This video floated up in my Google reader, from a blog called: if:book, A project of the Institute for the Future of the Book. "Orson Whales" is a photomontage of a book painted and photographed by Alex Itin set to music by Led Zeppelin and John Bohham, the drummer.
I liked this cartoon enough to republish it here.
MIT was the first to publish lectures, lecture notes, reading lists and syllabuses for the courses in the University. Now, Universities across the Globe Offer Free Open Courseware in a trend that opens knowledge to everyone. I don't find the indexing of all this material extraordinarily useful, but the catalog of courseware is becoming robust.
This is a great slide show on enabling communities in a web 2.0 world. Thank you to Collaborative Thinking for pointing out this document.
Typically, Google Book Search has not been high on my list of sites that I regularly use to search for content. However, recently I have had very good luck with searching this site. Over at Learning to Change Business, a blog that I write on executive education, you will notice that I have been doing research on the Mars Pathfinder mission. Google books actually produced excellent results for this query and I found two or three books on the subject that had not turned up in other sites.
Today's post at Google Operating System entitled Quantity Over Quality at Google Book Search explains a bit more about the status of the product and some of the problems associated with producing the site. I have not found a downloadable book yet, but the citations have been helpful.
