July 28th, 2010 by Joe Garity
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For the last couple of months, if you search Google and put in words like oil spill or gulf oil spill, at the top of the results list, you will get an ad from BP with the title BP Response. In it, BP gives you their side of the story about the oil disaster in the gulf and how they are responding to it. Unless you look carefully, it is easy to confuse the BP ad with the Google search results.
It is common on search engines that ads respond to your search terms, but this is the first time that I can remember that not only is the ad appearing, but where on the results page it appears is always the same. The real estate of web pages matter. By always placing the ad between the search box and the results list, it can blur the line between ads and search results.
There have been articles in the news about this and sites discussing the ethics of this. And according to some articles, BP has done the same on Yahoo and Bing.
My guess is that this case will be studied for years in business schools and how BP has used search engines to put out their message is an important part of their public relations strategy. There is nothing wrong with ads, of course. Google is able to digitize some amazing things because of their ad income. But we as search engine users need to be aware of how information can be influenced by things like the placement of ads on a results page. And as a librarian, I have to point out the obvious: library databases don’t have ads and so how their results display cannot be influenced like this.
July 21st, 2010 by Kelci
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Hello! At Book Club we decided to expand our horizons with a poetry selection for August. I suggested a book I read about a year ago and really loved (as a poet I have a low tolerance for bad or deliberately inaccessible poetry, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets aside…). Thankfully everyone else was game and agreed to read it!
Breakfast with Thom Gunn by local poet Randall Mann.
We have one copy of this book here at Gleeson and it’s currently checked out. You can request it through Link+, but there’s only a couple copies in that system. The other alternative is to request it through San Francisco Public Library, who has a handful of copies spread throughout the branch libraries in the city. Otherwise you can support a local book store and purchase it there, or you can buy an ebook version for your Kindle/iPad/whathaveyou.
We hope to meet in the Community Garden if the weather is nice. In case it is foggy/chilly, we will be in our back-up location: the seminar room of Gleeson Library (#209). Look for an email reminder on the morning of the 18th regarding our location. To sign up for the email list, contact Kelci at kbaughmanmcdowell@usfca.edu.
“With audacious wit and formal prowess equal to the master to whom he pays homage, Randall Mann has written a book both poignant and humorous, where one minute ‘we stand above it all’ and the next minute we are reading ‘the notes of the drowned.’ Mann invites us a into a ghastly metropolis, its emptiness and ruin nonetheless populated with remarkable sites of grace. If this were only the evacuated city, ‘the nothingness behind us/the nothingness ahead,’ the permanent red of Ilium scattered with fallen bodies, the feral world of nonchalant disease, rent boys and assassins, it would simply be another note of irretrievable loss in the parade of human history. But with purling fountains and lush gardens, Mann reveals the transitory but beguiling beauty that holds despair in abeyance, that reminds us of why desire propels us forward. ‘Soon we will be underground,’ he says, but for now we enjoy the cherries that dangle tantalizingly before us.”—D. A. Powell
July 21st, 2010 by John Hawk
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