So, Google’s Knol is now live (see this announcement on Google’s Blog). There’ll be comment aplenty about the merits of this service and how it compares to other user contributed content sites.

CrossTech is two years old (less one month) and we have now seen some 145 posts. Breaking the posts down by poster we arrive at the following chart: Note this is not any real attempt at vainglory, more a simple excuse to play with the wonderful Google Chart API.

Andy Powell has published on Slideshare this talk about metadata - see his eFoundations post for notes. It’s 130 slides long and aims Don’t be fooled by the length though. This is a flip through and is a readily accessible overview on the importance of metadata. Slides 86-91 might be of interest here.

Roy Tennant in a post to XML4Lib announces a new list of library APIs hosted at A useful rough guide for us publishers to consider as we begin cultivating the multiple access routes into our own content platforms and tending to the “alphabet soup” that taken together comprises our public interfaces.

The PRISM metadata standards group issued a press release yesterday which covered three points: PRISM Cookbook The Cookbook provides “a set of practical implementation steps for a chosen set of use cases and provides insights into more sophisticated PRISM capabilities. While PRISM has 3 profiles, the cookbook only addresses the most commonly used profile #1, the well-formed XML profile.

With PDF now passed over to ISO as keeper of the format (as blogged here on CrossTech), Kas Thomas (on CMS Watch’s TrendWatch) blogs here that Adobe should now do the right thing by XMP and look to hand that over too in order to establish it as a truly open standard. As he says: And this: He’s absolutely bang on. With XMP on the threshold of finally shining through we really could do with Adobe cutting it loose. It’s time to leave home.

For anybody interested in the why’s and wherefore’s of OpenURL, Jeff Young at OCLC has started posting over on his blog Q6: 6 Questions - A simpler way to understand OpenURL 1.0: Who, What, Where, When, Why, and How (note: no longer available online). He’s already amassing quite a collection of thought provoking posts.

I blogged here back in Jan. 2007 about Adobe submitting PDF 1.7 for standardization by ISO. From yesterday’s ISO press release this: Congrats to Adobe Systems!

This is a follow-on to an earlier post which set out the lie of the land as regards DOI services and data for DOIs registered with Crossref.

This test form shows handle value data being processed by JavaScript in the browser using an OpenHandle service. This is different from the handle proxy server which processes the handle data on the server - the data here is processed by the client. Enter a handle and the standard OpenHandle “Hello World” document is printed. Other processing could equally be applied to the handle values.

With Library of Congress sometime back (Feb. ’08) announcing LCCN Permalinks and NLM also (Mar. ’08) introducing simplified web links with its PubMed identifier one might be forgiven for wondering what is the essential difference between a DOI name and these (and other) seemingly like-minded identifiers from a purely web point of view.