Seb's Open Research

Friday, November 26, 2004

Of feeds, reuse, and rights The first widespread use of syndication was aggregation for personal use, but syndication also enables headlines or actual content from one site to be republished in different places. (You can see this at work on my front page, where I use Alan's most excellent Feed2JS.) Of course the question of copyright arises here, as some people don't want their feeds to serve for anything other than personal use. (Personally, I'd be happy to see my headlines being published wide and far, but I'm not selling advertising.) Feed rights issues also arise in the context of splicing (combining two or more feeds to make an aggregate feed and publishing it). Here are a couple pointers to recent talk about this: RobbInteractive: "Rolling up those particular feeds (linkblogs from Anil Dash, Waxy, and Jason Kottke) was in contravention of the terms by which at least two of those lists are made available, particularly on a page which included some advertising. This is true so I have removed the rollup, and I owe Anil Dash, Waxy and Jason Kottke an apology." Burning Questions: "as more and more meta-feeds and hybrid feeds are created from multiple source feeds, it will be important for publishers to declare licensing intentions for their content. Our new Creative Commons service is a step in that direction." Now, Robin Good wants to build a directory of reusable webfeeds. My question is, why separate it? I think copyright information ought to be just one more field in a global directory that enables searches to be limited to reusable feeds. Robin says none of the 104 feed directories he knows about tabulates rights information. Pretty astonishing. What do you think? []  links to this post    11:48:18 AM   Avec un grand O (english follows) Michel Dumais, qui a organisé les événements Constellation W3, offre son temps et ses ressources pour prendre en charge la logistique entourant la conférence dont on jase depuis un moment, à titre d'"organisateur en chef" (j'imagine). Je me disais justement ce matin qu'on aurait besoin de quelqu'un pour coordonner l'ensemble... Étant donné l'excellent boulot qu'il a fait avec Constellation, je n'aurais pas de crainte à lui mettre ça entre les mains, pour autant que la mise au point du programme de la conférence relève de l'ensemble des organisateurs. Qu'en pensez-vous? Michel Dumais, who put together the Constellation W3 events, has offered his time and resources to take charge of the logistics of the conference we've been chatting about, in a capacity of "main organizer" (I guess). I think it would make sense to have some kind of general coordinator, and given the excellent work he did with Constellation, I wouldn't be afraid to put this aspect into his capable hands, as long as the program itself is organized in a grassroots manner. What do you think? This post also appears on the open channel Montreal social software conference What do you think? []  links to this post    11:23:30 AM   Tutorials on open source in learning I attended the Semantic Web Interest Group meeting in Montreal last week and got to learn a bit about the work being done by Tony Bailetti and Michael Weiss of Carleton University and Glen McInnis of ICHU Learning. Among other things, they're writing wrappers for various pieces of open source software to enable them to integrate well together. If I understood correctly they do this in the context of the Open Source Courseware Initiative NZ, which is managed within Eduforge. Digging a little bit on that site I was able to find two practical and reference-laden tutorials by Bailetti that may interest the developers and businesspeople among my readers: FACTORS THAT DRIVE ORGANIZATIONS TO SHIFT FROM PROPRIETARY TO OPEN SOURCE LEARNING CONTENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS OBJECTIVE Upon completion of this tutorial you will know about the factors that drive organizations to replace proprietary LCMS (e.g., WebCT and Blackboard) for off-the-shelf open source LCMS (e.g., Moodle and ATutor). TARGET AUDIENCE This tutorial may benefit non-technical and technical individuals interested in making a case for their institutions: to switch from proprietary to open source software systems to install a new off-the-shelf FOSS LCMS SOURCES OF INCOME FOR INDIVIDUALS WITH EXPERTISE IN FOSS IN E-LEARNING OBJECTIVE Upon completion of this tutorial you will know about the various sources of income available to individuals with expertise in free open source software (FOSS) in e-learning and you will be able to identify the specific sources of income that are available to these individuals in your region. TARGET AUDIENCE This tutorial will benefit non-technical individuals interested in building capability in FOSS for e-learning in their communities. What do you think? []  links to this post    9:43:13 AM

Thursday, November 25, 2004

Who are your gatekeepers? Stefano Mazzocchi has an interesting essay that connects to recent discussions of peer review. He argues that giving a voice to many researchers, rather than to a small number of established (and busy) researchers, is often a better way of evaluating the usefulness of research. I suspect that this holds in general, not just in academic publishing: The set of people who are in the best position to evaluate your work are those who (will) build upon it. In academia, I'd bet that the referees that your paper is assigned to rarely belong to that set. Check out Paul Andrews' "Who Are Your Gatekeepers" for the journalism version of the same argument. What do you think? []  links to this post    12:26:09 PM   Montreal conference followup Yesterday's post seemed to spark interest from several quarters, so I've created a wiki page and a TopicExchange channel (RSS feed here) to help us coordinate. I took the liberty of naming the page "Montreal social software conference" because the term has a scope that encompasses blogging and I think an event like this would be better if it also included the perspective of wikizens, linkloggers, Flickrers and various others who are also expressing themselves and connecting to one another via the Web. But maybe we can find a groovier name for the event. So anyways, go ahead and brainstorm, and if you post about this on your personal site, make sure it appears on the channel! Naming update: Boris and the gang, who are putting together the Northern Voice conference in Vancouver, writes: "We originally designed the name of the conference so that it could (potentially) be re-used for other similar conferences in Canada. We'd like to offer you the use of the moose logo or any other collateral material." I like the idea of making this part of a series. What do others think? This post also appears on the open channels YULBlog Montreal Montreal social software conference What do you think? []  links to this post    11:22:51 AM

Wednesday, November 24, 2004

Wiki despam script A fellow who calls himself RichardP has written a script to despam wikis and is generously hopping around cleaning up other people's wikis. Somebody get this man a beer! I really need this to make my personal wiki usable again. Update: God bless you Richard: What do you think? []  links to this post    9:32:28 AM   A weblog conference in Montreal Thomas has announced that there will not be a BlogTalk 3.0, but there is talk of organizing a weblog conference in Montreal. Marie-Chantal, Sylvain, and Patrick have already expressed interest. This could intersect nicely with the "northeastern SXSW" vision that Michel, Karl and others were kicking around at the Constellation event last year. I'll gladly chip in too. Anyone else? Anyone? Bueller? Update: Some interest from far away too. Mark Bernstein from nearby Boston is interested, as are Jon from Vancouver and even Lee from across the pond. So it could definitely be an international conference! I think it would be good to have both French and English tracks. Maybe try and get some people from France. This post also appears on the open channels YULBlog Montreal What do you think? []  links to this post    9:02:09 AM

Tuesday, November 23, 2004

Alf and TouchGraph, an ongoing love affair Alf does it again with a (Java-powered) TouchGraph browser for navigating Google Scholar results: Use this ->GraphScholar<- bookmarklet to launch it from any 'Cited By' page on Google Scholar - like this example page, or a direct link to the graph if you just want to see how it works. Double clicking on any of the nodes will load a new set of papers which cited the selected paper - in other words, opening up new nodes moves forward in time through citations. Clicking on the 'info' box will open a window with a link back to Google Scholar, from where you can get to the full text. (Here's more TouchGraph goodness from Alf.) What do you think? []  links to this post    2:35:42 PM   Nominate! James Farmer: Nominations for the Inaugural Edublog Awards. Open to all. What do you think? []  links to this post    2:26:03 PM

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