"Blogs" (short for "Web logs") are one of the most recent trends in Internet content creation. Bloggers have gained visibility recently in political circles and have even been giving the mainstream press a run for its money. These days, everyone and his brother seems to have a blog (except me), and a number of Internet service providers now host Web sites designed to support bloggers and discussion boards associated with blogs (e.g., www.blogger.com).

Blogging styles range from long, carefully researched articles to collections of short, impressionist, stream-of-consciousness blurbs. Political blogs run across the entire political spectrum and range from flaming rants to serious, carefully researched news reports.

There are a few blogs devoted to operations research. The INFORMS Online Resources page (www.informs.org/Resources/) turns up five, although it is not clear if all of them are active. Searching for "operations research" and "blog" on Google turns up about 160,000 results, but only a few appear to be actual blogs devoted primarily to operations research.

Here are links to a few O.R.-related blogs that looked current and interesting as of press time:

• Michael Trick's Operations Research Blog (MTORB), last update 12/30/05 (http://mtorb.blogspot.com/)
  
  
• Francisco Marco-Serrano's FM Waves: The Dark Side of an Operations Researcher, last update 12/21/2005 (http://fmarcos.blogspot.com/)
  
  
• T. C. Chiang's On the Road to Production Scheduling, last update 1/9/2006 (http://www.wretch.cc/blog/tcchiang/)
  
  
• Roger Grinde's Operations Research Applications, last update 11/02/2005 (http://orapplications.blogspot.com/)

(The last updates are as of this writing, early January 2006.)

Technorati


Technorati (www.technorati.com) is a search engine for blogs that is kept actively updated by the blogs themselves. It tracks incoming and outgoing links and "tags" (for those readers who know HTML, Technorati tags are HTML anchor tags with a relationship attribute of type "tag") and indexes blog entries accordingly.

Registered users can save searches and repeat them at will to get updated results. For hot topics, a user can open a "mini" — a window that updates search results for a term once every minute.

There's not that much on math or O.R. here yet; there is some on science, computers, business and economics (though much of that is tinged with politics and social commentary). But the technology itself is interesting, based on ideas similar to Google's count of inbound and outbound references, tracking blog references and updating in real time.

Podcasting


Apple's iPod and similar devices are in the process of revolutionizing distribution of audio and video content. First came music, distributed online as MP3 files (legally, for a nominal fee per tune, with digital rights management (DRM) included). The latest product is a video iPod, with music videos and programs offered the same way. In addition, many sites that offer streaming content now also offer MP3s of their programming (known as "podcasts"), designed to be loaded on an MP3 player, a computer or burned to a CD, and consumed offline.

Apple's video iPod has a 2.5-inch color display. Some cell phone providers are also beginning to provide audio and video downloads to phones with similar displays as an add-on service. Maybe I'm just showing my age, but while video podcasting may make sense in some cases, I don't find the idea of watching videos on these devices terribly appealing. It is to be fervently hoped that watching video podcasts while driving doesn't catch on.

Google Books


New and highly controversial in the publishing industry, Google Books (http://books.google.com) is the latest search facility available from Google. Google Books allows searching of entire texts of a large library of books. Search results allow the user to view a few snippets near the matched string in each matching book. With the publisher's permission, a few pages may be shown. Books that are out of copyright are fully accessible. In addition, one or more links to online bookstores are presented.

As an example, a search on the phrase "integer programming" turned up 13,500 pages containing the term in 289 books. For each book entry, I could view about four pages around one match. There was also a link with each book to more matches from that book. Viewing the additional matches or more than a few original matches required registration (registered users of other Google features such as g-mail can use their existing registration information). Google claims that with registration, they track users to limit the total number of viewed pages from any source.

Google's original plan was to digitize the entire holdings of several major university research libraries. Some publishers objected to this service on the grounds that scanning the complete books constituted a copyright violation. Google took the position that because it presented only snippets or a few pages at a time, it was engaged in "fair use," and that providing limited access will encourage users to purchase the books. A final determination has not been reached yet, but for now, Google presents full pages only with the publisher's permission.



Matthew Saltzman (mjs@ces.clemson.edu) is an associate professor of Mathematical Sciences at Clemson University and the editor of INFORMS Online.

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