Print Can Be Wrong Too!

Great little article on the SpeEdChange blog discusses how print media can be wrong too.

Britannica Widgets

Encyclopaedia Britannica has recently made a series of widgets available which can be embedded into a blog or website. They come in a variety of "flavors," e.g. U.S. Presidents, brain, dogs, philosophy, with more to come.

The widgets are dynamic and show a snippet of information about one of several topics under that particular heading. There is also a link to the article in Britannica itself. One caveat is that the version of Britannica used is the commercial version which is different from the version many schools and colleges use. But it's still a pretty nifty little series of tools.

I've embedded several into the library web pages. See, for example, the page on U.S. history which uses the U.S. Presidents widget.

For more info on the widgets and to watch a video about how easy it is to embed them in your site go to Brtiannica's Assets & Widgets page.

Try Bit.ly

Bit.ly is becoming the new standard for link shortening.

ReadWriteWeb has an interesting posting about it here. "A little startup called Bit.ly has unseated TinyURL as the default link shortening service on Twitter. This isn't just about shortening links, though. "The truth about Bit.ly," enterprise software analyst James Governor said today, "is that it's not a URL shortener, it's a trend management and metrics platform."

This is Bit.ly's link to the California School Libraries Work! wiki .