Seb's Open Research
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Saturday, December 06, 2003
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Friday, December 05, 2003
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w.bloggar
w.bloggar provides an interface to your Blogger, b2,
MovableType, Nucleus, BigBlogTool,
BlogWorks XML, Blogalia, and Drupal blogs. Looks quite advanced. The w is for Windows. The Lockergnome review reads thus:
w.bloggar is a client tool
(meaning you can use it from the Desktop) that posts, publishes,
edits, and deletes blog entries for many of the popular blogging
software. The interface is similar to Microsoft Office programs
and may be easier for some to use as opposed to other posting
options. Plus, it offers features that may not come with the
blogging software, including spell check, adding links and images,
saving posts locally, find and replace, and others. (For geeks who
really wanna know... it uses the Blogger XML-RPC API.) The Web
site offers instructions for using w.bloggar with the various
blogging programs, and also hosts very active forums.
 12:49:12 PM
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Teaser feeds stripped!
I've been ranting about excerpts in feeds for a while, and Phil Pearson has yet again saved the day. His feed normalizer
has an option to completely strip out the item descriptions in a feed.
As SharpReader instantly follows links when descriptions are empty, a
single click on a title shows me the full post. Which means I won't
have to endure any further mid-sentence ...
(just kidding!) interruptions while viewing excerpt feeds.
By the way, I suspect the feed normalizer could be useful for a lot of
other things, as (stealing words from Phil's mouth) it makes it trivial
to work around incompatibilies between news aggregators. It could probably fix Lilia's <content:encoded> problem in the Radio aggregator.
11:27:17 AM
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Thursday, December 04, 2003
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Charles Caleb Colton. "If you would be known, and not know, vegetate in a village; If you would know, and not be known, live in a city."
5:03:42 PM
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Wednesday, December 03, 2003
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Topics and groups
A week ago Tim Bray wrote a post titled Taxonomy Madness:
I observe that many who like me hand-craft their
publishing setup are kind of absessive about taxonomies, both their contents
and construction.
Consider examples chez Walsh
( taxonomy,
machinery),
Pilgrim
( taxonomy), and
Winer ( taxonomy).
Of course there’s also that
link to your right labeled What (but these days,
I’m increasingly conscious that I need to run through the whole essay farm here
and do some taxonomicleanup).
So, a reasonable person might ask: “Why all this taxonomy work?
What is it being used for?”
And I wouldn’t have a good answer.
I’m not stopping, though.
Intuition is a perilous guide to engineering action, but for now, this
certainly feels like the Right Thing To Do.
I have the constant feeling, that whatever I put in as a keyword or a category is ultimately wrong.
- Wrong, because it's plain wrong choosen
- Wrong, because the keyword or category only captures part of the content
- Wrong, because I chose the keyword, and someone else (like you out there would have chosen something completely different)
- Wrong, because the item belongs to more than one keyword (and no, it doesn't help to include two keywords)
- Wrong, because my conceptual framework changes over time and what seems right today, is totally off tomorrow
- Wrong, because it's so arbitrary like a certain classification of animals (and yes, I do realize, that Mark knows this too)
For all these very good reasons, I've never felt comfortable with the
idea of setting up categories of my own. I did not think it would be a wise investment of my time. However, as I wrote in the "Ridiculously Easy Group-Forming" proposal that led Phil Pearson to build the Topic Exchange,
topics have the semi-magical property of implicitly defining a group -
the set of people who are referring to the topic. If a topic gets a
little press, a group can quickly pop up where there was once just an
idea. That is, provided there is a mechanism in place to enable
topic-based aggregation.
So a possible answer to the questions Tim asked lies in the idea of shared categories, as exemplified e.g. by the Internet Topic Exchange and k-collector, both of which have been quietly gaining traction in the blogging community over the last year or so. (Dave Winer is hinting at developments in a similar direction on his side, using another mechanism.)
OK, so other than group-forming, what happens when topics are
shared? Another key benefit is that it enables newcomers to the
blogosphere who don't really know anyone to home in on stuff that is
meaningful to them.
Some people (including David Sifry, Gary Lawrence Murphy and I) have
been thinking about further implications of shared categories and how
to tackle the problems inherent to that idea. If you want to follow the
breadcrumbs a little bit, I suggest you have a look at "The dynamics of
ridiculously easy group-forming".
3:08:15 PM
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Weblog fragmentation
Redesign is in the air for many well-linked bloggers, and the ideas of
categories and content types and what to do with them are enjoying a
bit of limelight these days. Some people have mentioned it makes sense
to have a different stream for each type of content, but people like
Jason Kottke want all of them to appear together as a single stream.
(See Richard on this.)
What I'm thinking is that if we had a feed bricolage facility it would be trivial for anyone to piece together new feeds as they see fit, starting from a collection of raw feeds. Charles has been thinking about it.
10:26:00 AM
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Tuesday, December 02, 2003
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Another free music label
Wired: "Loca Records wants
to foster experimentation and freedom in music by building a stable of
free music which can be shared, remixed and manipulated by anyone.
Songs are not locked by digital rights management technology."
This post also appears on the open channel free_music
10:24:01 AM
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SciX Survey on scientific publishing
Peter Suber writes: "The SciX Project is conducting an online survey on scientific
publishing. Among other topics it covers attitudes toward open access. The
results will be compared to those from a similar study three years ago."
If you're a researcher, I recommend that you take the survey, if only
to
reflect a bit on your own knowledge gathering and selection behaviors.
You'll hit questions you probably don't get asked often but that are
worth thinking about, like, "Why do you write journal papers?"
9:55:47 AM
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Pitch journal launches
David Wiley's innovative publication project in the field of learning tech is launching. The site says,
Pitch
is a peer reviewed online journal in Instructional and Learning
Technology. Articles in Pitch focus on pedagogical, technological,
sociological, legal, and moral issues related to opening access to
educational opportunity. Example topics include reusable media /
learning objects, scalability issues, informal social networks for
supporting learning, legal schemes for the sharing of open educational
materials, and the right to education. Pitch is run by the OSLO Research Group at Utah State University.
Here's what Stephen had to say:
Pitch
has launched. I'm not sure if the launch is formal yet, but you can
access the online magazine and view three articles, including an introductory editorial by David Wiley and Brent Lambert, an article from George Siemens on open source content in education, and one of my articles, The Regina Declaration.
Now what's really interesting about Pitch is the peer review system.
"Pitch uses a democratic method of peer review where all readers
participate in the review process. Instead of sending submitted
articles away for 12 months of secret review by three individuals,
Pitch allows your peers to review your work. In Pitch everyone 'pitches
in' to rate papers submitted to the journal." Kudos to David and Brent
for getting this off the ground, and my thanks to them for letting me
be a part of it. I look forward to the discussion that will no doubt
follow.
9:34:01 AM
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Monday, December 01, 2003
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Philip G. Hamerton.
"Have you ever observed that we pay much more attention to a wise
passage when it is quoted than when we read it in the original author?"
[Quotes of the Day]
6:07:41 PM
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Lockers and customer retention
Joi writes that
"Lockers lower churn for Japanese love hotels" and that "Apparently, lockers in almost any industry are a great way to lower churn."
What came to my mind as I read this was how a weblogging system, as
soon as you've started using it, becomes a de facto locker for your
content, working as a barrier of sorts against moving to another
system. In general it is not easy to move your stuff around between
systems - at present.
6:06:34 PM
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Sunday, November 30, 2003
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EEK meets Ross
Eugene Eric Kim reports on Ross's talk at the Bay Area
Futurist Salon, and compares SocialText with Blue Oxen Associates:
SocialText and BlueOxen are similar in that we both are interested in
collaborative tools, and that we both share similar philosophies about
tools. SocialText sells these tools as enterprise applications,
however, whereas BlueOxen is focused on understanding how best to use
and improve these tools and on disseminating that understanding
widely.
4:50:02 PM
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Starting knowledge fires
Jonathan Briggs:
Over the weekend I listened to IBM’s Dave Snowdon discussing the need
for organisations to try lots of options and focus on emerging
successes rather than to try to define what would be successful and
then only try out that option.
A metaphor for this would be starting lots of fires. Some
will be quickly extinguished by their environment, some will burn a bit
but go out and some will become the centre of attention encouraging
people to add wood or dance and sing around the flames.
Absolutely. In contexts where experiments costs little, it makes sense
to try many things, even if you expect most of them to fail. The Web is
just such an environment, which is why we're seeing so much
experimentation all around.
4:26:20 PM
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Copyleft
2006
Sebastien Paquet.
Last update:
4/22/2006; 12:13:28 PM.
This theme is based on the SoundWaves
(blue) Manila theme. |
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From early this year,