Consider: Untitled 1

http://www.boingboing.net/2008/04/24/untitled-1.html

more information in fewer hands

Weekly News Digest from Info Today reports on the Thomson happenings:

On April 17, The Thomson Corp. announced that it had completed its acquisition of Reuters Group, PLC, forming Thomson Reuters, a provider of "intelligent information" for businesses and professionals in the financial, legal, tax and accounting, scientific, healthcare, and media markets. Thomson Reuters has more than 50,000 employees with operations in 93 countries on six continents and 2007 pro forma revenues of approximately $12.4 billion.

Update: it shouldn't go unnoticed that Thomson Reuters had to go through tough federal anti-trust scrutiny to make the merge. Librarians have a duty to develop collections of information from diverse sources... a few more major consolidations like this & there won't be any diversity of database sources to speak of. Buy small press (and build homebrew) while you still can. I'm not knocking the value of what Thomson Reuters has to deliver, but I don't like being forced into smaller and smaller cattle chutes to get at what I need.

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Reading: Not Loompanics Press anymore. Don't forget the value of niche info.
Listening: "Nutbush City Limits"

gale, readspeaker

At Library Journal, Michael Rogers reports that Gale's going to add text-to-audio software into 6 of its databases (including Opposing Viewpoints!)

Hope the voices aren't super canned and tinny sounding like other such audio/text programs are, but even if they are robotic I'll be very happy to have this tool handy. Yessir.

ok, so i'm a copycat

I'm a copycat too.
But man, I love me some playlist.com... been waiting for a really good .mp3 search engine for a while now. Love it maybe just as much as I do Pandora...
Enjoy while you can, before the RIAA or the CIA or Hillary Clinton or some other finger shaker takes it all away.
(You know, we ought to shake our fingers too every once in a while...)

sphering the square

News on AOL's Sphere deal at Information Today's Newsbreaks.
Comments here...