Seb's Open Research

Thursday, April 08, 2004

Ideal intellectual communities Janet Tokerud: Academic Blogging is a Must. A comment links to a post on Ideal Intellectual Communities. Features: "people who aren't competing with each other for funds, status, recognition, or employment"; "wouldn't be limited to the traditional options of journal article and monograph"; "mixture of academics and nonacademics"; "enough room for idiosyncrasy". Janet comments on local intellectual communities: [...] there are lots of interesting and gifted people around, we just don't know the right ones - locally. As blogging and other tools that (a) expose the brilliance and interests of those around us and (b) give us ways to engage with each other get better, I think we'll find andcultivate IICs in our communities. Can't wait for that to happen. It's already started in places like San Francisco. Use the GeoURL, Luke. (Special plea to Blogger, Typepad, LiveJournal, et al.: take a cue from deviantART - make geotagging ridiculously easy and users will love you for it.) (link via del.icio.us/mathemagenic/researcherBlog) What do you think? []  links to this post    10:10:36 AM

Wednesday, April 07, 2004

Kinja, Rollup, and topix.net By now you've surely heard about Meg Hourihan and Nick Denton's Kinja, the "public aggregator for the rest of us". It should be pointed out that Charles and Indi's Rollup has been offering similar functionality for a while. (Example: striproll.) Interestingly, Rollup offers a full implementation of what I've called feed splicing, offering an RSS feed for each digest/rollup and thus making the output amenable to other manipulations (e.g. republishing digests/rollups as sideblogs using tools like feedroll). If you're looking for topic feeds, also check out topix.net (here's their social software feed). What do you think? []  links to this post    3:49:58 PM

Tuesday, April 06, 2004

Stories as currency Nice bit of insight into what people get out of volunteering, by Michael Lenczner: "That is the currency with which we "pay" volunteers. By giving them another bit of a story, of meaning, to add to their lives. (not that their lives aren't full of meaning and stories already - that would be impossible. It's just that the "meaning" we have is pretty sought after). Another disclaimer - I don't hand out this "meaning" to other volunteers, it is something we create together and give each other." (Michael is spearheading Île sans fil, a wireless community development project in Montréal.) What do you think? []  links to this post    10:03:07 AM

Monday, April 05, 2004

Agility and adaptiveness Ray Ozzie: "We should distrust any elaborately planned, centrally deployed, and carefully developed business system or process. Successful systems and processes will be agile and dynamically adaptive; they'll grow and evolve as needed over time." What do you think? []  links to this post    1:26:31 PM   Blue-sky thinking on musiclogging Here's a quick blueprint for a grassroots music dissemination network which works on music files that are linkable and freely available on the Web. I want: An aggregated display of recently logged songs by people I've subscribed to. A nice, big, green "PLAY" button somewhere that lets me play whatever songs are linked to in my aggregator. An "I LIKE THIS" button that lets me indicate that I like the song that's currently playing, pushing its URL into my personal musiclog (the reBlog idea). A matchmaking engine that uses my published preferences to point me to other musiclogs I might like Given the above, I could fire up my aggregator in the morning, start playing the songs it has collected, reblog whatever I like throughout the day without going out of my way, and once in a while visit the matchmaker to find good new DJs to subscribe to. Implementation thoughts, small pieces loosely joined-style: Single-page aggregators like Blogdigger Groups, Rollup or simply Bloglines are perfectly able to handle display if the syndication feeds' formatting is appropriate. "PLAY" can be implemented by way of Alf's M3U bookmarklet service, which grabs links to .mp3s from an HTML page and builds a playlist from them. (Try it e.g. here.) "I LIKE THIS" button - I don't know of any plugins that log preferences into a syndication feed. The audioscrobbler plugin is closest, and logs into RSS - or anyways it used to - but it logs everything you play. (I don't like everything I play, though publishing this can be useful too.) But - if there were a HTML-based player thingy out there that took a playlist and simply opened songs one after the other in a browser window, a del.icio.us bookmarklet would do the trick and close the publish/subscribe loop. Matchmaking could be implemented à la Audioscrobbler. (blogmatcher.com similarly recommends weblogs based on links out of a given weblog and seems to work pretty well.) This post also appears in the open channel playlistlogging What do you think? []  links to this post    12:38:44 PM

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