Wednesday, December 13, 2006

Clay Shirky - A Story Too Good to Check - Valleywag. Clay Shirky has admirably put into text the reasons to be sceptical about second life. And I like the way he connects the hype with the source: "the press has a congenital weakness for the Content Is King story. Second Life has made it acceptable to root for the DRM provider, because of their enlightened user agreements concerning ownership." Looking beyond the hype, which as Shirkey notes is "push-driven" we see a set of dubious numbers which, even if charitably interpreted, amount to no more than a few tens of thousands of users, and "in a billion-person internet, that population is also a rounding error." I agree with his prediction, that Second Life is a "try me" virus, "where reports of a strange and wonderful new thing draw the masses to log in and try it, but whose ability to retain anything but a fraction of those users is limited." Via Tuttle. [Link] [Tags: Digital Rights Management (DRM)] [Comment] Stephen's Web ~ by Stephen Downes ~ OLDaily RSS 2.0, December 13, 2006. [Conversation] [Stephen's Web ~ by Stephen Downes ~ Edu_RSS Most Recent - RSS old] 11:06:02 PM      Google It!.

Video Search by Phonetics. One of the holy grails of technology is video search. What if you could search a database of video for clips that say this or that. Efforts have centered on voice to text technologies, but Nexidia is taking a different approach, something that they call Speech Intelligence. Their technology listens for phonetics, the same thing that we listen for. This Google video plays an interview with the company's SVP for Marketing and Product Management, Anna Convery. Think about the possibilities of teachers being able to create their own digital multimedia learning environments (textbooks), when they can search news and entertainment archives, and remix their findings into instructional media. OK, admittedly, U.S. copyright law has a ways to go in order to adapt this this sort of remix classroom. But do they have a choice? Technorati Tags: warlick education video technology search nexidia speechintelligence Plesser, Andy. "Nexidia Is Pioneering Video Searc 2 Cents Worth, December 13, 2006. [Conversation] [Stephen's Web ~ by Stephen Downes ~ Edu_RSS Most Recent - RSS old] 3:21:29 PM      Google It!.

Uncanny moment in Second Life. On the theme of the uncanny and Second Life, consider this screenshot from Steven Kaye, who was visiting Warren Ellis: The most apparent creepy aspect is perhaps the desolate ground, gray and lifeless for much of the observable area. A boulder offsets the layer of human habitation. Peer a bit closer in, and you'll see some floating bits. Those are things belonging to Steve's avatar, including a collar. His body failed to appear by that moment. Another twist on the missing body part meme. This is surreal, funny, and a bit disturbing. It's somewhere between memorial and puppet, the objects standing in for the body in a provocative way. Infocult: Information, Culture, Policy, Education, December 13, 2006. [Conversation] [Stephen's Web ~ by Stephen Downes ~ Edu_RSS Most Recent - RSS old] 3:16:08 PM      Google It!.

Data formats for digital democracy: XML vs CSV. As a first experiment I grabbed the DCStat reported-crime feed for November, sucked it into Excel 2003, consolidated incidents by day, pivoted them on type of offense (homicide, burglary), and exported them back out as a CSV (comma-separated value) file that Swivel could import. [Full story at InfoWorld.com] Here's one of those pivot tables in Swivel. The auto-generated charts don't do much for this style of dataset. But the point of this week's column is that just publishing a named dataset, along with pointers to the raw data, is inherently valuable. ... Jon's Radio, December 13, 2006. [Conversation] [Stephen's Web ~ by Stephen Downes ~ Edu_RSS Most Recent - RSS old] 3:14:23 PM      Google It!.

OpenOffice.org 2.1 Released With New Templates. Several readers wrote in to mention the release of OpenOffice.org 2.1. It includes support for 64-bit Linux and a number of other improvements, including multiple monitor support for Impress, improved Calc HTML export, and automatic notification of updates. Also, all of the templates and clip-art that were submitted for the template contest are available to download.[Slashdot] 9:14:08 AM      Google It!.