The Distant Librarian (Paul Pival) points out that many libraries are running Meebo to gather IM requests from multiple clients (AOL, MSN, Yahoo!, GTalk).

Inspired by Amit Agarwal (Digital Inspiration) who explains how to set up Google Talk in a Firebox sidebar, Paul set up Meebo so that it, too, will run in the sidebar in Firefox.  You can browse in Firefox while Meebo follows along in a sidebar.  Paul’s directions and screen shots are very helpful, and if you haven’t visited Digital Inspiration — it’s a great source for tips, tools, and hacks.

 eWeek reports that widgets — which are shortcut links downloaded to computer desktops — are being used to track stock portfolios, mortgage rates, baby due dates, as corporate marketing tools, and many other ways.

“The user’s desktop is extremely valuable, it’s prime real estate,” said Paul Brody, Yahoo vice president of desktop products, in Sunnyvale, California.

Desktop widgets, also called gadgets or modules, can serve as short cuts to other Web sites. They are becoming more and more diverse, and represented by pictures, logos and or even interactive games.  The new Windows Vista comes with “gadgets” and Google has many widgets you can add to your desktop or personalized home page.

Yahoo has more than 4,300 widgets, including company-branded ones, and many are written by third parties.   The “airport status” widget shown can be found in the Yahoo Widget Gallery.  It displays FAA-reported status (such as delays, shutdowns, and weather incidents) for major airports in the US.  A preferences option allows filtering for a specific airport.

Widgets are being developed for many uses.  Popular ones include weather trackers, news feeds, train, bus and flight schedules, stocks and currencies.  A widget coffee alarm will sound when it is time for a break and an alcohol calculator widget allows brewers to determine the alcohol content.

Whether widgets are time-wasters or have the potential to be exploited by advertisers, one analyst says people like them for their cool factor, but they won’t help you solve the whole information overload problem.

It’s good advice to play it safe and download widgets only from established sites.
 

Do you research the web, take notes, and want to organize and maybe share them?  There are several web clipping services, including Google Notebook .

The idea is to clip and collect text, images, and links from web pages to your Google Notebook without ever leaving your browser window.  They can then be organized into “notebooks,” and accessed from any computer using your Google Accounts login.  You can also publish and share your Notebooks.

The service recently introduced a new interface and some new features such as the ability to add maps to published notebooks.  You can sort notebooks by name or date, and easily add a new note or section. 

 Clipmarks is another clipping service that advertises itself as “a new way to save and share the interesting things you find on the web. Our free browser add-on lets you clip text, images and videos from inside web pages then save, blog, email and print what you clip.” The Clipmarks web site features shared clips, or you can keep your clips private.  All clips are saved online and you log in to the Clipmarks site to see them. 

They also have a tool — Clip-to-Blog — that help you clip to blogs hosted on Blogger, WordPress, TypePad, LiveJournal, Movable Type and Vox, and they provide an embed code so you can copy and paste clips into other personal spaces such as MySpace.  Check out the video showing how the tool works.

Texters can now retrieve airline numbers, flight status, and airline phone numbers from their phones using Google SMS.  Lifehacker gives us tips on how to do it.  If you haven’t used Google SMS before, you’ll be pleased to find the amount of information you can get this way.

There is an interactive demo at the Google site.

I’ve written before about Citizendium, the  Citizens’ Compendium, but it wasn’t quite ready for prime time.  As of March 25, 2007, the compendium says it is working on 1,000 articles. 

Billed as an experimental new wiki project started by Larry Sanger, 38, that aims to be an improved competitor to Wikipedia, Citizendium adds “gentle expert oversight” and requires contributors to use their real name rather than a pseudonym which is acceptable to Wikipedia.  Sanger cliams to be a founder of Wikipedia — a point disputed by Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales.

Created to offer a more “reliable” (read accurate) free encyclopedia, Sanger hopes Citizendium will become a strong competitor to Wikipedia through its professionalism and credibility.

“If there’s going to be a free encyclopedia, I’d like there to be a better free encyclopedia,” says Sanger in a Seattle P-I article.  “It has bothered me that I helped to get a project started, Wikipedia, that people are misusing…, and yet the project itself has little chance of radically improving.”

Citizendium has been operating in a limited manner that ends with this week’s official launch.  Its volunteer base numbers roughly 900 authors and 200 editors.  Because of massive press coverage of their recent launch, they write that you can expect intermittent service problems this week.

Want to view your Google calendar, weather, and news headlines alongside your Gmails?  Add extra keyboard shorcuts?  Access Gmail from your mobile?

makeuseof.com brings us Gmail tips and tools that range from the “why bother” to the “gotta’ have it.”  They include Firefox Add-ons, Greasemonkey scripts, and desktop apps and web tools of various kinds.  [via Lifehacker]

Web Worker Daily brings us 18 ways to jazz up Google Calendar, including ways to customize, set event reminders, access your calendar from you IM client, add to-do lists, share dates with others, and more.

The New York Times reports that Senior Judge Lowell A. Reed Jr. of Federal District Court in Philadelphia struck down a 1998 law that made it a crime for Web sites to allow children to gain access to material deemed “harmful.”

The ruling is the second major setback in federal efforts to control Internet pornography. The United States Supreme Court struck down a similar law in 1997.  Judge Reed ruled that the law was ineffective, overly broad and at odds with free speech rights, adding that there were far less restrictive methods like software filters that parents could use to control their children’s Internet use.

“Despite my personal regret at having to set aside yet another attempt to protect our children from harmful material,” Judge Reed wrote, he said he was blocking the law out of concern that “perhaps we do the minors of this country harm if First Amendment protections, which they will with age inherit fully, are chipped away in the name of their protection.” 

Civil libertarians applauded Judge Reed’s decision as a victory for free speech and creativity on the Internet.

The Internet “would have had to be brought down to a level that is acceptable to a 6-year-old and that would have had a devastating effect on the kind of interactions that take place on the Internet,” Chris Hansen, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union said.  See the article for more background and details, and the PDF court decision.

OCLC Research has updated its list of the top 1000 titles owned by member libraries — the intellectual works that have been judged to be worth owning by the “purchase vote” of libraries around the globe.  You can view the list by category. 

More than 57,000 libraries in 112 countries and territories around the world use OCLC services to locate, acquire, catalog, lend and preserve library materials.

It looks like WebEx, recently purchased by Cisco, will have competition from Zoho Meeting, Zoho’s new online meeting application currently in private Beta.  They advertise “Web Conferencing - Meet Online • Demonstrate • Access.”  There is a demo video but the audio is a bit difficult to understand.

TechCrunch says that “Zoho Meeting lets each member view (zoom in/out) and remotely control the host’s desktop, chat, add participants, email the host, and view meeting details.  Sessions can also be recorded and downloaded by users.  Chat is handled with Zoho chat, which will soon have VOIP capability as well.  Basically, if you want to demo something remotely, Zoho Meeting is going to be a very compelling choice.”

In addition, the Flash viewer will let users embed meetings anywhere flash is accepted, such as a website. This embed will also work for Zoho Show, which will allow hosts to remotely demo to a large crowd from within a slide containing the embed code.  Zoho Meeting will integrate with other Zoho apps through Zoho Chat, and Zoho users will soon be able to call a meeting with any Zoho user by clicking a link in their chat box, making it possible to not only say, but show what you mean.

Zoho has an interesting and growing number of useful web-based applications.