This article in the Chronicle of Higher Education says that academics have trouble evaluating the quality stuff published online, because it wasn't published in a journal whose reputation was a "known quantity". To me (the naive one) this seems pretty bizarre. Whatever happened to evaluating things on their own merit, not what club they belong to?

(that link works now)

The Deapleap beta is now available for general consumption. It's a "contextual information application" - pretty close to something I've been complaining about not having. I always thought of it as a system-level thing, though - e.g. right click on a word in any application and get a contextual menu with stuff like look up this word in dictionary X, or search for this words/phrase in Google, or whatever else. This is cool too tho.

They should have a "show me weblogs that link to this page" option.