The Material Culture of Mad Men — Via Steve Lubar, an intriguing interview with the prop master of Mad Men, a hit television drama set in early 1960s New York and acclaimed for its realism and attention to historical detail.
Enough Wave, Improve Google Docs — Google Wave may be all the rage among the trendy kids, but I agree that Google Should Stop Playing Around With Wave and spend its energy improving Google Docs … both for its own sake and ours.
Real Time Web Search is Here — You may have read that both Microsoft’s Bing and Google have reached agreements with Twitter to make user updates (“tweets”) searchable. (The Bing Twitter Search is live; Google’s effort is on the way.) The O’Reilly Radar blog has a good overview of why this is important news.
Utah State OpenCourseWare in Trouble — Budget cuts at Utah State have put the University’s OpenCourseWare program in jeopardy. Other outlets have reported the story as the “closing” of Utah State’s OpenCourseWare project. But the Univeristy’s OpenCourseWare website is still live, and just because the project has formally ended, the program doesn’t necessarily have to go away. It’s my hope at least that the site can remain up and running through central IT and faculty efforts, despite the project’s $120,000 annual budget line having been eliminated and its director having been let go.
