okay, this is a very cool new feature that i've been waiting to add for a short while, needed to be sure that it worked perfectly. you can now add or import/export bookmarks from within researchzilla. bookmarks contributed by users default to 'public' view though you may mark them as private. all marked public will appear within search results on the site, and all bookmarks may be viewed via their own bookmark 'tag cloud' (a nice way to navigate through them)

 hey, did you ever watch the a-team? this is the research geek version, living underground...why can't all libraries be this cool!??

 

so arstechnica (awesome site btw) did a quick review of a new idc study that says 2007 is the year when spam outnumbers real person to person emails - article is at: http://tinyurl.com/2eqrkr

so not many people are really aware of this rather interesting undertaking, but several scholars at babson (www.babson.edu) are behind the diana project - full info with video interviews here:

this is really special, it brought tears to my eyes...i laughed, i cried, i choked on a jujube...

direct link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Td922l0NoDQ

 

("march of the librarians") 

has anybody been following this trend - increased quality of business information through wikipedia? would it be all that difficult to bring together wikipedia, yahoo and google finance and a few other sites to create a free alternative to hoovers?

 ...at what point are people going to get really sick of being asked to fork over 3 thousand or more for the hoovers.com information? ...i smell a new dawn coming...

so most of you know that i've been spending years tracking and cleaning up tons of 'meta resources' for all sorts of research...in fact, this was the most popular part of the old site, gathering between 3 and 5 thousand visitors daily (yes, daily)...

 since resources change constantly, and because links come and go, i've been torn in two directions regarding the best way to rebuild this thing - from the ground up.

 ..well, not totally from scratch. i've still got the links.

one idea is a wiki. in this case, it will be a very structured set of pages open to extensive user contributions and edits. the idea is simple, utility is there, but wikis can get kinda geeky.

the other idea is something more akin to a social news type of site (think digg, www.digg.com, the mother of them all) - but exclusively related to research resources, so tweaked quite a bit to remove the noise and clutter...

 ...oh, and then of course it could just be done up like an old-style dmoz directory, but that seems kinda boring...

thoughts? anyone? anyone? bueller? 

thanks for holding on zilla community folks...i'm going to be sending out notes to kazillions of you over the coming weeks to talk to you more about this community site upgrade...the whole idea was to keep it simple - really simple.

 unfortunately, the old site got a little ridiculous and a bit too feature-rich for my own good and that of the users...hopefully you'll find this particular platform to be much more intuitive and simple in terms of putting up content and getting thoughts and ideas out there (yadda, yadda, yadda and so on and so on)

 there's also a whole new research guide going up shortly, more to come on that over the coming weeks as well...