brett's logjam

Darien Library website relaunches with new social features:

John Blyberg, Darien Library’s Head of Technology and Digital Initiatives, has created our website and the connection to our online catalog using open source software, and at his initiative, we are making it freely available to all libraries, as a contribution to strengthening the role of all libraries in their communities.

I’m really happy to see John’s work on SOPAC go live, and not just because I went to middle school with him years ago. The suite he’s developed to allow libraries to integrate internet social media with their internal systems is really amazing. Effective searches need interoperable data to be successful, and SOPAC helps libraries assemble that in an inexpensive, sustainable way.

You can read more about John’s work on SOPAC 2.0 at Library Journal, or right on his website.

Congratulations, John!

Google announces its entry into the browser arena with a great comic book (by Scott McCloud of Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art,no less), called Google on Google Chrome:

There’s a good (if lacking in Safari 3 comparisons) overview at Blogoscoped, which notes:

I think it can’t hurt to have more competition in the browser area.

I can’t help but agree. It will be interesting to see how it competes against the Webkit/Safari family of browsers, especially with the upcoming release of SquirrelFish to set new Javascript speed records. Many of the other new Google Chrome features are already in Safari (cough porn mode cough), so I suspect this will turn out to be a good, solid entry into the browser market.

I just hope that the comic isn’t the best thing about the browser.