Seb's Open Research

Friday, January 23, 2004

Link discovery credit discussion On Wednesday I wrote a post on Many-to-Many on giving and getting credit for "link discovery", which spurred an interesting discussion. Have a look if I've piqued your interest. What do you think? []  links to this post    4:50:57 PM   Group blogging and group voice Diablogue at socialcode.net - Not sure how to describe it yet, but the byline says "Group blog about social code, internet governance, digital copyright, and other topics." Thoughtful. Features discussions of the "accountable net" - a topic I wish I knew more about. Speaking of group blogs, Ben Hyde is thinking out loud about the idea that group blogging makes participants converge to a collective voice. I've noticed this while contributing to Many-to-Many - Clay, Ross, and I do "sound" more similar than back when we started (I think Liz still stands out). All of us obviously follow the group blog rather closely, and it seems that in doing this I've taken to modeling my contributions (and selecting my topics) after what I saw the others do. Does this push us towards blandness? Maybe I should make an effort to counter the trend and celebrate "la différence". Dunno, perhaps throw in a post in French. (funny, rhymes with "throw in a monkey wrench" ;-) And speaking of French, I'm going to be a contributor to the new ConstellationW3 French language group blog on "la société du savoir, son économie et l’impact des TI" - the knowledge society, its economy, and the impact of IT. (If you've been following Seb's Open Research for a while, you may recall I gave a talk at the last ConstellationW3 meeting. This group blog was started by the people who organized the event.) (Si vous êtes curieux, voici un peu de contexte: les réponses aux questions Pourquoi? et Qui?) What do you think? []  links to this post    3:22:23 PM   "Email is where knowledge goes to die" What a great line. (This piece by Bill French might be the original source.) Via Lilia, who reflects on asking questions in public. Update: a more precise statement would be "email, the way it is used today, is where knowledge goes to die." - don't miss Chris's counterpoint in the comments. What do you think? []  links to this post    9:10:29 AM

Thursday, January 22, 2004

Richard Feynman. "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself - and you are the easiest person to fool." Lyndon B. Johnson. "If two men agree on everything, you may be sure that one of them is doing the thinking." [Quotes of the Day] Let me slip in one last one, from Paul Graham: "Do you have any opinions that you would be reluctant to express in front of a group of your peers? If the answer is no, you might want to stop and think about that." What do you think? []  links to this post    4:19:03 PM   Open access to books and scholarship Last september there was an interesting thread on open access on Philip Greenspun's weblog, with the usual ironic overtones. In my own little field, for example, ACM and IEEE do their best to deny access to computer science research results to anyone who is not working at a university, a member of their orgs, or willing to pay $$$.  I.e., if you're a kid in Africa wanting to learn something about computer science you're not going to do it by looking at these folks' journals on the Web. And Ming recently discussed the impact on sales of putting books online. What do you think? []  links to this post    3:02:12 PM   Call for papers: Technology Enhanced Learning workshop This one's in Toulouse, in August. Sounds like the kind of event Seb might be interested in. ...the distinct shaping factor will comprise the identification of the enabling parameters to “leverage the promotion of key initiatives in putting the grassroots for TeL, especially for school e-laboratories utilizing novel pedagogical and evaluation theories”. This post also appears on the open channel calls for papers What do you think? []  links to this post    2:38:15 PM

Wednesday, January 21, 2004

Apartlogging Asbury tenants weblog. Brilliant. Think of the value to prospective tenants. This is a community weblog for tenants of the Asbury apartment building in Los Angeles. It has no connection to the management of the Asbury. Any Asbury tenant may post entries to the blog. (via Mark Kraft) What do you think? []  links to this post    10:59:56 PM   The Expensive Watch Marcus Pierson, cluetrainish MD: The Expensive Watch. Last year I was standing in the back of a presentation hall at an international conference on medical excellence. Late in the day a dream-like image suddenly occurred to me. I perceived a group of six to ten patients sitting together in chairs patiently looking at the face of a large watch. (probably a version of my father's gold pocket watch). The watch hands were stationary. In this apparition I moved to the back side of the watch. The back was off of the watch and all of the inner workings were exposed (when I was a child my father used to unscrew the back of his watch for me to look inside). Here the apparition became more dream-like--the gears were made of precious metals, gold, silver, platinum; and each had two people working on it. The day's speakers were each on a separate gear and they were polishing the metal with cloths. Each gear really shown brightly. And each gear also had the CEO of the presenter's organization on it. The CEOs were embedding precious stones--diamonds, emeralds, rubys onto the surface of their gears. Most gears had lots of jewels already set into their surfaces. It was something to behold, beautiful and the people were very animated. Then I stepped back a little distance and noticed--the gears did not mesh, they were not connected, they were not moving together. Everyone kept applying jewels, polishing, and waiting. I had an immediate longing for the brass gears of my fathers pocket watch with their precision fit and perfect time keeping. (There were jewels in his watch, seventeen I think, strategically placed to keep the gears turning.) Since it's first occurrence, this vision has frequently reoccurred to me in my work. see Marc's other stories. What do you think? []  links to this post    9:39:11 PM   Interview with a webhead Under the iron: a series of interviews with people of the web. Among others: Matt Haughey, Jeffrey Zeldman, Mark Pilgrim, Anil Dash. For different crops, check out pixelview and the Lydon interviews (index in the right column). I love these because, although it's the person's voice all the same, the question-answer dynamics give you a different view than what you get from reading their weblogs. I should really begin interviewing my favorite bloggers, ask them the questions I'm asking myself. What do you think? []  links to this post    9:24:41 PM   Matador Records playlist Here's a 100+ tracks long playlist of Matador Records artists, created in a snap thanks to Alf Eaton's m3u generator bookmarklet. Some pretty good material in there. This post also appears on the open channel playlistlogging What do you think? []  links to this post    9:51:07 AM   French language wiki on the Semantic Web Karl Dubost: "La communauté francophone du Web sémantique est lancée." Unless I'm mistaken, this initiative follows from recent discussions at the recent Autrans gathering. What do you think? []  links to this post    9:44:13 AM   Ottmar Liebert's blog Popular guitarist Ottmar Liebert has started a comments-enabled blog. Among other hings he uses it to discuss new revenue models.(via Gary) This post also appears on the open channel musicians What do you think? []  links to this post    9:30:30 AM   The kindness of strangers Gary Lawrence Murphy recounts how he found and reported a bug in the free Mozilla browser, and points out that the bug was fixed isolated on the same day, by unpaid strangers who cared. What do you think? []  links to this post    8:53:12 AM

Tuesday, January 20, 2004

Technorati beta launches Just a quick post to point out that a new, faster Technorati has launched. Here's Dave Sifry's intro to the new service. Neat! What do you think? []  links to this post    12:17:28 PM   Clay: "Weblog" has no global definition ...[defining "blog"] is a hard question, of course, so hard, from my point of view that it is unsolvable in anything other than local declaration, as in “In this paper, we use the word ‘blog’ to mean X.” I don’t think there will ever be a definition common enough to take for granted in research contexts. I did make a local declaration in my own (2002) effort. It can be helpful, when undertaking to define something, to first look up other people's definitions. For a while I've been collecting definitions of "blogging" on this wiki page; feel free to add more. This post also appears on channel weblog research What do you think? []  links to this post    11:28:01 AM   Middlemen beware Rob Paterson, riffing on disintermediation : This pressure to cut out the middle man will grow everywhere and in all fields. The opportunity is that most of the big guys will fight rather than switch and hence be doomed. There is a huge opportunity to support new direct networks. I would not waste a lot of my time in helping the big guys to defend themselves - they may want to but their attachment to their system will prevent them. You don't believe me? look at the airlines - they cannot shift to the southwest culture. I'm not sure all of the big middlemen are doomed, but it sure looks like some of them are going down the drain as the new (social, economic) networks get built... What do you think? []  links to this post    10:02:53 AM

Monday, January 19, 2004

Building & Bridging Community Networks conference Call for papers: Building & Bridging Community Networks: Knowledge, Innovation & Diversity through Communication conference - "network with others engaged in community networking, community informatics and community technology research, practice and policy." The call mentions other conferences with neighboring themes: ... in addition to the recent World Summit on the Information Society event in Geneva , the period between March and September, 2004 will see a number of important conferences taking place on the subject of community network or related areas. The Canadian Research Alliance for Community Information Networks (CRACIN) will be launched in the form of an International Workshop in May, 2004. The eighth biennial Participatory Design Conference will be held between July 27-31, 2004 at the University of Toronto, Canada and will have a strong community networking component. The second international colloquium of the Community Informatics Research Network (CIRN) is being convened in Prato , Italy at the end of September. (Possibly of interest if you're in the UK: right next to the announcement I found a job posting for a Research Officer position with the Community Network Analysis Project. Closes Jan. 21.) This post also appears on the open channel calls for papers What do you think? []  links to this post    4:52:29 PM

Copyleft 2006 Sebastien Paquet. Last update: 4/22/2006; 12:17:40 PM. This theme is based on the SoundWaves (blue) Manila theme.