Nurul Asyikin:

[...] It was horrible - the night before my proposal presentation I was desperately trying to find a way to convey the potential I saw in blogs as a new tool for community building to a roomful of disbelievers. For some reason, none of my web searches last year returned any academic papers on blogging, so you can imagine how completely alone I felt.

A couple months later, things have changed. I've found a multitude of papers (I'm listed there, even), blogs and websites, all devoted to the various possibilities presented by weblogs. I've no idea why I couldn't find them last year, when I felt so alone.

It could very well be because of this blog. Since I set this page up, I've received a bunch of emails offering help and support in writing this thesis. It's heartwarming, and somehow knowing that other bloggers care really does a lot for my confidence in doing this research. It's nice to know that blogs mean as much to other people.

[Seb's Open Research]

If you're a newcomer to the world of weblogs, one of the first things you will want to do is to find people with similar interests to yours. Unfortunately, it's so difficult right now that some human assistance can come in handy.

I've been blogging for a while now, and I've seen a lot of high-quality blogs, more than I can read actually, about a variety of topics such as science, philosophy, literature, knowledge management, e-learning, information architecture, communication, design, social software, etc. Most of those I can remember are written by articulate, investigative folks. I've already helped a few people connect in the past, for example Alex Halavais and Liz Lawley, or Alf and Richard Gayle.

So here's my offer to new bloggers. (Veterans are welcome too, but there are more chances that I'll point you to people you already know). Post an explanation of what your core interests are on your weblog, and send me a link to that post. I'll do my best to find a few good blogs that match those interests. I won't spend a day on this though; your mileage may vary. You can also post to the new webloggers blogchannel to improve the visibility of your post.

One thing to keep in mind: the more precise the description, the better the results.

Oh, and it's a free service.

[Seb's Open Research]

The video from yesterday's standing-room-only conference at MIT on Spam-busting has been converted to a series of Real video-files. Oliver Schmelzle has posted timecode-indices for the different speakers, so you can jump right to the talk you want to hear:

Session 1

0:00:30, Teodor Zlatanov, spam.el Maintainer, "Gnus vs. Spam"
0:10:00, Bill Yerazunis, MERL, "Sparse Binary Polynomial Hash Message Filtering and The CRM114 Discriminator"
0:32:30, Jason Rennie, MIT AI Lab, "Adaptive Spam Filtering"
0:52:00, John Graham-Cumming, POPFile, "The Spammers' Compendium"

Link Discuss (Thanks, Oliver!) [Boing Boing Blog]