British Library books go digital: is it okay for these books to only be available through the British Library and Microsoft Live? The answer I think is that they should be discoverable through the usual channels (Microsoft Live is not the usual channel for most people) and directly accessible without 'institutional' barriers. SO the BL ought to expose its content outside of its digital walls.

does this (pdf Object) simplify the semantic web or complicate it?

What good is IPSV? (Integrated Public Sector Vocabulary)

I've just found this post and have to say I agree. See comment about librarians at the end of the post. The value of taxonomies/vocabularies has to be re-examined in a world that may not be using them.

Mary Foley: Five take aways on Microsoft’s new Live Search includes a note on their new health search vertical.

Minimap is working really well in Firefox. Highlighting an address and dropping it in the sidebar if its open, or using the right hand menu, produces the sort of result illustrated. Only problem so far is that it persistently puts the MRC headquarters near Millbank Towers. This was the first home of the Ministry for Technology. With the pressure on the MRC these days perhaps this is a very subtle semantic web joke.

Norway.no - MyPage

Norway.no - MyPage: "MyPage will bring public service offerings together in a web portal. You will have your own custom page on this citizen portal. The information will be structured thematically, and the services will be grouped and sorted according to your needs. It should be easy for you to find the services you need without any previous knowledge of who is responsible. MyPage represents, therefore, an opportunity for a simple and effective dialogue with the public sector. It will also give an overview of what information the individual agencies have on you. The information and services on MyPage will be provided by agencies and authorities at all levels of public administration, ranging from large central government agencies to small local authorities. To gain access to the information and services, all you need to do is to log on by means of the PIN codes on your tax deduction card and a self-selected password. This is how MyPage will make daily life easier for most people."

Microsoft plays catch up on search as the article says, there's not much new. But one thing looks interesting --user reviews and ratings when searching for products. Interesting to see if reviews can be extracted from sites without them using microformats such as hReview

Public OpenID providers - OpenID Wiki

Preview of a medical device that does not exist yet

Health 2.0 Conference - Social Netwoks

Wired Science: anti-open access PR plan revealed - the PRISM/AAP approach looks pretty shameful.

Cover Pages: W3C GRDDL Recommendation Bridges HTML/Microformats and the Semantic Web. could be the meeting point between top down and bottom up approaches to the semantic web.

"Tim Berners-Lee, W3C Director compared GRDDL to style specifications: 'Sometimes one line of code can make a world of difference. Just as stylesheets make Web pages more readable to people, GRDDL makes Web pages, microformat tags, XML documents, and data more readable to Semantic Web applications, opening more data to new possibilities and creative reuse.'"

NCBI Resource Locator creates stable, addressable URLs for various NCBI resources, including PubMed. This was a requirement in the OBS for Clinical KNowledge Summaries, but hasn't been implemented. Part of the Resource Oriented Architecture.

Minimap is a very neat Firefox add-on, giving map functionality in a sidebar

Facebook Developers Wiki

IBM Lotus Symphony - freeware office suite with a rather old name

Brown pledges to expand GP access - the portability of primary care records, under the ownership of patients, is the key to expanding access

Google Maps in your car

Microsoft thinks Google Apps is a bad idea

Peter Suber: Elsevier opens up access to oncology journals, tries ad revenue model

HL7 Watch = HL7 is too complex.

Vitalist, a web based GTD, has some nice features, including a way to drop it straight into Netvibes and iGoogle, as this screenshot shows: