Friday, February 11, 2005

Visualize Your flickr FOAF. Woah, nellie! I had no idea when I clicked a link that said, "do not, I REPEAT, do not go here" (the old teacher reports read "Alan does not listen well to instructions") that I'd find this wildly fantastic flickr graph tool: Flickr Graph is an application that explores the social relationships inside flickr.com. It makes use of the classic attraction-repulsion algorithm for graphs. Basically it lets you visualize and generate a dynamic social network the friends and friends of fiends and the friends of friends of friends as defined in flickr. Each node you click on, moves to the center and blossoms with the network for that person. Whichever node is in the center has a link to "view pics" or to load their flickr page So starting with Will's network I re-organize to put mine in the network.... Now I must admit I've not spent much time going around adding flickr friends (I tend to explore flickr via tags) but now I have more of a reason. It makes for a new interesting way to travel the flickr network-- where can I go with six clicks away from me (traveling by random picks of icons-- note to flick-ers, best to create a flickr icon that is customized- the grey flat smile is pretty ordinary) (1) cogdogblog (that is me) (2) mrgluesniffer (brian lamb) (3) striatic (they guy who did the cool Vancouver flickr map) (4) eric (no idea) (5) Jason Classon (no idea) (6) -- oops ran into an error could not go one more Lands a flickr map that arranges itself to display my path: And checking out jason's images... well, he has a mix which liekly explains it self, fun images, beach images, warehouse images... the flickr grpah loads its own representation, and his URL, tags, and individual image icons are all links into flickr: Every re-draw of the flickr graph seems to generate a slightly different map arrangement. A totally addictive experience. Check it out... And this is why flickr is the über über über of internet technologies- it is easy to use, engaging, and its APIs allow for innovative add-ons like this example. It would be the opposite of the standard corporate approach to try and keep users penned in. If your internet strategy is aimed at making your site "sticky" to users (locking them into your site), remember that as individual humans, being stuck to something is not very attractive. We want freedom, the ability to come and go, to choose paths, to create our own ways of using content, to rip, mix. Flickr has got it nailed. [cogdogblog] 10:08:19 AM      Google It!.

Poking Around Weather via WAP/WML. I keep planning WAP / WML versions of this newsletter and Edu_RSS; I'm not sure how useful that woiuld be but I would like to provide the option. This link provides advice on how to do it. By Alan Levine, CogDogBlog, January 29, 2005 [Refer][Research][Reflect] [OLDaily] 10:06:14 AM      Google It!.

Community Portals – The UK Experience. A False Dawn Over the Field of Dreams?. I understand why the author would say this: "To increase the sustainability of portal projects there is a need to 'work towards establishing common frameworks that will enable applications and services, from different sources, to work together.'" After all, it is precisely that failure that accounts for the indifferent success of community portals, the 'field of dreams' scenario, where you build it, and they do not come. But such an enterprise is perhaps best compared with constructing an artificial language: sure, it would make communication easier if evereyone used the standard - but who speaks Esperanto? The growth of community - and hence, community frameworks - is much more organic than that, a product of multiple simultaneous negotiations to create a network of compatible systems rather than a centralized planning department to create a structure. By Stephen James Musgrave, The Journal of Community Informatics, January, 2005 [Refer][Research][Reflect] [OLDaily] 10:04:59 AM      Google It!.

Google, Wikipedia and More. I was talking with Chouki the other day, and what I said was, "Wouldn't it be neat if we could take every page in Wikipedia, do an associative analysis of the contents of each of the million plus articles, and use clustering algorithms to create a genuine dynamic folksonomy, rather than the highly artificial (and hence, unstable) structures generated by tagging." His response was, well, you could do that, but you wouldn't need to analyze a million articles; a subset would do it. And then he outlined some of the algorithms that would support such a system. Well, from where I sit, it appears that the people of Google are thinking much along the same lines, as they are providing funding and equipment to support the world's largest encyclopedia. By Dan Gillmor, Dan Gillmor on Grassroots Journalism, Etc., February 11, 2005 [Refer][Research][Reflect] [OLDaily] 10:01:21 AM      Google It!.

The Doctor Will See Your Sim Now. Researchers are assembling super-accurate digital versions of humans to test the effects of drugs on patients. By Michael Behar from Wired magazine. [Wired News] 8:21:33 AM      Google It!.

Online courses help boost AP results - eSchool News. More students are taking--and passing--Advanced Placement (AP) exams in every part of the country, as college-level work in high school becomes increasingly common, the College Board reported Jan. 25. Many state education officials attribute the gains in participation at least in part to online courses that expand the reach of advanced-level instruction. In every state and the District of Columbia, the percentage of public school students who took--and who passed--at least one AP test was up in 2004, compared with the graduating class of 2000.[Online Learning Update] 8:19:58 AM      Google It!.

Blog Content Based Solely on High Paying Keywords [Slashdot:] 8:13:27 AM      Google It!.

Prospects For the CELL Microprocessor Beyond Games [Slashdot:] 8:10:49 AM      Google It!.