Just some of the engaging items to cross my screen so far this month.

• There is a nice post on the Wired Campus blog summing up reasons why the recent reversal of the Georgia State ruling may not be all bad for libraries. The item highlights points from two experts whose copyright news-related writing I’ve mentioned before in Blog Buzz: Kevin Smith of Duke, and Nancy Sims at the University of Minnesota.
• CNN passed along news from Engadget that Google is testing a Chat with a Doctor option for medical symptom searches. This raises many questions and could be the subject of a very long in-depth post touching on various complex issues. Even if issues of privacy, quality and regulation were set aside, wouldn’t a paid chat service be taking advantage of the health searcher’s anxiety that it is supposedly intended to ameliorate? Continue reading →

Here are some of the stories bouncing around the internet in recent weeks:

• Some of the internet’s most popular sites jointed in a protest against the FCC’s proposed net-neutrality laws.  Mozilla, Netflix, Reddit and more placed a “buffering” symbol on their pages to signify what users might see if internet speeds were controlled by those companies willing to pay. The New York Times Bits blog dives a bit deeper.

• Nature discusses the White House’s new strategy to deal with antibiotic resistance. The Wall Street Journal highlights some of the plan’s criticism in Pharmalot.

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Some interesting tidbits over the last few weeks in the blog-o-verse…

• Dr. Paul Knoepfler of UC Davis asks on his blog if the large numbers of recent retractions in Nature may be a good thing. Knoepfler discusses the pattern of retractions in the journal over time, the higher numbers of retractions in the last two years, and some ideas about what could be going on.

• Margaret Atwood is the first author to contribute a work to The Future Library Project according to this report in The Guardian. Over the next 100 years, works will be added and remain secret until they are finally read in 2114 after being printed on paper from 1,000 trees, recently planted trees near Oslo.

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