Seb's Open Research

Monday, March 15, 2004

Altavista Refine Your Search The "Refine Your Search" topic list that Altavista provides for my blog is uncannily accurate. I wonder how it's built... What do you think? []  links to this post    1:19:17 AM   Deans can count Erik Duval, on measuring the quality of academic communications: What we really ought to try and measure includes more subtle things, like how useful was this publication for others? how much effect did it actually have on the field? etc. Of course, this is much harder to measure - though the answers to both questions above would be "not at all" and "none whatsoever" for the great majority of publications, I am afraid. Questions like those above hint at much more relevant issues, I believe, but it seems like we prefer ease of measurement over relevancy... Well, maybe not all researchers have that preference, but the people who administer academia sure do. William Arms, in his article Quality Control in Scholarly Publishing on the Web, quoted the saying "Our dean can't read, but he sure can count"... What do you think? []  links to this post    1:01:22 AM

Sunday, March 14, 2004

Bloglines: it's that good Mark Fletcher wrote, a year and a half before launching the blazing fast Bloglines web-based aggregator: "just like fast cars will get you all the chicks, fast Internet services will get you all the users." Well, I don't know about the first statement, but I've followed in Sam Ruby's tracks and am ready to switch from SharpReader to Bloglines any minute now. I used Radio's aggregator before that, and it seems to me that Bloglines offers a good combination of the strong features of both Radio (e.g. you can read with few clicks) and SharpReader (e.g. you can save posts). What do you think? []  links to this post    6:20:52 PM

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