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Wednesday, February 27, 2002 |
A kind, anonymous person pointed me towards fyuze, another RSS news aggregator. Has anyone else used it? I'll add it to the list on the presentation I gave today. Hopefully I'll be able to get it online soon and link to it, although I included far less commentary on the slides than I normally do because of time constraints.
11:55:58 PM Permanent link here
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Urban navigation technique
"John writes: 'I have discovered a new urban navigation technique. If you're ever unsure as to which direction you're heading. Take a look at the satellite dishes. They're always pointing SW. It's like the moss growing on the north side of the tree!" Does this only work in northeastern North America? (via John!) [bOing bOing]
I hadn't thought of it, but I noted today that this works well in rural areas, too.
11:49:57 PM Permanent link here
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 David Berry: "Every day I come across web sites that are stale, stagnant and offer no real reason for me to ever want to revisit them. Even my own site hasn't been updated in quite a while because I just don't have the time to maintain it. I think that part of the reason for this is the time it takes to open up your site, format a new page, add content to it and then publish it out to the web. It's not a quick process." [via Scripting News]
Additional Kool-Aid for the ILA folks. I know you're getting tired of hearing about them, but it's baptism by fire after all. The above paragraph is part of a larger essay Dave has written about the one week it took him to become addicted to Radio. All I can really say here is "ditto."
Oh, and Laura - Dave is the guy who is blogging how to use FrontPage in general, but specifically how to use FP and Radio together. After you install Radio, you'll want to subscribe to his site! :-)
10:28:44 PM Permanent link here
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Weblogs and Google. Quote: 'While I've been enjoying the debate, the question is largely moot: whether or not people even know what a weblog is, blogs are already having a massive impact on the lives of almost all web users. This is due to a quirk in the way the world's most popular search engine works. Unbeknownst to most, weblogs have a significant impact on Google search results. With over '150 million search queries per day' [1], that means that weblogs are influencing over a billion Google searches a week.'
Comment: Ah, but here's a question: If hundreds of weblogs point at John Dvorak whilst critiquing him, his ranking goes up as a popular resource, doesn't it? i.e. popularity is not necessarily an indication of quality (unless Google's cleverer than I imagine). [Serious Instructional Technology]
Lots of bloggers have been linking to this article, but I'm choosing David's commentary as my post because I think he raises an excellent point. How then do you Google Bomb Dvorak?
10:18:45 PM Permanent link here
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Watching the Grammys and here comes an actual lecture about piracy on the Net! Let's praise all of these artists, and chastise you for taking away their livelihoods. This is just too hilarious. I feel really bad for the three poor college kids who are getting held up to the world for downloading songs backstage.
"Make sure you download music from legal sites only." Name one. Name one big, RIAA-backed site that will let me download a song and put it on my MP3 player. Name one that will agree that once I've bought it, it's mine to listen to as I please. You can't do it, can you? Is this guy really serious? Is he really going to stand up there and lecture me when the artists they're ripping off are sitting in the audience? I guess they couldn't get a single artist to stand up there and give that speech. I can't wait to see the blog reaction to this! Let the games begin!
9:43:58 PM Permanent link here
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Can the World Be Copyrighted?
"The treaties, hammered out in 1996, give a general framework for countries to develop standard copyright laws.
However, it took several years for each to be ratified by 30 countries, the minimum required before they can formally take effect. In the interim, the agreements became the basis for America's Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the first legislation designed to protect intellectual property on the Internet....
'The DMCA satisfies the WTC treaty and then goes way beyond its scope. The U.S. actually adopted the DMCA long before we were required to by international law and now we're going overseas and telling people they need to enact a DMCA-like law.' " [Wired News]
For when you hear the argument that the DMCA just makes us compliant with existing international laws. Does not.
9:37:47 PM Permanent link here
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Today I found yet another site to add to my news aggregator. At the ILA RTSF meeting today, there was a question about how to judge which sites to trust for your aggregator, and I didn't get to note one of the greatest benefits I've been given by the blog community and the Radio community in particular.
Simplly by installing Radio and playing around with it, I found a network of trusted advisors, philosophers, connectors, and human gateways. In Userland-land, it's pretty easy to spot the movers and shakers. What they don't tell you is that you suddenly re-discover the joy of browsing to find the gems. Across the entire blogging spectrum, you recognize pretty quickly who you consider aggregator-worthy and why. At least, that's how it's been for me.
So what site did I just add, you ask? Steal This Idea: Knowledge Management for the People. Mainly because I want to track Craig's Idea and what he does with it. Craig is a lawyer who is exploring ways to use Radio to help track his cases, his thoughts about his cases, and context for his cases.
"Documents don't need to be found, they need to be marshalled.
As I work, I develop theories about what happened in a case and how the law applies to it. I often use outlining software to help me organize my thoughts about these theories. I make file folders and notebooks of the documents that relate to those theories.
Radio does outlines and hypertext. I assume I can make a Radio outline and link to the documents in the log that relate to that particular point in the outline. The outline then becomes the marshalling point for the documents that matter. With links from the home page of the log for the case or project to the outline, then I have not only an easy way to find the important documents in the case, I have a way to preserve and incrementally build my work product."
I'll be interested to see how he does with this. I'm intrigued with the outlines feature of Radio, too, but that's something for another day when I have time to truly delve into it. Like when I retire or something or they add another hour to the day.
9:20:41 PM Permanent link here
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Tonight eight-year old Kailee came to me with a piece of paper. It was a sign-in form for her club, and she wanted to know if she could copy it five times so that she could give one to each of her neighborhood friends. I said sure, thinking she meant could she have some more paper or take the time to hand-copy them.
When I went upstairs a few minutes later, I found her at the fax machine. She had meant could she copy the page using the fax machine. And not only that, she knew how to do it on her own. That'll teach me to blindly say "sure" without further inquiry.
8:51:47 PM Permanent link here
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Partnership bolsters wireless instant messaging
"Under the partnership, New York-based e-Vantage is integrating Slam Dunk's guaranteed delivery network services into its wireless messaging platform, dubbed TMX (Transaction and Message Exchange). TMX contains rules-based workflow, transaction management, and wireless gateways that support mobile and Internet-based transactions. The combined offering can guarantee message delivery and automatically track, store, and audit each wireless instant message as it moves along the network, according to Slam Dunk officials." [IDG InfoWorld]
It's interesting to watch the evolution of a new form of communication, isn't it? So with this type of technology embedded in an IM client, why couldn't we construct an IM query interface to an online catalog? Would this be a viable entry point for remote searching?
8:43:42 PM Permanent link here
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This morning's meeting was really exciting, and my brain was tumbling new ideas in its washing machine afterwards. While I was talking about aggregating RSS news feeds for handling information overload and disseminating information, I heard Tom say, "Wow." That's all I need in a situation like that - one person who gets it. One light bulb in a room full of people and I'm happy. So I was pretty high afterwards.
Cut to an hour after the meeting, and I got the proverbial slap in the face on a totally unrelated topic. I have to get to work on the Tech Summit for tomorrow, and I can't because I'm so angry I can't concentrate. I can't even sit still at the computer at the moment, so I'm taking a little break. I'll get back to posting later tonight. :-
5:03:05 PM Permanent link here
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Interesting. IM logs. Microsoft has a plan to introduce this. Dann has an IM log tool already working for Radio and Trillian. [John Robb's Radio Weblog]
When did I miss this one?! Rocking! Dann's graphic for comments is even an IM icon! This would be a wonderful addition to my new information workflow.
3:15:25 PM Permanent link here
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Well, I'm back from the meeting and I think it went pretty well. Yesterday I pitched blogging and RSS internally, today I pitched it to the RTSF sub-committee (is that the right terminology, Teri?), and tomorrow I'll hang my hat on it yet again at the Technology Summit. Confirmed light bulb count so far:
- Yesterday: 2
- Today: 4 (including Tom!)
- Tomorrow: ??????
Baby steps....
2:39:00 PM Permanent link here
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Great... yet another language to learn - 3dhtml. Actually, it's very interesting and the examples are cool. Of course, you'll need a newish browser to view them. [via MeFi]
8:31:28 AM Permanent link here
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Blogging and Googling
"Matt Jones discusses a new practice that ScottAndrew is using on his blog. Below each post, he has a link to search Google on the topic that his blog entry is about." [ia/]
Very cool! Can this be done with Radio? I'm not sure this is the "big neo-cortex" as Matt notes, but it does act as a built-in "see-also reference" like we have in libraryland. Even with the Greatness of Google, I don't think this will be truly killer until:
- all software generates specific title tags at the individual item level and lets the user specify that title (Radio doesn't really let me do that) and
- the intelligence behind search engines gets better (which will happen).
8:03:32 AM Permanent link here
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© Copyright 2004 Jenny Levine.
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