EBlogger

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.

Yo hablo muy poco español, but it seems that BibDigBlog offers a Firefox plug-in for searching multiple databases available to members of the institution, including ProQuest, Britannica, the Oxford dictionary and more. That’s a great idea. Do other universities do the same?

Over at Joho the Blog, there’s an interesting little post on taxonomy, folksonomy and the organization of knowledge, including some insightful discussion.

Alex Choo’s Super Search widget searches a staggering array of sites–including Britannica, Answers.com, Wikipedia, IMDB, Google and many many more–via a single, konfabulous interface.

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.

Searchy is a tool that adds search engine shortcuts to IE (and Firefox, but there are better ways to do that), so that you can type “imdb Vertigo” into the location bar to search the IMDb for “Vertigo”. They provide a Britannica search plugin (type “b Mircea Eliade” to search Britannica.com for “Mircea Eliade”), among many others.

Britannica.com recently unveiled a new Encyclopædia Britannica Subject Browse, which provides an enormous taxonomy of human knowledge. The feature is currently marked “beta”.

The Britannica.com homepage now includes headlines from SBS World News Australia (in addition to headlines from the New York Times, which has been available for quite some time). G’day mates!

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.