Beginnercode.com

From InternetWeek –

Google Inc. on Wednesday was sued by a major publishing association for digitizing library books without the permissions of copyright holders, the second such suit filed against the search engine giant

I didn’t even know about Google Print(Still in Beta) until I read this. So I went and checked it out. It pretty much looks and works like the google web search, except it searches for books.

I thought I would give it a run. I typed in ‘cats’. The usual list pops up including a color photo of the front cover of each book. I randomly chose a book about why cats paint. (Didn’t know they could). From there I could see a few pages. Table of contents, and a couple of other pages. From there you could search even deeper into the book. I typed in ‘color’. I was presented with about 10 links to several pages within the book. After being prompted to login with my google account, each link would show me a page, and a page or 2 forward or backward in the book. I’m not sure how far is too far with copyrighted content.

They do reference the author, the publisher, and a few links to where one could buy the book. I can only imagine that they have the permission of the publishers and authors. It is duly noted on this page:

Library books still in copyright: For books that we have scanned from a library which are still in copyright, you will only be able to view the bibliographic information and a few short sentences of text around your search term.

I seriously doubt that google wouldn’t have covered those bases before they attempted this endeavor.

I wrote an entry about a similar service called codefetch{ that allows you to search for books on programming code. These also would show a few excerpts of each authors pages. (A handy tool BTW!).

If anything you would think authors might even persue google, to plan how and what content would be shown. What a great way to advertise, and get books sold!

I’m thinking we haven’t seen the end of this topic, or copyright rules and laws.

google, google print, lawsuit, publisher, books, internet

I signed up for an account at blogflux.com.

It uses Google Maps to display where referrers are comming from for your blog traffic stats. It’s almost scarey on how far you can zoom in on any particular referrer. I’m hoping that these locations are ISP’s and not actual locations! See the 2 screenshots:

 

The zoom in feature goes a lot further than whats shown on the thumbnails above. You can see the stats for beginnercode.com.

google, google maps, maps, blog, track visitors

I added an image utility plugin for Wordpress. It’s called IImage Browser, and can be obtained at skriker’s blog. This thing works great. There is only 2 files to upload. I was up and running with it in a matter of minutes. There’s virtually no setup other than activating it in your plugin panel.

Within the write area of the admin panel, there is a button added for iimage browser.
It pops open a window letting you browse your image dir. Inside of it you can create a directory, upload files, and create thumbs.

Then while browsing you click on the image you want to add. You can add the pic to your entry, add thumbnail with link to main, or just create a link to the picture. Pointy clicky, and very user friendly.

blog, wordpress plugin, images

I returned safely from my trip on Sunday October 7th around 5pm. I’m still trying to catch up on work/emails and personal business. I did journal the entire trip on paper, and will hopefully get those entries up in the next few days. Please hang tight…

Today I added a podcast for the blog posts. The talkr service takes your blog entry, and will read it back to you. You can download it and listen to an .mp3 of any blog entry.

Membership was as easy as filling out a form. They give you the html to display their button. They also give you the code you need to add to give the link for the podcast in your template. In my template file. I added the link they gave me, and as they explain to do, add the permalink variable to the querry. In my case with this wordpress template it was the variable in post.php.

href=the_linkage_from_talker_< ?php the_permalink(); ?>

 
With this, anybody can listen to your blog!
 

podcast, talkr, wordpress