Seb's Open Research

Friday, October 03, 2003

Telepathy of sorts Alf releases the code for HeadCloud, and provides his best description so far of the ridiculously easy thought sharing service it enables: HeadCloud is a Napster-style service, where people connect to a central hub, send a list of the thoughts they want to share, and search the database of other people's thoughts to see who they want to connect to. It's called HeadCloud after the original vision - being able to walk down the street and see little clouds above people's heads that showed what they were thinking. I haven't gotten around to using it, as I have yet to embrace Instant Messaging. (Gosh I feel old.) I could see it being useful for a tribe-sized cluster of users who already know one another, though. For instance, it lets you think out loud about a movie that just came out and that you're curious about; if someone else happens to also care (e.g. has seen it/is thinking about seeing it), the two of you can connect easily using the title as a bridge. Hey, this might come in handy for Skypers (paging Stuart...) What do you think? []  links to this post    10:16:50 PM   Blogcount update The Perseus sampling [via Dave Winer] suggests upwards of 1.4 million weblogs are active, and at least 2.7 million have been abandoned (i.e. not updated in the last 2 months). Phil summarizes. What do you think? []  links to this post    9:45:54 PM   Begin with small groups Charlie offers a sensible suggestion to accelerate the building of a community feel into classrooms: Building a Community of Webpublishers [Kairosnews - A Weblog for Discussing Rhetoric, Technology and Pedagogy] What do you think? []  links to this post    1:21:38 PM   GeoPhotoBlog: Name says it all This, I'm sure, will rip through the blogosphere in no time flat. geophotoblog - wow, Mikel just doesn't stop. I generally avoid using the word cool, but GeoPhotoBlog certainly deserves it. [Puzzlepieces] Update: it doesn't get updated as quickly as the world as a blog, which limits the interest a bit; I take it back. It won't catch fire now, but it's got potential. What do you think? []  links to this post    1:05:24 PM   Another musician's weblog Scott Andrew and the Walkingbirds "are apparently some kind of lo-fi, DIY urban acoustic pop and weirdo country thing". Free (for non-commercial use) MP3 downloads. I like. Quite well-known already in blog circles, it seems. Related earlier posts of mine: Musician weblogs, Freeing the music. This post also appears on channels free music, musicians What do you think? []  links to this post    11:00:45 AM   Mobile composition Wired: The Incredible Shrinking Studio. What do you think? []  links to this post    10:38:39 AM   The end of open? After writing my Accountability in comments post, I found an enthralling discussion of parasitism and the decline of openness going on over at Many-to-Many. What do you think? []  links to this post    10:33:15 AM   Jeremy's instructional design and technology blog is simply full of gems. I'm very glad to have discovered it. Just two examples. Turning product customization into learning experiences Learning in FFWD What do you think? []  links to this post    9:47:58 AM   Accountability in comments Gary again: end of an era here folks. Open blog comments: 1997-2003. He and dragoon are thinking about schemes to counter comment spambots (these automated scripts that scatter droppings everywhere and anywhere in weblog comment sections). The challenge here is to build a validation system that is painless to use but hard to game. Gary's proposal might break spambots but will do little to get in the way of human spammers who smell PageRank from afar. One thing that's relatively hard - though not impossible - to game is one's Technorati inbound link count, which serves as a reputation system of sorts for weblogs. My earlier suggestion of using Technorati data to rank or selectively cull comments might be appropriate to bring up again as the barbarians are quickly closing in... Of course this would have to go hand-in-hand with the previous comment logging (comlogging?) suggestion, as forging signatures is trivial in current systems. What do you think? []  links to this post    9:14:38 AM   The straight dope on the Elingsh uinervtisy Matt Davis [via Gary]: I work at Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, in Cambridge, UK, a Medical Research Council unit that includes a large group investigating how the brain processes language. If there's a new piece of research on reading that's been conducted in Cambridge, I thought I should have heard of it before... I've written this page, to try to explain the science behind this meme. There are elements of truth in this, but also some things which scientists studying the psychology of language (psycholinguists) know to be incorrect. What do you think? []  links to this post    8:17:20 AM   Tied research Integrity in Science Internet Database: Scientists' and Non-Profit Ties to Industry via Michael - neat idea... as an illustration, here are the results of a search for industry-sponsored coffee research. What do you think? []  links to this post    7:50:37 AM   TrackBack from comments? I notice Michael has given up on the heroic endeavor of logging every comment he posted on other sites.  But as I wrote earlier, this is something that should really be automated. I see four advantages to having a local log of the comments you posted on remote sites: It authentifies the origin your comments; It provides wider exposure, both to your writing and to the sites you're commenting on; It makes more of your content accessible from your site; It makes it easier for you to follow ongoing discussions you're participating in, or to revisit past discussions that are scattered God knows where. Next question is, can we hack this together out of commonly available parts? Here's one rough idea that might work with systems that support TrackBack. I post a comment on a remote site, leaving my weblog's URL. The remote site immediately TrackBack-pings that URL with the permalink to the comment I just made. My blog receives the ping and stacks the permalink on top of my comments blog, which is displayed in a sidebar. Does that make any sense? This post also appears on the channel lazyweb What do you think? []  links to this post    7:46:51 AM

Thursday, October 02, 2003

The world needs tippers Bill Joy: "The hardest part isn't inventing the solution but figuring out how to get people to adopt it." Books like the Tipping point and resources like Alan Reifman's site on the social psychology of information diffusion might be useful starting points in trying to find sensible strategies for this challenge... What do you think? []  links to this post    4:43:32 PM   Bloglines' public aggregators I just discovered that the Bloglines web-based aggregator lets users make their aggregators publicly accessible. If you're curious to play with a (two-pane) aggregator without downloading anything, have a look (for instance) at Ed Dixon's aggregator. What do you think? []  links to this post    3:34:31 PM   Suffering together Great quote from a Geffen ex-exec who's pushing for flat-fee distribution of culture [via Alf]: To act otherwise, to create digital tethers to creativity and information, would condemn much of the world's population to darkness, to outdated textbooks and third-hand inspiration. What's worse, it's the haves who will suffer alongside the have-nots, the former deprived of the creativity of the latter. What do you think? []  links to this post    9:59:06 AM

Wednesday, October 01, 2003

The curriculum vs. the personal learning network George Siemens on learning communities and learning networks: Courses work in an environment when knowledge/information is fairly static and developing slowly. The more rapidly information develops, the more quickly courses cease to serve the needs of learners. The information is outdated before the ink is dry. [...] learning communities allow us to become knowledgeable in a specific area of interest...much like courses teach one specific subject matter. Most of us belong to more than one learning community. These multiple communities form a personal learning network. If a learning community equates somewhat with a course, then our learning network is equivalent to a degree program. Yes! Definitely. Precisely. Spot on. As the evolution of the different fields of knowledge speeds up, each crosses a threshold point where it makes more sense for most learners to give up on courses and embrace learning networks. In IT this is already happening. What do you think? []  links to this post    4:39:30 PM   World of Broadcasters? Richard MacManus asks, why would normal people want to publish to the Web? Accurate observations in there. I honestly believe blogging as we currently know it will never become mainstream. The reason is that it is a poor fit for anyone who isn’t the (hyper)text-driven, infovore kind of person. However, that doesn’t mean that the more general practice of broadcasting information of personal relevance will not become mainstream. My vision of the future in this respect is closest to what Marc Canter’s been pushing under the moniker of “digital lifestyle aggregator”; this also seems to be where Meg Hourihan is heading with the Lafayette project. Think about restaurant/show reviews, recipes, pictures. The Web is already full of user-contributed stuff like that; most of it currently resides on centralized sites like Amazon. The individuals who help build those sites do so most of the time with no reward other than a high local profile that is generally non-transferable (how many Amazon reviewers are on your blogroll?). I’m willing to bet that many of them would prefer keeping control over their contributions and putting themselves at the center of their content if systems were available that made that easy. What do you think? []  links to this post    11:13:02 AM   Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Music Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Music [via Hossein] is simply great. It features representative samples from loads of different subgenres, and provides colorful descriptions for each. This from the Acid Jazz definition: This kind of music is best meant for late-night coffee houses and alternative culture eateries where the waitresses are all short-haired lesbians, the coffee comes in tall glasses, and there's a small smokey stage where a crowd of intellectuals wearing dark-brimmed glasses are listening to some guy in a turtle neck reciting crappy poetry like a bunch of pretentious post-ginsbergian beatnicks. Ooh yeah! Gotsta love that post-modern poetry. I also got to learn about the origin of the ubiquitous Amen break, about the difference between the TR-808 and 909 ("The 909 is ALL about the handclaps."), and I discovered a genre I didn't - and maybe shouldn't - know about: Glitchcore, also known as CD Skipping. My only complaint is that I can't deeplink, as this is a Flash monolith. Still, a wonderful resource. This post also appears on channel music What do you think? []  links to this post    9:39:46 AM   The Internet and politics PoliticsOnline put out an interesting list of 25 people who are changing the world of Internet and politics. PoliticsOnline asked its 30,000 readers and subscribers to name the people, organizations and companies that are changing the world of Internet and politics. From these nominations, 25 world changers and five rising stars were selected. Interestingly, warbloggers don't show up in this world-changers list - save for Salam Pax (#23). Meetup is number 13. [via Ingrid Jones] This post also appears on channel politics What do you think? []  links to this post    9:28:15 AM

Monday, September 29, 2003

Flemming Funch: "You can procrastinate tomorrow." (By the way, this was not meant to be tongue-in-cheek.) What do you think? []  links to this post    9:17:58 PM   Failures of corporate memory Denham Grey: Have we learned anything yet? - knowledge management initiatives that don't put the human experience at the very center are unlikely to develop healthily. What do you think? []  links to this post    11:08:43 AM   Too clever Joel Spolsky hired a great architect, who managed to synthesize the architectural pattern Light on Two Sides of Every Room in a conventional office space. What do you think? []  links to this post    10:13:08 AM

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