Database

What is Microsoft’s vision for social computing? Sharepoint’s Community Lead offers some perspective.

Lawrence Liu is a Senior Technical Product Manager and the Community Lead for SharePoint Products and Technologies at Microsoft. In the short video below, he talks with WhatIs.com’s Alex Howard on the demo floor at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston about the evolution of social software, the development of Sharepoint and the extension of the collaborative software’s capabilities and integration with Office products. Liu also discusses interoperability, support for ODF and PDF within Sharepoint and possibilities for Sharepoint online as part of Microsoft’s long term cloud computing strategy.

Lawrence was kind enough to take a few minutes to talk thoughtfully about what his team is doing. Many thanks!

Project Gutenberg: More than 19,000 free ebooks from the public domain

Project Gutenberg is the first and largest single collection of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart founded Project Gutenberg when he was granted an account with $100,000,000 of computer time in 1971 by the operators of the Xerox Sigma V mainframe at the Materials Research Lab at the University of Illinois.

The Project Gutenberg Philosophy is “to make information, books and other materials available to the general public in forms a vast majority of the computers, programs and people can easily read, use, quote, and search.”

Only books that have entered the public domain are entered into the database of 19,000 titles, of which nearly 2 million are downloaded every month. That means the database is full of the classics of Western literature, with names like Twain, Doyle, Shakespeare, Dickens, Kleiser, Poe, Wells, Austen and Verne dominating the top 10 most downloaded list.