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Friday, May 24, 2002 |
Alan Macdougall figured out how to use the blogroll macro to render links to his subscriptions, just like the ones that appear below my calendar at the right, by pointing at mySubscriptions.opml. I was saving this one to show people a little later, but now the cat's out of the bag.  As it turns out, there's an even easier way than pointing at mySubscriptions.opml with the blogroll macro, which doesn't involve finding and copying any URLs. Here's how: 1) Update Radio.root. 2) Edit your home page template. 3) Add the following macro to the template, in the location where you want your subscription links to appear: <%radio.macros.mySubscriptions ()%> 4) Click the Submit button. [Jake's Radio 'Blog]
1:23:06 PM 
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ACM Steps to The Plate on DMCA and CBDTPA.
ACM Steps to The Plate on DMCA and CBDTPA
Jeff Grove of ACM's Public Policy Group has written an OpEd piece called: New Legislative Attempt to Regulate Technology Poses Additional Threats to Access. While Jeff elegantly explains the basics of the new proposed law. He goes one step further to express the same things I have been saying for months but a little differently.
"By building on the DMCA, the CBDTPA continues to shift the balance of intellectual property protection in favor of copyright holders, further eroding the rights of consumers and researchers. The U.S. Public Policy Committee of the ACM (USACM), Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, and others in the computing community have expressed concerns that the CBDTPA will raise the costs and degrade the performance of computers and software without benefiting consumers. As our community knows too well, legislating constraints on technology that may be developed, purchased, or used by law-abiding citizens has the potential to cause widespread and severe damage to society at large."
Jeff is exactly right. His article is worth a quick read. It gives me comfort to see such an established professional computing organization step to the plate and tell Washington they are going down the wrong path. [Mary Wehmeier's Blog Du Jour]
1:15:10 PM
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Insatiable SVG. If you think of SVG as a toy technology to draw nice pictures, wake up! SVG is invading your cell phone and this "graphical XML" might wipe out "text XML" (such as XHTML and XSL-FO), just as graphical user interfaces have wiped out text-based user interfaces. [xmlhack]
1:13:58 PM
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Metadata = Better Access.
"The final session of the day was my favorite. What was it about? Metadata. I'm sure there are those who, like me, appreciate that metadata is important but feel that it's as exciting as watching paint dry. Hard to believe, I know, but this session was far from dull. I give credit to the speakers for getting down to what we, mostly users, though I noted at least one serious programmer and one GIS vendor in the room, need to know. Ron Matzner of FGDC made sense of the jumble of federal initiatives including GeoSpatial One-Stop, the National Map, NSDI, I-Teams and the role each plays in the over-arching goal of data sharing. And, in turn, he focused on the role of metadata in making each initiative successful. He pointed out that no one program is the "be all and end all," but rather that each contributes to moving things forward. He also emphasized, and I've not thought of data this way, that data is a capital asset for the country. Said another way, it has real value. He also explained that the 'bottom up' approach to data sharing-currently underway via I-Teams-came from suggestions from local governments themselves. The key benefit of I-Teams, he suggests, is that they bring instant credibility with folks in the budget department.
Dave LaShell gave a real world example of how to create and publish metadata in ArcGIS 8.2 and ArcIMS 4.0. The process seemed a bit complex to me, but the fact that the tools are there is significant. Bruce Wescott, SMMS Metadata Consultant and admitted metadata geek, finished up by highlighting the differences between FGDC standards for metadata and the newly adopted ISO standard. The FGDC format is designed for us humans to read; the ISO format is for applications, or said another way, for machines. The ISO standard, Wescott argues, is the future since, 'no one cares what it [metadata] is, they care how to use it.' These days the ultimate users are our software packages, not our eyes. Again focusing on the 'what we need to know,' Wescott went on to introduce ISO-MTX-a product built by Intergraph, in partnership with the Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC), for upgrading 'legacy' spatial metadata to the newly adopted ISO format." [GIS Monitor]
The GIS community as a whole is starting to understand the importance of metadata. The blogging community needs to catch up.
I really wish we (SLS and the ISL) had time to work with Nina at the Northeastern Illinois Planning Commission to collaborate on GIS metadata projects that would help make the Illinois Government Information service (IGI) a better product.
Side note: if you're at all interested in Geographic Information Systems (GIS) or Global Positioning System (GPS), GIS Monitor is a great site to track. Another one that I'll have to try to get into my aggregator some day. [The Shifted Librarian]
1:10:45 PM
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GILS Just received this notice about the Governmen .... GILS Just received this notice about the Government Information Locator Service:
Through the efforts of several people, we now have a draft Web Services Description Language (WSDL) file for the GILS search service, available for review.
This draft only defines GILS search using "HTTP Get", following the extended ZURL. The search response message follows the definition given at . (BTW, these definitions align with the ZX client from Dave Vieglais.)
Future discussions of GILS as a Web Service will be conducted mostly on the GILS Version 3 Discussion List. Subscribe to the GILS V3 list. [Catalogablog]
1:07:03 PM
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School Blogs. Marcus Mauller. Why doesn't each student get an iPod or equivalent to store all their work, and more importantly Radio? That would allow students to roam with their published work, personal music, and docs etc from shared computer to shared computer. A storage device is less expensive and more robust than a laptop, particularly for high school students. For professionals, this solves the home/work computer problem. [John Robb's Radio Weblog]
1:06:09 PM
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Cool Day for Me and RSS (Flowing Yahoo Investor Message Boards and Edgar into Radio).
Cool Day for Me and RSS (Flowing Yahoo Investor Message Boards and Edgar into Radio)
Last week I used RSS to flow two people's blog postings with separate copies of Radio into a single home page. Today I was talking to Ian in Hong Kong (gotta love Yahoo Messenger -- a free, high fidelity, 2 hour phone call). Ian says to me that he'd like to flow Yahoo Message Boards like this into his Radio:
Roll up my sleeves. Swear a little. Grab some real time assistance from Kjartan (I had no idea that if you are debugging with IE and you change content types during the session, IE retains the old one). Thanks Bill! Not!.
So... Here's the question. Being the aggressive, sell snow to the eskimos guy that I am:
- Anybody besides Ian care?
- Any investors out there that need this?
- Anyone willing to pay for this kind of a web services? Probably makes sense to license it on update frequency, amount of filters, need for archival and personal versus institutional type pricing. $5 per month?
sjohnson@fuzzygroup.com to give me input. [The FuzzyBlog!]
1:03:59 PM
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© Copyright 2002 Mark Oeltjenbruns.
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