Monday, August 30, 2004

Sample PubSub Queries. PubSub's query language is powerful and allows you to do searches that are not possible with other services. If you're new to PubSub's service, here are some common queries to get you started: 1. PubSub can deliver updates to a website as if you were subscribed to the website's feed. SOURCE:2entwine.com The advantage of using this approach is that PubSub will deliver the item as soon as it discovers that the item is new as opposed to the your newsreader polling the RSS/Atom feed every hour. 2. If you want to be able to see the referrers for a blog or a URL, you can use the following: URI:2entwine.com This ought to yield the same results as you would get from Technorati's service. You can do one better than Technorati by using the following: URI:2entwine.com AND NOT SOURCE:2entwine.com This query will get you everything that referrers to 2entwine.com except for posts on 2entwine.com itself. 3. Keeping it OT (On Topic)! If you're only interested in Linux related posts on Slashdot.org, you could use the following query: SOURCE:slashdot.org AND (Linux OR Linus OR Torvalds) 4. PubSub can be used to aggregate and filter all at the same time. Let's say you're interested in grouping all posts about cellphones from various sites into a single PubSub feed. The following query would do just that: cellphone AND (SOURCE:engadget.com OR SOURCE:gizmodo.com) With this query, you would receive all the updates that mention cellphone from Engadget and Gizmodo. By Dudley. [Gush Blog] 10:00:11 PM      Google It!.

Open Xchange Server Source-code Released [Slashdot:] 1:00:22 PM      Google It!.

Start-Up Offers Low-Power 'Personal Supercomputers'. NEW YORK (Reuters) - Lower electrical power consumption, not just greater data processing oomph, will help a new class of desktop supercomputers unveiled on Monday turn conventional industry logic on its head, its designers say. [Reuters: Technology] 12:54:06 PM      Google It!.

The Internet At 35 [Slashdot:] 10:25:56 AM      Google It!.

Logitech Gives A Mouse A Laser [Slashdot:] 10:23:04 AM      Google It!.

Phone Home and Find the Way. Route finders, once limited to executive autos, have become part of advanced handsets and are now being designed into mobile phones. New smartphones can load computer-like applications, adding mapping to their bag of tricks. [Wired News] 10:13:09 AM      Google It!.

A Celebration of Cell-Phone Film. Filmmakers who who make tiny movies now have a festival. An independent studio is collecting entries of films made for the small screen -- the cell phone. By Daniel Terdiman. [Wired News] 10:11:12 AM      Google It!.

Collaborative knowledge gardening. Next month I'll be giving a talk on social software to an audience of CTOs. To prime the pump, I've been spending some time with two of the newer services in the space: Flickr and del.icio.us. Neither focuses primarily on the six-degrees-of-separation dynamic that drives LinkedIn, Orkut, Friendster, and Spoke. Flickr, as I would explain it to my friends and family, is a way to easily upload and share digital photos. And del.icio.us does the same thing for Web bookmarks. To CTOs, though, I'd say that both are collaborative systems for building a shared database of items, developing a metadata vocabulary about the items, performing metadata-driven queries, and monitoring change in areas of interest. [Full story at InfoWorld.com] While I was on vacation, this column percolated through the infosphere. Now that I'm back, I'm seeing some interesting ripple effects. It had already been apparent that in addition to monitoring the blog conversations swirling around a column, it would be interesting to monitor the del.icio.us traffic too. Not surprisingly, those two views have now begun to merge. ... [Jon's Radio] 10:09:50 AM      Google It!.

96 Processors Under Your Desktop [Slashdot:] using transmeta efficion processors 8:52:35 AM      Google It!.

Open letter from 25 Nobel laureates. The Open Letter to the U.S. Congress from 25 Nobel prize winners has been released to the public (and I've posted a copy to SOAF). Excerpts: As scientists and Nobel laureates, we are writing today to express our strong support for the House Appropriations Committee's recent direction to NIH to develop an open, taxpayer access policy requiring that a complete electronic text of any manuscript reporting work supported by NIH grants or contracts be supplied to the National Library of Medicine's PubMed Central. We believe the time is now for all Members of Congress to support this enlightened policy. Science is the measure of the human race's progress. As scientists and taxpayers too, we therefore object to barriers that hinder, delay or block the spread of scientific knowledge supported by federal tax dollars including our own works.... There's no question, open access truly expands shared knowledge across scientific fields -- it is the best path for accelerating multi-disciplinary breakthroughs in research....There is widespread acknowledgement that the current model for scientific publishing is failing us....The trend towards open access is gaining momentum....Free access to taxpayer funded research globally may soon be within grasp, and make possible the freer flow of medical knowledge that strengthens our capacity to find cures and to improve lives. As the undersigned Nobel Laureates, we are committed to open access. We ask Congress and NIH to ensure that all taxpayers get their money's worth. Our investment in scientific research is not well served by a process that limits taxpayer access instead of expanding it. We specifically ask you to support the House Appropriations Committee language as well as NIH leadership in adopting this long overdue reform. [Open Access News] 8:40:20 AM      Google It!.