a breakthrough. The Britannica seemed to have finally got it entirely right.”

The new interface seems to be well received, by beta testers, and so far, by reviewers as well.

As follow up to yesterday’s post, it has been brought to my attention that an interview with Jade Liquid’s CTO Anthony Scotney mentions Britannica as a user of their WebRenderer Java browser, no doubt as the “Embedded HTML Viewer” that can be seen in the “Britannica’s CD/DVD Product Architecture” diagram on Sun’s site.

Mathias has stumbled across an old article on Britannica’s CD/DVD technology platform, which is based upon a great deal of open source Java technology.

Over at the Gordon’s Tech blog, John has posted something of a left-handed compliment for Britannica:

Next thing you know the freight trains will sprout rocket engines. Britannica gets sexy (in a geekish sort of way) with widgets and firefox search plugins. I guess I’ll have to reenable Dashboard on my iMac.

The amazing thing, however, is that their new RSS feed has over 150 bloglines subscribers. Wow.

I’d mostly forgotten I pay Britannica each month for their service. It’s kind of been a charitable act. Maybe they’re actually thinking about how they could be useful. Or maybe Google has agreed to buy them …

See Encyclopædia Britannica Online Tools for the “sexy” tools to which he refers.

Blogger Stefanos Evangelou complains that certain apps aren’t available on Linux and that that makes him unable to free himself from Windows tyranny. The Britannica encyclopedia is one of the apps he mentions (although he doesn’t specify what version).

While it doesn’t quite say so on the box, the fact is that the Britannica CD products run quite well on Linux. You can find instructions for running the Britannica CD/DVD on Linux at http://support.britannica.com/linux/linux.htm, although it looks like those need to be updated for the 2006 edition which became available eariler this month.

“If you and I rely on the Encyclopaedia Britannica, we have a common ground for interaction, but once we start learning exclusively through the Internet, you risk creating your own personal encyclopedia, which will be different from others’.”

Umberto Eco quoted by The Village Voice in “Eco and the Funnymen” [July 5th, 2005]