Lee Lefever at the Common Craft show has done it again!  It seems that each video they create is better than the last without losing the “common” touch that is unique to them.

The folks at Reader have added some new features. 

Want to add to your Google Reader feeds without relying on serendipity?  To help with the discovery of interesting sites to subscribe to, Reader has introduced personalized recommendations.

On the Google Reader Home page, look for “Top recommendations” on the right side.  Click on “view all” and you’ll see a number of feeds that you may find interesting.  Reader uses the other feeds you already subscribe to and your Web History data to create the list.  Here’s more on how Google Reader feed recommendations works. 

The other new feature is the ability to organize existing feeds with drag-and-drop support for your subscriptions and folders.  You can now easily move feeds between folders, as well as reorder things up and down within the list.  Hooray!

Courts offer libraries free access to e-records
For the first time, the U.S. court system will provide free access to its online court records at select libraries, reports Government Executive.com.  The PACER service will be free at 16 library systems nationwide under a joint project of the courts and the Government Printing Office.  

“No-fee access to the PACER system will allow the branch libraries outside of major regional centers to provide federal court records to patrons who would otherwise not be able to access these important public documents,” said Catherine Lemann, who is with the Alaska State Court Law Library.  [via AL Direct]

EFF wins release of telecom lobbying records
U.S. District Judge Susan Illston canceled a Friday hearing and ordered the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) to release records by December 10, in time for a congressional debate over granting amnesty for telecommunications companies taking part in illegal electronic surveillance.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) had sued for release of the documents after the ODNI’s slow response to a Freedom Of Information Act request.

Library spaces designed for collaborative learning: Commons 2.0
It was inevitable that the physical “information commons” concept that became popular for libray space planning a few years ago, particularly in higher education, became translated to our Web 2.0 world.  EDUCAUSE Quarterly has an interesting article, saying that “The information commons is a natural extension of the library’s traditional mission in a wired world.”

Of course the Commons must adapt and evolve to meet changing expectations and technological capabilities.  Read about collaborative library spaces, Commons 2.0., in v. 30, #4, 2007.

Google Maps mobile with “my location”
Don’t have GPS on your cell phone but would like to find your location on Google Maps for mobile?  Now you can with “my location” in beta (it doesn’t work with all devices).  Mashable has the news, and several sites have a video obviously made by the wonderful folks at Common Craft.

Social site rankings
TechCrunch asked comScore to look at traffic on some social sites and a few blog platforms.  They have an interesting chart showing Oct. 2006 numbers versus Oct. 2007.  They are conveniently grouped so you can quickly see those that have gained in popularity during the year.

Verizon wireless opens network
Will the first wireless network to give customers more choice in phones they can use start a new trend?  Check out Blogrunner.

It’s that time of year again and BuzzFeed has gathered eight book lists:

• 100 notable books from New York Times
• The best novels you’ve never read
• ALA’s notable children’s books for 2007 
• Pubisher’s Weekly best books
• Amazon’s best books picks
• Best art books 
• Best biographies
• Best books from Guardian  

Using wiki technology in an organization requires a careful balance of freedom and control, says eWeek in a recent article.

They note that wikis were once an exotic collaboration tool used by developers, but have since gone mainstream.  Making them work as a corporate collaboration tool means that IT and business managers will have to strike a careful balance to make wiki deployments a success.

Several examples are given in the article, including Boston College’s Gerald School of Information Management where wikis have completely changed the way associate professor Gerald Kane teaches his classes.  Kane deployed a Socialtext wiki for his students to post ideas and essays and even to suggest questions for exams.  Reportedly, the result has been increased collaboration and interaction between Kane and his students without increasing Kane’s workload.
  
In the corporation, just building a wiki won’t necessarily attract participation.  A core group of active users is needed to support the wiki.  Encouraging contributions becomes a matter of providing incentives for participation and some basic operational rules.  If you are considering an organizational wiki, check out eWeek’s information.

Image by See-ming Lee.  Creative Commons license.

This year forget media downloads — what Cell customers really want is GPS and navigation features, says Business Week Online.

A surge in phones with built-in satellite navigation capability has sparked a wave of mapping and locating services, and has set off a multibillion-dollar scramble by companies to buy up digital navigation technologies.

“The number of navigation-ready cell phones will hit 162 million this year, or more than seven times the number of such devices sold for use in cars or other nonphone gadgets,” says researcher iSuppli. “You only have to scan phone company ads to see how they are touting navigational features:  The new N95 smartphone from Nokia (NOK ) plays music and videos, but it also has a chip that receives signals from the government’s Global Positioning System satellites, enabling the phone to display maps.  Research In Motion (RIMM ) is already putting navigation features into its BlackBerry smartphones.  Other big phonemakers including Motorola (MOT ) and Samsung are doing the same.  Apple (AAPL ), having put a version of Google (GOOG ) Maps on its iPhone, is widely expected to add GPS chips and live mapping in 2008.”

Why has phone-based navigation become hot suddenly? 

Debby Ramundo, for example, is senior project manager at Seattle’s Swedish Medical Center and oversees 200 doctors and nurses who visit patients who can’t travel to a doctor’s office.  Like millions of other people, clinicians are hard-pressed to get to the right place on time.  That can be especially tricky in fast-growing Seattle, where new residential streets pop up out of nowhere.  So last year the medical center handed out GPS-equipped Nextel cell phones.  The phones offer such features as spoken turn-by-turn directions.  The software, from TeleNav, a Sunnyvale (Calif.) company, costs each user $10 a month.

Check out the article for more information about GPS, its businesses and services.

Google Maps replaced the button Hybrid with a button reading Terrain, reports Google Blogoscoped. 

Hybrid showed a mix between satellite imagery and maps data, such as streets or borders — a feature I liked.  There is also a new feature of the Satellite tab, a checkbox which allows you to toggle off the display of labels on the map.

Another change to Google Maps automatically gives you a pop-up Street View image if you search for a site where one is available.  Google Maps Street View allows you to view (pan and zoom) panoramic photos of a limited number of US cities shown below.

 In August, Zoho made its Writer software available offline.  At the time the documents were available in read-only mode when offline.  Now Zoho has announced, you’ll be able to both view and edit your documents offline, using Google’s open source project Google Gears.

You’ll need to have Google Gears plug-in installed on your browser (quick and easy).  It works on Firefox 1.5+ and IE 6+.

“Click on ‘Go Offline’ to access your documents offline.  By default, we download 15 documents each from ‘My Docs’ and ‘Shared Docs’ section.  You can change the default setting by clicking on the down arrow beside ‘Go Offline’ link.  The documents are downloaded based on the ‘Sort Order’ in your ‘My Docs’ section,” advises Raju Vegesna at Zoho.

When you are not connected to the internet, there is a link where you can access and edit your documents offline.  When you are back online, clicking on ‘Go Online’ will let you to synchronize the modified documents with the online versions.

Not all online functionalities are available in offline mode because some are online specific, while others will make their way into the offline mode in the future.

Take a look at the video to see how it works. 

The latest Website Magazine celebrates its two-year anniversary by documenting the rapid evolution of the Web, especially search technology.

Since November, 2005, they say, Google has risen to dominance and there has been an explosion of user-generated content which has made the Web a “platform developed and shaped by users and has come to foster communities all over the world.”

What’s next?  In terms of search, social networks may become better places to find relevant information to satisfy our queries.  Traditional search engines often provide irrelevant - and often manipulated - results.  “Many are wondering if more customized search verticals will unseat popular search engines when it comes to user preference.”

Look here for more about Website Magazine and a link to a free digital subscription.