Stay in India for free via blogger Web site

Tony Tharakan , Reuters & CanWest News Service, 27 Sep 2007

Hotel rooms in India tend to be expensive and hard to find, but a new Web site is helping visitors find a bed, with a warm conversation thrown in, all for free.

While most hosts on http://www.extrabed.in/ offer a spare bed and an Internet connection, some offer sightseeing tours, endless cups of coffee or even a game of Scrabble to add that personal touch.

The Web site was born after its founder, Kiruba Shankar, randomly contacted bloggers in Mumbai to see if anyone would put him up. He found several. continue reading

see also:

ExtraBed on NDTV

Bangla and Bangalooru: The Phonetic Similarity in Jeopardy

PS. Bear in mind the newstory about the trend to restore original syntax & symantics (A.K.A. Indianization) that was announced in the State of Karnataka (India) -- It's official: Bangalore is now Bengalooru / Bangalore or Bangalooru?

Reference and Research Protests posted by Annoyed Librarian:
It can't happen often that a reference book draws more than yawns and mediocre reviews, but the OUP has stopped selling the Concise Dictionary of World Place Names because of some protests and outcries in India. (This was reported a few days ago, but I'm behind on my news.)

According to the story:"Among other errors, the book, the Concise Dictionary of World Place Names, says that the local language in Bangalore, Karnataka’s capital, is Bengali. Actually the language is Kannada. Bengali is spoken in Bangladesh and neighboring regions of northeastern India." Continue reading

Checking Out Tomorrow's Library

In Paris, an International Working Group Shows Off the Prototype For a Multilingual 'Intellectual Cathedral' of Digitized Knowledge

By John Ward Anderson, Washington Post Foreign Service -- Thursday, October 18, 2007; A21

PARIS, Oct. 17 -- As ideas go, they don't come much bigger: Digitize the accumulated wisdom of humankind, catalogue it, and offer it for free on the Internet in seven languages.The first phase of that simple yet outlandishly ambitious dream is about a year away from being realized, according to a group of international librarians, computer technicians and U.N. officials who unveiled a prototype for the project, called the World Digital Library, in Paris on Wednesday.

Its creators see it as the ultimate multilingual, multicultural tool for researching and retrieving information about knowledge and creativity from any era or place. The WDL Web site ( http://www.worlddigitallibrary.org/) will provide access to original documents, films, maps, photographs, manuscripts, musical scores and recordings, architectural drawings and other primary resources through a variety of search methods. ...

Info courtesy: "Ali Houissa"

Pachauri is the seventh Indian to win the Nobel Prize

UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) chief Dr Rajendra Pachauri 'stunned' on receiving Nobel

"I was not expecting any award for my efforts. I feel privileged to share it with Al Gore. I am only a symbolic recipient but it is the organisation which has been awarded,'' he said. "'With this award to the committee, the issue of climate change will come to the fore. It places a larger responsibility on me and I will ensure that more will be done."

Other Indians to win the coveted international recognition are: Rabindranath Tagore (1913) for literature, Sir C V Raman (1930) for Physics, Dr Hargobind Khurana (1968) for Medicine and Physiology, Dr Subramaniam Chandrasekar (1983) for Physics, Mother Teresa (1979) for Peace and Dr Amartya Sen (1998) for Economics. [see also: India Info Centre]

• Climate Change and Peoples Capitalism @ Faith Commons

• The Color Yellow. Run, Al Gore, Run! (Run, ICRISAT, Run!)

Al Gore ran for US President and lost; he has been running for Global Prescient for 30 years and just won the Nobel Peace Prize, October 13. When running, act locally, think globally. Now at peace, Al Gore is not running for President and losing again. He has been running a greater race. Run, Al Gore, run!

Participatory Librarianship: The Library as Conversation

An introduction to the participatory librarianship test bed, by Dave Lankes.



See also:

Participatory Librarianship: The Library as Conversation [pdf format]

Participatory Librarianship « Ellen: Learning Library 2.0

The Participatory Librarianship Talking Tour 2007

Massive Scale Librarianship

Excerpts from the "Really Modern Library" blog entry:

"The goal of this project is to shed light on the big questions about future accessibility and usability of analog culture in a digital, networked world."

"Our aim with the Really Modern Library project is not to build a physical or even a virtual library, but to stimulate new thinking about mass digitization and, through the generation of inspiring new designs, interfaces and conceptual models, to spur innovation in publishing, media, libraries, academia and the arts."

The blog entry also mentions "plans for a major international design competition calling for proposals, sketches, and prototypes for a hypothetical 'really modern library.' " The blog entry goes on to describe this competiton as follows:

"The call for entries will go out to as broad a community as possible, including designers, artists, programmers, hackers, librarians, archivists, activists, educators, students and creative amateurs. Our present intent is to raise a large sum of money to administer the competition and to have a pool for prizes that is sufficiently large and meaningful that it can compel significant attention from the sort of minds we want working on these problems."

For more info, go to: the really modern library

Info courtesy: Bernie Sloan.

RANGANATHAN REVISITED: FACETS FOR THE FUTURE

ISKO UK meeting: Connecting communities: Content, knowledge, information: Same Difference?

Event Details:
5th November 2007
14:00 - 18:00
Venue
University College London
Sir David Davies Lecture Theatre (G08), Ground Floor, Engineering Faculty
Roberts Building, Torrington Place, WC1E 7JE

Programme

14:00	Vanda Broughton	Facet analysis as a fundamental theory of knowledge organization
14:40	Claudio Gnoli	‘Classic’ vs. 'freely' faceted classification
15:20	Jan Wyllie Simon Eaton	Faceted classification as an intelligence analysis tool
16:00	Tea/coffee
16:30	Factiva	Faceted Categorisation for the corporate desktop Visualisation and interaction using metadata to enhance user experience
17:15	Aduna	AutoFocus: An Open-source Facet-Driven Enterprise Search Solution
18:00	Networking, wine & nibbles

Click here for more Info

The BOBs - BEST OF THE BLOGS - My Electronic Library 2.0

PS. If you see it deserves, vote this blog [request to circulate this message by Blogmaster Heyam Hayek, a Kids Librarian.]