Amazon Editors’ Picks for 2009 — Amazon.com has released its editors’ picks for the 100 best books of 2009. The “nearly unanimous choice” for the best book of the year is Let the Great World Spin, by Colum McCann, which I haven’t read yet. But I can vouch for #7, Steig Larsson’s The Girl Who Played With Fire, the sequel to his The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, both of which are excellent. In general, if you haven’t read a Swedish murder mystery before, you don’t know what you’re missing.

E-Books More Popular than Games Among iPhone App Developers — Twenty percent of new applications in Apple’s iTunes App Store are books, according to a survey summarized at ReadWriteWeb. That compares to thirteen percent for games. I guess app developers disagree with Steve Jobs’ 2008 assessment that reading is dead or his more recent contention that the iPod Touch is a gaming platform.

More from ArchivesNext on NARA’s Digitization Partnerships — ArchivesNext has some excellent commentary—indeed, original reporting—on the National Archives and Records Administration’s digital partnership agreements, such as the ones it has entered into with Footnote.com. Written partially in response to some poorly thought out comments here at Found History, ArchivesNext provides (as usual) a well considered, well balanced discussion of the issues at play.

Top Ten Disruptive Technologies — Although it’s 18 months old, Gartner’s Top Ten Disruptive Technologies for 2008 to 2012 stands another look. Most of the entries are familiar and sound about right, but I’ll have to read up on a few, including “fabric computing” and “contextual computing.”

Net Neutrality: Pro and Con — Two Op-Eds in The Wall Street Journal present two sides in the debate over the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC’s) proposed net neutrality guidelines and some very different ideas about the meanings of words like “neutral,” “fair,” and “open.” Supportive of the FCC’s proposals are Mitchell Baker and John Lilly of Mozilla. Opposed are U.S. Senators Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) and Jim Demint (R-South Carolina). Worth reading both sides.

DOD <3 Open Source — The United States Department of Defense has put open source software on an equal footing with proprietary software, reports ReadWriteWeb. That’s a big deal, but DOD isn’t first U.S. government agency to make this move. IMLS and NEH, for example, started favoring open source software in their grant making guidelines a couple years ago, which puts the digital humanities and cultural heritage biz way ahead of the game.

The End of Student .edu Email — Citing a study by Educause, The Chronicle of Higher Education’s Wired Campus blog reports that as many as 25% of institutions of higher education are considering eliminating support for student email addresses.

Prep School Library Drops Books in Favor of Kindles — Cushing Academy in Ashburnham, Massachusetts (not far from where I grew up) is in the process of deaccessioning the books in its library in favor of Amazon’s Kindle e-book reader. According to USA Today (hat tip @BryanAlexander), instead of checking out books, from now on Cushing’s students will check out Kindles, pre-loaded with the books they require. Interesting, but I can’t help thinking it’d make more sense to give each kid a Sony Reader or Barnes & Noble Nook and have them download the books they need themselves. Many—if not most—of the book high schoolers need are in the public domain and available on the Sony and B&N devices as free EPUBs from Google Books.

Ubuntu 9.10 — The latest release of the Ubuntu Linux distribution (Version 9.10 “Karmic Koala”) is now available for download. Among the new goodies: 2 GB of free online file storage for syncing through Ubuntu One. I know what I’m doing this weekend.

Verizon Droid, Android 2.0, and Why Early Adopters May Get Burned — Anyone who has read this blog or listened to the Digital Campus podcast knows that I’m an Android fan and optimist. I know I should be cheering the release of the Motorola Droid for Verizon, which—with the help of Android 2.0—looks like it’ll give the iPhone a run for its money. Unfortunately, it looks like the original Android phone, the T-Mobile G1, of which I am a proud (if not always 100% satisfied) owner, may not be able to run the 2.0 version of Android. I understand the importance of improving the Android experience to attract converts, but early adopters should see those improvements as well as the newcomers. Burning your loyal user base doesn’t seem good business. Then again, maybe the Android folks know that many of us will just suck up the extra couple hundred bucks to break our contracts to get our hands on the slick new hardware.

Big Copyright’s History of Anti-Innovation — Ars Technica has an interesting account of the movie studios, music companies, and other large content owners’ historical antipathy to new content delivery mechanisms. Some of the new technologies on the list: the player piano, the television, the .mp3 player, and the digital video recorder.

What the $%@! is Net Neutrality? — Confused about the “net neutrality” issue. The Public Knowledge website has a good intro video. Via @james3neal.

White House Switches to Drupal — The Obama administration has made the switch to Drupal, the open source content management system, for WhiteHouse.gov. Hat tip Rick Shenkman.

The Material Culture of Mad Men — Via Steve Lubar, an intriguing interview with the prop master of Mad Men, a hit television drama set in early 1960s New York and acclaimed for its realism and attention to historical detail.

Enough Wave, Improve Google Docs — Google Wave may be all the rage among the trendy kids, but I agree that Google Should Stop Playing Around With Wave and spend its energy improving Google Docs … both for its own sake and ours.

Real Time Web Search is Here — You may have read that both Microsoft’s Bing and Google have reached agreements with Twitter to make user updates (”tweets”) searchable. (The Bing Twitter Search is live; Google’s effort is on the way.) The O’Reilly Radar blog has a good overview of why this is important news.

Utah State OpenCourseWare in Trouble — Budget cuts at Utah State have put the University’s OpenCourseWare program in jeopardy. Other outlets have reported the story as the “closing” of Utah State’s OpenCourseWare project. But the Univeristy’s OpenCourseWare website is still live, and just because the project has formally ended, the program doesn’t necessarily have to go away. It’s my hope at least that the site can remain up and running through central IT and faculty efforts, despite the project’s $120,000 annual budget line having been eliminated and its director having been let go.

Open Access to AHA Directory Until End of October — The American Historical Association’s (AHA) Directory of History Departments and Organizations is now online and available to all until October 31, 2009. After the trial period, the full directory will be available to members and institutional subscribers. A limited version will remain available to the general public.

Museum in a Day — Mike Ellis and Dan Zambonini are trying to build a Museum In A Day. Follow their progress as they document the work of building a fully functional museum website in 12 hours. At press time, the two had collectively spent £6.39 and about an hour building the project. I’m happy to report that Omeka (along with Joomla, Drupal, and WordPress MU) is still in the running to serve as the site’s content management platform.

The Great Museum WC — Maybe not the most important room in the museum, but among the most essential: Okay, you have GOT to check out that bathroom.

Dan Brown Gets Smithsonian History Right and Wrong in "The Lost Symbol" — Smithsonian Magazine’s Around the Mall blog has a nice “fact or fiction” run down of claims made about the Institution by Dan Brown in his latest thriller, The Lost Symbol, which is set in Washington, DC.

Curator Now Online — Via @NancyProctor comes news that Curator: The Museum Journal has launched a new website. Unfortunately, it looks like only subscribers can access full text articles, but I love that the journal is using WordPress to manage the content.

The Tweeting University Administration: How Much is Too Much? — Inside Higher Ed is reporting that George Washington University administrators use Twitter more heavily than colleagues at other universities, with an average of 57.7 tweets per day. The entire study by UniversitiesAndColleges.org contains some potentially more interesting and more useful data, including rankings by number of followers and number of offical accounts. From a quick scan, my own university, George Mason, doesn’t seem to appear on any of the lists. I’m trying to decide whether that’s a good thing or not.

Harvard-Yenching to be Digitized — The Harvard College Library and the National Library of China have launched a project to digitize all 51,000 volumes in Harvard-Yenching Library’s rare book collection. The project will take six years, and apparently the results will be made available under open access terms.

Google Books Settlement: Sergey, Smoke — I’m a week or so late on this, but anyone who hasn’t done so already should read Sergey Brin’s response to critics of the Google Books settlement in the New York Times. Brin makes a good case for benefits the settlement will bring, but doesn’t directly address many of the more subtle criticisms of the deal, a point made effectively, if a little snarkily, in a Slate article entitled “Sergey Brin Blows Smoke Up Your Ass.”

BBC and Neil Gaiman Launch Collaborative Storytelling Experiment on Twitter — This week the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) teamed up with Neil Gaiman (author of Neverwhere and other latter day science fiction and fantasy classics) and thousands of Twitter followers to draft what will become an original audiobook. Gaiman tweeted the first line yesterday and invited followers to continue the story with replies to @BBCAA and hashtag #bbcawdio. When approximately 1000 tweets are logged, editors at the BBC will compile and edit the accumulated tweets into an audiobook script and recording.