A new search site is in beta called DeepDyve that has some promise. First,
they claim that they index millions of medical papers from paid journals and
free sites. The problem in the past is that this content wasn’t too readily
available. Yes, there is Medline, but not a very user-friendly tool. Second,
getting copies of the papers to read has never been easy, particularly for
those of us in the lay community that don’t have medical center accounts or
access to medical libraries.
This is where DeepDyve comes in. They charge a buck to rent the paper for 24
hours. You can get other “plans” that allow unlimited access for more
money. Does this sound familiar, like renting movies? Got it. Their search
engine is very simplistic — you can’t sort by date for example. But you
can enter an entire abstract into the search query to narrow things down.
... (more)
It Strategy
I have been a long time donor to Kiva.org, a peer microfinance lending site
that has been around for several years. When I first heard about it I thought
it was an interesting idea and donated some money to fund a few different
third-world start up businesses.
Kiva works by hooking up generous folks with microfinance lenders by
promoting the individual beneficiaries on their Web site. You get the feeling
that your donation is going straight into the pockets of these worthy folks.
And you can watch your donation be repaid in painfully small increments as
the business o... (more)
It took only a few years for the Web to evolve from its first crude text-only
efforts to a full graphical experience. Yet it has taken more than a decade
to get videos inside the browser page.
This week Brightcove begins a new lower-priced video service called Express
that starts at $100 a month and offers some impressive features. I’m glad
to see them in this space, which is still very much in the pre-Gutenberg
publishing era. I thought I would take this moment to talk about some of the
issues involved in publishing Web videos for corporate uses, putting aside
all the tectonic s... (more)
iPhone Developer
I had an opportunity to audit a computer science class this week at
Washington University, a class that was teaching students how to write iPhone
apps. It was their final presentation, and I got to see a dozen apps that
were very impressive. As I was watching the kids present, I was thinking back
to my college days and the similarities and differences about my education.
Of course, back in my day real programmers wrote in Assembler, and maybe
Fortran. None of this object-oriented stuff had even been invented. We also
had punched cards, which is probably why I nev... (more)
New Media on Ulitzer
In the ten years since Real Simple Syndication (RSS) has been invented, it
has been one of the most significant technologies that Rodney Dangerfield
would say “got no respect.” Providing the connective glue behind most
social media, linking various Web sites for automatically posting content,
being able to Webify various other protocols — RSS is the tech that most of
us now take for granted.
I am not a big fan of the best of the decade type of stories (especially as
the decade isn’t really yet over for another year). But as I was thinking
about how far we ha... (more)