14 Personalized Homepages Compared, Feature by Feature
Count on Mashable to help us choose among multiple options on the web.  Now they give us a “start page showdown.”  Includes Netvibes, Pageflakes, iGoogle, MyYahoo and more.  In addition to a look at the “look” of the start pages, there’s a helpful feature chart.

Web Conferencing Tools compared
Here’s a round-up of reviews of affordable web conferencing and online collaboration tools from Robin Good. 

As the post points out, there are so many possibilities these days, it is difficult to choose among them.  Tools that are generally aimed at enterprises (that can afford them) are left out since they wanted to provide a list of usable low-cost alternatives.  Includes a comparaison chart and a continuously updated news “radar.”

If you have accounts on Flickr, Picasa, YouTube, Facebook or Box.net, there is now a Firefox extension that lets you upload and download videos, pictures, documents and other files to those websites from a common interface.

Digital Inspiration says it is easy to get started with Universal Uploader — download it here  or here.

The ‘Wright’ Cop on the Copyright Beat
Check out a new feature on the Library of Congress Blog designed to educate young folks on the basics of copyright — before they go out and infringe on it unintentionally.

GPL 3 officially released
The GPL is an open-source software license used by many high-profile open-source software projects, including the Linux kernel.  GPL explicitly guarantees users the right to modify, repurpose, and redistribute software.  Read all about the new release at Ars Technica.

In less than 2 minutes, Lee Lefever’s video explains why social networking websites are so popular today.  If you haven’t seen them, take a look also at two previous videos:  “Wikis in Plain English” and “RSS in Plain English.”

Coming soon to a Pageflake start page near you…

Mashable says Pageflakes is taking steps to turn itself into more of a social network with its latest offering, called Blizzard.  The launch has been pushed back from June until July to incorporate more features that users desire.

With Blizzard, Pageflakes will have a “People” tab in order to find other Pageflakes users and subscribe to others’ Pagecasts. 

Their conclusion:  “The beauty of moving from a personalized front page into a larger social network is the capacity for more sharing between users - Pageflakes ceases to be an individual experience and becomes a social one.  As Facebook becomes more like an aggregated startpage, it’s interesting to note that startpages are becoming more like social networks.”

A number of blogs are reporting today on Google Maps new “draggability,” which O’Reilly Radar says is a real product booster. 

You can now drag a route on a map to change the streets it takes, add a destination anywhere on a map just by right-clicking or by dragging an existing place marker to a new location.

Google Blogoscope explains it this way:  “First, you can right-click a part of the map and select  “directions from here.” Then right-click another part of the map and pick  “directions to here.”  A route will appear in blue, and you can now click a spot anywhere along that route, and drag it to another position… say, because you want to make a stop someplace nice, or you prefer driving along the coast.  I gotta say this drag & drop feature works extremely smooth, updating the route in real-time…”

Take a look at Google’s video.

OCLC and WebJunction announced at the ALA Conference recently that the Gates Foundation’s U.S. Libraries Initiative had awarded them a large grant. 

One of the grant’s goals is to ensure WebJunction’s self-sustainability within OCLC by strengthening its revenue-generating activities and creating additional services to assist all types of libraries. “The self-sustaining aspect is important,” OCLC’s Bob Murphy emphasized, “because we want WebJunction to continue on and on, and to be a place that library professionals can count on for their continuing education needs.”

Since its 2003 launch, WebJunction has garnered more than 29,000 registered members, and more than 300,000 unique users have visited the site.  [American Libraries]

When the FBI came calling with a National Security Letter (NSL) — which doesn’t require a judge’s approval –to order the release of patron computer records,  four librarians declined to comply.  They were convinced that the feds had no right to intrude on anyone’s privacy without a court order.

Wired Blog Network notes that life got really interesting for them after that.  Under a gag order, they weren’t allowed to reveal that they had received an NSL or even to talk to each other by phone or email.

The ACLU took on the case and it went to court in Bridgeport, Conn. The librarians were not allowed to attend their own hearing, only to watch it on closed circuit TV from a locked courtroom in Hartford, 60 miles away. “Our presence in the courtroom was declared a threat to national security,” one of the librarians said.

This same librarian was identified publically by the FBI despite the fact that he was legally required to keep his identity secret.  Then  reporters started calling.  One day, the AP called the librarian’s house, got his son on the phone and told him his father was being investigated by the FBI.  Still under the gag order, the librarian was unable to explain to either his family or co-workers what was was going on.  The ACLU even advised him to move to a safehouse.

Finally, the Bridgeport court ruled that the librarians’ constitutional rights had been violated and the government appealed the decision to U.S. District Court in Manhattan.  Around the same time, “the Congressional spin machine kicked into overdrive.”  Once President Bush reauthorized the Patriot Act, the FBI lifted the librarians’ gag order. “By withdrawing the gag order before the court had made a decision, they withdrew the case from scrutiny,” the librarian said. This eliminated the possibility that the NSL provisions would be struck down.

When the Patriot Act was reauthorized, a five year prison term for violating the gag order was added to it, and today there are likely hundreds, if not thousands, of similar stories that cannot be told.

 From Google Operating System blog, good news about Google News.  Go to the site to see the most important news in images and select the new image view.  Hover over an image and you’ll be able to read a snippet from the news in an animated sidebar and see images from related news.

This feature is also available for search results and it’s easy to toggle between the standard view, the image view and a text  version. You can also restrict the results to news sites or to images that contain faces. 

Among the finalists in the Microsoft Imagine Cup is a group of North American college students who created a site that leverages social networking concepts for language instruction.  According to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, the software projects displayed Tuesday at Microsoft were all developed to tackle educational challenges. 

The North American project, Omni, connects people who are learning languages, using a social approach to translation.  The basic idea is to tap into “the excitement surrounding social networks” to help people learn languages, said team member Brian Thomas, 21, of Tacoma, a computer science major at Western Washington University.

The North American team’s project connects users based on their interests and their levels of ability in the languages they’re learning.  For example an English speaker interested in communicating in Chinese could submit a message to a pool for translation.  Someone else further along in Chinese lessons would then translate the message before it was sent, honing the skills of the translator and helping the sender learn.

“Software being used to help facilitate education is one of the most exciting things about the whole software revolution,” Bill Gates told the students before touring their projects with Craig Mundie, Microsoft’s chief research and strategy officer.

The competition is in its sixth year, and Microsoft says 100,000 students from more than 100 countries have participated this year.  The level of sophistication of the submitted projects grows every year.