Powerset’s Sr. Product Manager writes:

We’re excited to announce officially that Microsoft has signed an agreement to acquire Powerset.
…
With any startup, the challenge is to take the seeds of an idea and grow it into a viable company. At Powerset, we transformed our idea into a world-class semantic search platform, demonstrating the future of search with our Wikipedia search experience. But building a large-scale semantic search engine is expensive, requiring an engineering effort and computing resources beyond what most start-ups could ever imagine. Because our goals around improving search align so well, Powerset has decided to team up with Microsoft. We believe that this is the fastest way to bring our technology to market at a large scale.

Read more on Microsoft’s Live Search blog.

It’s not surprising to see Microsoft gobble up a company that has strived to be a Google-killer from its inception.  It will be interesting to watch Microsoft continue battling Google and to see how this latest acquisition comes into play.

(Maybe I gave up on compling too soon, eh?)

Google and Princeton University went public twenty minutes ago in announcing their arrangement to digitize roughly one million of Princeton’s public domain works as part of the ongoing Google Books initiative. Princeton is one of a growing number of academic institutions in the United States — including private institutions like Harvard and Stanford and state universities in Virginia, Texas, and California — that have worked with Google on this. For more information, see the post on the Google Books blog or the official announcement.

Many of the details need to be worked out yet, but I am hopeful this will bode well for our users here at Princeton and for the broader community.

The need for digital preservation just grows and grows.

Internet Explorer likes to throw the “Operation Aborted” error when trying to hook into the Google Maps API via JavaScript, at least when the JavaScript is placed where it is supposed to, i.e., a reference to the Google Maps JavaScript in the page HEAD and the actual rendering of the map within the DIV tag.

To fix this in IE, move the DIV block JavaScript code near the bottom of your HTML. Place it right between the terminating BODY tag and the terminating HTML tag. The problem seems to be that IE gets all confused when JavaScript attempts to make modifications to the page — e.g., sucking down a map from Google — while still rendering the body HTML. There are a couple other fix options here:

http://www.mapki.com/index.php?title=FAQs#Browser_Problems

It is worth noting that this “fix” does not break functionality in Firefox. And, really, who cares about the other browsers? Communists and robots, my friend.

In the HEAD of your page, you may include the initial JavaScript

<script src="http://maps.google.com/maps?file=api&v=1&key=BLAHBLAHBLAHBLAHBLAHBLAHBLAHBLAHBLAH" mce_src="http://maps.google.com/maps?file=api&v=1&key=BLAHBLAHBLAHBLAHBLAHBLAHBLAHBLAHBLAH" type="text/javascript"></script> 

Though it surprised me that I couldn’t remove the terminating SCRIPT tag and instead make the first SCRIPT tag self-terminating, i.e., instead of <script foo="bar"></script>, I tried <script foo="bar"/> and it didn’t work.

The JavaScript that actually renders the map within the DIV tag, cleverly named “map”, should look similar to the following:


</BODY>
<script type="text/javascript">
//<![CDATA[ 

var map = new GMap(document.getElementById("map"));
map.setMapType(G_HYBRID_TYPE);
map.addControl(new GSmallMapControl());
map.addControl(new GMapTypeControl());
map.centerAndZoom(new GPoint(-666.666,66.6666), 2);
map.openInfoWindowHtml(map.getCenterLatLng(), "100 Main St.<BR>Nowheresville, ZZ 99999
ZZZ");

//]]>
</script>
</HTML>