Seb's Open Research

Thursday, June 10, 2004

"Backlinks by Bloglines" bookmarklet I've whipped up a Bloglines Citations bookmarklet which should prove even more useful than the Technorati Anywhere bookmarklet. Drag the first link to your link bar, and click it while viewing a page. You'll get all the backlinks Bloglines knows about in no time flat. What do you think? []  links to this post    12:13:52 PM   Online security survey My researcher colleagues Scott Flinn and Dr. Joanna Lumsden of the Human Web group are seeking people who have recently used the Internet for on-line banking, on-line shopping, discussion forums, or similar activities. They're running a quick 13-question survey to "learn about how you perceive various risks, how you relate to them, and how (or if) you use the features available to help you manage them." Their goal is to help make the Internet more trustworthy. So if you feel like doing good today, please go and answer the questionnaire. They're especially looking for international participation. As the majority of my readers seem to live outside Canada, I figured posting this here might help them. What do you think? []  links to this post    11:26:40 AM   Blogger gathering in Moncton Had a good time at the Moncton Cybersocial yesterday. Harold Jarche gave a lively presentation on open source and the associated business models. Recent local discovery Steve Mallett climbed on the soapbox and gave a 2-minute pep talk titled "Open Source - Get on Board or Get Run Over". I didn't look around but I suspect he got the deer-looking-in-the-headlights stare from a few of the people present... A number of people from Prince Edward Island crashed the party, most of them bloggers I already knew. To the right you see Jevon MacDonald, Will Pate, Jacob Dockendorff, Nathalie Babineau, and Harold Jarche. I get the feeling we're approaching critical mass for interesting things to happen locally in the broad "weblogs and business" area. So I've started a little directory of Atlantic Canada bloggers to help accelerate this. Feel free to add yourself! What do you think? []  links to this post    10:44:02 AM

Tuesday, June 08, 2004

Get Gmail I've got a Gmail invite on hand myself. I'll give it to you if you're willing to pay it forward. (Wouldn't it be cool to find out that Jonas has initiated an uncontrollable chain reaction of random acts of kindness?) Update: the invite went to Meredith Beattie, who puts in many long hours for the Women in Community Service. Thank you Meredith! What do you think? []  links to this post    2:46:34 PM   Monkeymagic on the guestblog Piers Young's original and insightful Monkeymagic is the new guest feed for my weblog's front page. What do you think? []  links to this post    2:28:31 PM   Social Tools for Enterprises Symposium Matt Mower announces the first Social Tools for Enterprises Symposium, Monday July 12th, with a great lineup of presenters: Stowe Boyd - Corante Research & A Working Model Lee Bryant - Headshift Prof. Marc Eisenstadt - Knowledge Media Institue David Gurteen - Gurteen Knowledge Euan Semple - BBC Phil Wolff. - A Klog Apart & BlogCount What do you think? []  links to this post    12:27:36 PM   Email woes It appears that my mail server lost messages on Sunday and Monday. If you've sent me mail that I haven't replied to, you should probably resend it. What do you think? []  links to this post    12:23:41 PM   Backlink tracker comparison One thing I often find myself wanting to do is find who has linked to a given post. Backlink trackers give you this information, or at least they try to. I like using the Technorati bookmarklet while browsing, but as Lilia Efimova indicates, Technorati forgets the links that scroll off weblog front pages so it's useless for older posts. Now Lilia investigates the output of backlink engines on a post of hers from last December. It seems Bloglines and blogdex come out on top, by a comfortable margin. Thanks Lilia! What do you think? []  links to this post    11:21:39 AM

Monday, June 07, 2004

FreeCache: ridiculously easy free content mirroring The Internet Archive's FreeCache (beta) is "a system of cooperating caches to move large files of free content closer to users", providing a Real Simple(tm) way of solving problems such as this: "Say an up-and-coming rock band, the RockLobsters, has a website that has a large file, say www.rocklobsters.com/videos/my-new-rock-video.mpg that is 5MB-1GB in size. If it gets popular, they will lose their guitars and homes to their ISP because their bandwidth bill will shoot up. While keeping their big file on their webhost, the RockLobsters change the URL on their webpage to point to: freecache.org/http://www.rocklobsters.com/videos/my-new-rock-video.mpg " ... and this is it. Afterwards, users download the file from a nearby machine on their participating internet service provider's network. It sounds like a real Good Thing, especially for cash-strapped music artists. Though I'm not sure how well it actually works and how widely it has been embraced by ISPs. Funny, I had raised that very issue just yesterday in the Webjay forum. Sometimes when you ask questions, answers seem to come magically to you out of left field... (via Evan) What do you think? []  links to this post    11:42:53 AM   What do you think? []  links to this post    9:22:38 AM

Sunday, June 06, 2004

Wireless unleashed launches The launch of  the Wireless Unleashed group weblog gives me the delight of finally moving Andrew Odlyzko's name upwards in my sidebar, from the "without a weblog" to the "with a weblog" category. This is from Wireless Unleashed's inaugural post: "Spectrum policy may sound like an obscure, technical topic. However, it governs wireless technologies with huge impacts on our lives: television, mobile phones, WiFi, GPS, and radio, to name a few. Opening up wireless capacity could improve broadband connections to the home, spark deployment of peer-to-peer or location-based wireless applications, and more. In the developing world, unlicensed wireless devices could create economic opportunity by bootstrapping network connectivity. The potential benefits are enormous, and the consequences for business and social interaction are significant." (The blog's coauthors are Kevin Werbach, David Isenberg, Andrew Odlyzko, and Clay Shirky) What do you think? []  links to this post    10:05:01 PM   Paying attention I think Phil Jones provides a powerful insight in his page on Google Juice. As attention online becomes explicit and accounted for, we may "start to apply it more, to put it to better use, going out of our way to earn it by writing more, and thinking more and offering other favours to our net-friends. In other words, an attention economy can stimulate people to do stuff the same as the money economy." What do you think? []  links to this post    4:58:38 PM

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