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  Monday, December 16, 2002 

LibraryLookup project rolls along

The LibraryLookup project is rolling along nicely. Yesterday's insight about Googling for services proved fruitful. I found another 300+ Voyager libraries that way, and updated the Voyager list accordingly, bringing the total to around 400. So that's about 1500 libraries so far. Of course as Will Cox points out, that's still only a tiny fraction of U.S. libraries.

In other news, Howard Hansen tweaked the regexp to work with powells.com, and I rolled that change into all three lists I've posted. And Jonnosan came up with a Safari1 looker-upper. "The link to drag and drop is here: Lookup on Safari," he writes. In other words: given an ISBN-bearing URL, you can use this bookmarklet to look up the book in Safari. The inverse is also possible, of course. Another tweak to the code would enable the bookmarklet to do a lookup from Safari to your local library.

I've discovered a hard limit on the size of the bookmarklet's code, though. IE 6 evidently fails silently if you exceed 508 characters, though other browsers are more generous. So it may not feasible to incorporate every imaginable variation into a single version.


1 Disclosure: I helped create Safari.

 

The power of voice

CHEAP STORAGE MAKES it feasible to save voice recordings of many of our meetings, teleconferences, interviews, and other conversations. In some environments -- call centers and certain sectors of finance and government -- that already happens. But audio surveillance isn't yet routine, and the thorny legal, social, and cultural issues it raises haven't yet been widely debated. That's because, until now, there was no practical way to mine voice data. As with other forms of practical obscurity, this artificial barrier was bound to topple, and now it has. Fast-Talk Communications' revolutionary phonetic indexing and search technology brings the magic of full-text search to the formerly opaque realms of audio recordings and video soundtracks. If you consider the way in which Google has already become everyone's indispensable "outboard brain," and extrapolate that to all the voice data that exists -- and to the vast quantities that soon will exist -- it's hard to avoid the conclusion that Fast-Talk is one of the most disruptive technologies in the pipeline. [Full story at InfoWorld.com.]

 


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