The latest from the blogosphere

It has been a while since I blogged last. This is what I have found on the iLibrarinan blog, that could be of interest:

A New Look for Delicious
The Delicious social bookmarking website has undergone a transformation to a sleek new design which is much easier on the eyes. What has change:
- “Speed: We’ve moved to a new infrastructure that makes every page faster.
- Search: We’ve completely overhauled our search engine to make it faster and more powerful.
- Design: Finally, we’ve updated the user interface to improve usability and add a few often-requested features (such as selectable detail levels and alphabetical sorting of bookmarks). Check out the What’s New page for an overview of the changes.
Have a look at my sciencelibrarian on Delicious to see all these changes. I'm really impressed with the new "makeover" as it is much easier to spot the tagged information.

70+ Open Courseware Resources
Christina Laun at CollegeDegrees.com has compiled The Ultimate Guide to Using Open Courseware: 70+ Apps, Search Engines and Resources for Free Learning.

Pirated and Open Source Books
These are quite a few projects with Open Source books which have been made free by their copyright holders. If you are a student or a professor about to choose your readings for the fall semester, you may want to consider some of these choices: Textbook Revolution ; Global Text Project etc.

50 Ways to use Social Media to Improve Marketing
Chris Brogan discusses 50 Ways Marketers Can use Social Media to Improve Their Marketing.

Chemspider: Chemical Search Engine

I have found about this product through the Nature issue dated 8/05/08.

This New Chemical Search Engine can be accessed @ http://www.chemspider.com/

According to their web page:

ChemSpider is a free access service providing a structure centric community for chemists. Providing access to millions of chemical structures and integration to a multitude of other online services ChemSpider is the richest single source of structure-based chemistry information.

It has been built with the intention of aggregating and indexing chemical structures and their associated information into a single searchable repository and make it available to everybody, at no charge.
ChemSpider is a value-added offering of publicly available chemical structures since many additional properties have been added to each of the chemical structures. We intend ChemSpider to offer the fastest chemical structure searches available online and delivered with the flexibility and usability necessary to encourage repeat usage. A quick browse of the manual will help understand how ChemSpider can be of value.

With ChemSpider the intention is to aggregate into a single database all chemical structures available within open access and commercial databases and to provide the necessary pointers from the ChemSpider search engine to the information of interest. This service will allow users to either access the data immediately via open access links or have the information necessary to continue their searches into commercially available systems.

ChemSpider was released in March of 2007. At present the database contains information from such diverse sources as a marine natural products database, from all commercially available ACD/Labs databases, from the EPA’s DSSTox efforts and from a series of chemical vendors. The data collections will continue to expand.

Click on ChemRef to search through the following literature sources:
- International Journal of Electrochemical Science
- Association of Clinical Biochemists of India
- Molecular Diversity Preservation International
- PubMed Central
- Hindawi Publishing Corporation
- International Union of Crystallography
- Medknow Publications
- RepositoriUM

Click on Search to have different search options:
- Simple search: Systematic Name, Synonym, Trade Name,Registry Number
- Structure search
- LASSO search: A new 3D ligand activity surfaced-based similarity tool from SImBioSys gives users the power to quickly screen large datasets for structurally diverse active molecules
- Advanced LASSO
- Chemical elements
- Properties search
- Predicted properties
- Data Source search
- Literature source (see ChemRef)
- PubChem search
- Advanced search
- Searches history

Have a look at this search engine, and explore all the possibilities that offers

Useful reading, the article publish in Nature, 7th May 2008:

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2013937/posts

Open Source PDF Creator

PDF Creator: Instead of paying for a program that can generate PDF files: use this convenient tool instead. It easily creates PDFs from any Windows program ( Power Points, Publisher, Word, etc.)

I have found this Open Source PDF Creator on Monday and decided to download it. I always have the need to convert documents in PDF and every time I run to our IT for assistance. But, now I can do it myself and it very convenient to have it.

To download start with the following steps:

* Click on the "green" Download PDF Creator

* Scroll down the page and Click on: Download (PDF Creator - Dec 2007 release)

* Then select the file to download from the Table

Once downloaded the PDF Creator will appear as a PRINT option. Once you click on PRINT (the original document), select "PDF Creator" option to convert the document in PDF. It will ask you to save the new document and then the conversion will start. It tooks seconds for the document to be converted. It is very easily done and will save you a lot of memory space, if your document is originally big.

I hope this will be a good solution to those who do not have PDF option on their computers.