Using HTML5 features, this is the kind of obvious tool that makes symbol lookup faster than doing it by hand.
Just draw the symbol in the box and up comes the LaTeX code, and the package name that contains it.
CourseRank: An algorithm that helps students choose the right courses
I’m not sure how big of a problem selecting classes is for students, and how much it can be automated, but now there’s a tool specifically solving this problem. CourseRank tracks scheduling conflicts, together with some other Interesting features. For example, it gathers course/professor reviews, workload estimations and aggregates questions and answers.
Right now the selection of universities is not that great. It makes sense since the service is specifically tailored to each university, so I can imagine the implementation can take a while.
Scientific Publishing and Web 2.0 survey: Call for participants
Judith Simon and Diego Ponte from the LiquidPub project are seeking participants for a a survey about scientific publishing and the Web 2.0.
The aim of the survey is to gauge the potential acceptance of a Web 2.0 inspired production and dissemination of scientific publications by different scientific communities and by practitioners. The survey is hence tailored for researchers in all domains as well as for people working in the publishing industry.
Judith promised to report back on the results of the survey 
Introducing citeproc-js
Citation copy-editing is one of those deceptively small burdens that have a way of taking over the working day. If left untended, the task of tidying up casually scribbled references can snowball to crisis proportions as a submission deadline approaches. Similarly, when a submission to one publisher is unsuccessful, significant effort may be required to recast its citations in the format required by another. Collaboration outside of one’s own field can bring with it an unwelcome tangle of fresh style-guide quandaries to ponder and fight through. These are things that the machines, if they want to make themselves useful, should be doing for us.
There is plenty of collective experience in this line, and as fate would have it, there are also plenty of collective solutions. In the TeX/LaTeX world, authors and their editors can today choose between BibTeX and BibLaTeX — both of them excellent utilities — with the several variants of the former supported by no fewer than four separate versions of the BibTeX program. [1] Users of WYSIWYG word processors can look to the bibliographic support built into Word or Open Office, or they can turn to an external solution such as EndNote ™, ProCite ™, Reference Manager ™, or more recently Zotero or Mendeley. Migrating data between these environments is a process fraught with uncertainty, but it is sometimes unavoidable when you need this kind of output, and it can only be produced on that kind of system …
Review of Google Wave as a scholarly HTML editor
Peter Sefton wrote a series of posts on wave. He has published on Scholarly HTML so I read attentively what he has to say. What follows is some highlights of his posts, and my thinking about where things are going. There are at least four things that bother me about wave –as it is today:
1- It’s not really HTML
I thought that waves being XML documents would be a good thing because it’d separate content and formatting. But it seems that they made some strange decisions about how to represent formatting with “very tenuous relationship to HTML”. For example
While there is talk of ‘XML documents’ in the whitepapers etc, a wave document in the current implementation is apparently a series of lines of text. All formatting and what you might think of as structure, such as whether something is a heading or not, is considered an annotation.