With the close of the year approaching, this issue marks the 14th week of DLTJ Thursday Threads. This issue has a publisher's view of Amazon's strong-arm tactics in book pricing, research into the possibility that academic authors could game Google Scholar with spam, demonstrations of how Amazon's Mechanical Turk drives …

When I say "<blank> is a question answering system. A question can be posed in natural language and ... <blank> can come up with a very precise answer to that question" -- what comes to mind to fill in the <blank>? If you guessed a system developed by IBM to appear alongside …

This week's Thursday Threads highlights includes two legal cases that bear watching. The first is the case of SkyRiver/Innovative Interfaces versus OCLC (covered on DLTJ previously); now that the case has been moved to OCLC's home court (the federal district court located in Columbus, OH), it is asking for …

It has been another busy week, and unfortunately Thursday has slipped into Friday. There have been a few updates to earlier Thursday Threads items, so I'm turning this into "Friday Followups" instead. We'll attempt to get back new items next Thursday, but in the meantime take a look at these …

The highlights of the past week are around publishing -- first with a model proposed by Eric Hellman in which consumers can pool enough money to pay publishers to "set a book free" under a Creative Commons license, then with an announcement by the University of Pittsburgh offering free hosting of …

No, I am not composing this edition of DLTJ Thursday Threads on the Thanksgiving holiday. This was written the day before and scheduled for posting on Thursday. With a significant run of weekly Thursday Threads postings, it seemed a shame to break the trend because of a holiday. So if …

Another slow Thursday Threads week due to higher priority work duties taking precedent over scanning for trends. This week has a look at the explosion of video content uploaded to YouTube (which dovetails nicely with the Thursday Threads report two weeks ago about the record amount of internet traffic attributed …

It has been a long week, so for many of you this edition of DLTJ Thursday Threads will actually be read on Friday. The spirit was willing, the topics were certainly out there in the past seven days, but the necessary distractions were numerous. Please enjoy this edition whenever you …

This week is a mostly Google edition of DLTJ Thursday Threads. Below is a high-level overview of Google's Book Search algorithm, how Google is helping web servers improve the speed at which content loads, and how Google's internet traffic is growing as a percentage of all internet traffic. But first …

This week's Thursday Threads looks at a big hole in the security model of most internet sites that require you to log into them with a username and password plus a pair of stories about "big media" battles.

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This is definitely becoming a habit...welcome to the fourth edition of DLTJ's Thursday Threads. Feel free to send this newsletter to others you think might be interested in the topics. If you are not already subscribed to DLTJ's Thursday Threads, visit the sign-up page. If you would like …

If it is Thursday it must mean it is time for another in this series of Thursday Threads posts. This week there are an abundance of things that could fall into the category of "disruptive innovation" in libraries and higher education. If you find these interesting, you might want to …

This is the second week of this Thursday Threads experiment and already we have a bonus edition. Two other items crossed my browser today that were just too good to pass up: how statistical techniques are improving the aggregation of political polling and a visual representation of lifespan versus income …

Week #2 of this new project to highlight interesting tidbits from the previous seven days. Well, things that were interesting to me that I hope will be interesting to DLTJ readers. Time will tell.

Technical Debt: A Perspective for Managers

What is Technical Debt? It’s all “those internal things …

I'm starting something new on DLTJ: Thursday Threads -- summaries and pointers of stories, services, and other stuff that I found interesting in the previous seven days. This is culled from entries that I post to my FriendFeed lifestream through various channels (Google Reader shared items, citations shared in Zotero, Twitter …