The 3 Tiny Habits programme is a way of looking at how people form habits. As I am both a serial procrastinator and someone who finds it hard to stick to routines, I thought I’d give it a go. So I signed up and found out yesterday that I got accepted on the programme. The instructions are simply, very simple, but that’s the point.

1. Pick something simple & easy to do in very little time.
2. Decide when to do it.
3. Practice.

There’s more to it than that but I’ll wait until after the programme to describe more. In the meantime, writing down the 3 habits I will try to form over the coming week is a way of declaring publicly my commitment. Mine are:

1. After I finish my breakfast, I will write down on an index card 3 things that I want to do during the day.
2. After I eat my lunch, I will take my vitamin tablets.
3. After I have cleared up after dinner I will post a single Tweet describing one thing that I have learnt during the day.

See, I said they were simple. Of course with some willpower you wouldn’t need to join a programme to create such simple habits. But that would miss the point I think. Doing things in a group like this strengthens the behaviour. The really fun and rewarding part will be building bigger habits in the future. From little acorns to great oak trees grow.

Well that was until my 2-day workshop at Talis this week. My brain is now full of graphs and triples with their subjects, properties and values. The trouble is, this little insight into how linked data is helping to shape the semantic web has made it even more frustrating for me. I left the workshop fired up to add machine-friendly meaning to all my information in future, only to get back home, fire up my blog, and realise that if I want to add RDFa, the in-line annotated version of RDF that can be embedded in any web-based document, then I’d have to add it by hand by editing the source code of my post. Ok. Maybe I just haven’t looked hard enough. But no, after a couple of days of searching I can’t find an easy way of adding RDFa to a WordPress post. No matter, this is still, ahem, early days of the semantic web and maybe the user-friendly tools are coming RSN (real soon now). But at least if I accept the pain of adding RDFa by hand, it’ll be worth it, my posts will enter the web of linked data. The only trouble is, I’m not sure if that is true. I can’t find how my RDFa-enabled posts can be used to extract their meaning. Am I simply adding this meaning now for future consumption by a semantically-aware search engine, or have I missed something?

By the way I tried to add valid RDFa inside this post but WordPress kept changing it, I guess out of the box it doesn’t like RDFa, or perhaps I was just doing it wrong.

Maybe I should have written a recipe instead.

I’m curious to know who looks at iTunesU sites and whether they find the content there useful (as opposed to simply ‘peering over the garden fence’ to have a look at what the neighbours are doing). I’ve looked at lots of iTunesU sites and viewed lots of content but I wouldn’t say I was a consumer of iTunesU content, merely curious to see what’s there. But then again I’m probably not part of the target audience.

So what is the target audience? Is it prospective students, wanting to find out what they can expect if they choose a particular educational establishment? Or current students perhaps, trawling for useful learning resources? Then again maybe iTunesU is just a digital market place, where institutions set out samples of their wares, and where turning up and being seen is as important as what you have to show (there is some shockingly awful content on some sites). Perhaps it’s all of these things, and more.

One less good aspect of iTunesU is that it seems to enforce content silos. Although it’s early days (for us) it doesn’t seem to encourage or provide a mechanism for collaboration between content providers. The platform, and I use that term loosely at least in the edtech sense of the word, is simply a smart looking aggregator of channels of content, and limited content types it has to be said, where channels are institutions rather than topics, themes or cross-institutional content areas. I will however acknowledge that the search engine in iTunes is quite good, although you apparently can’t subscribe to an RSS feed of search results but I might have missed that.

It’s hard to deny that iTunesU has an appeal to many content providers (marketing and comms departments?) as there’s a growing list of institutional members. But as for who’s using the content, I guess after a little while we’ll find out, or at least find out who’s been looking at our stuff.

Go find on Google: wii hacks, head tracking vr

In the past I’ve used a more formal version of this kind of approach in the battle against plagiarism. For my module’s assessment I get students to write a dissertation and occasionally one student tries to pass someone else’s work off as their own. There are a number of applications that compare text from one source against another to look for blatant copying, but another approach is to use textural analysis that compares the linguistic style and word count of one section of a piece of work with that of another section. If you suspect a student of incorporating someone else’s work you can use this approach to spot a change a style from one chapter to another. This is a useful approach when the plagiarised source cannot be identified.

Anyway, for fun I thought I’d use Wordle to compare the word maps from the recent blog posts of three leading learning technologists. It’s interesting to see the different word emphasis. Can you guess which map belongs to Josie Fraser, Scott Wilson and Stephen Downes?

Go find on Google: copycatch, plagiarism detection, word clouds

Firefly allows visitors to a web site to point and chat. Basically a Flash overlay movie with transparent background allows contemporaneous web site visitors to point at content on the site and instant chat with each other. Chat messages are currently anonymous but I expect that will change. Messages are also transient so unless you’re there to see them posted you won’t see them although a chat history is recorded.

Dave was one of the first users to demo in public but they’re now taking beta signups so you could add the app to your site too. What will you use it for?

Critics will ask ‘what’s the point?’. Sure, being able to comment on a web site so that subsequent visitors can share comments is not new, but there’s something kinda cool about being able to do this in real time. Of course if you have a high traffic site like Dave’s you’ll get several people online at once, but for my site and I suspect many others you may be chatting alone for a while

Anyhoo like me Dave feels there must be an easier way of leveraging RSS instead of using services like Twitter, so he has burnt his own RSS feed as a contingency for when Twitter is down. It makes sense of course because RSS is ubiquitous and shouldn’t need centralised services like Twitter to syndicate. Stephen correctly reminds us that finding RSS feeds still isn’t as easy as it could be (anyone know of a good way to find email addresses? Me neither yet we manage with those) but that could change very quickly if there was the demand, and of course new ways of using web data are demand driven. A special kind of search like Google’s blog search or FriendFeed or countless others could find and syndicate RSS feeds relatively easily.

I’ve recently found Feeder, an elegant way of burning your own RSS feeds for almost any occasion. It even supports iTunes podcasting extensions. It’s easy to make a feed and publish it to a variety of hosts including via FTP. The beauty of making feeds in this way is that they have a permanence that conventional feeds e.g from a blog don’t. This can be a good thing.

For example, here’s an RSS feed containing the sources I used for my recent randomly generated CD covers. A trivial example but you can do a lot with RSS as a lightweight content syndication format.

The benefit of a single service access point I guess is that it makes it easier to find new sources or feeds, but there are so many ways of finding RSS feeds that a distributed rather than centralised approach would be no problem. So what value do services like Twitter add? I guess that until we get better RSS clients – that is RSS creators rather than RSS aggregators – then the likes of Twitter offer client applications. But if we started to get other kinds of clients based upon RSS then just imagine the possibilities. You could syndicate your status and other Twitter-like info, but also mobile data, email, calendars, and in an educational context learning activities, reading lists, portfolios, lots of stuff. Of course you can syndicate a lot of this now but only via dedicated clients apps like purpose-built calendering service, VLEs, etc. An RSS client agnostic to content based around the triumvirate of title, description and link (plus attachment of it makes sense to add a file) would be a very flexible tool indeed.

I had a similar thought 5 years ago and created a simple tool back then for Radio UserLand. The tool is still available though I doubt it works now, and I don’t have a copy of Radio to try it.

The investigation follows a complaint by a user of the social network who was unable to fully delete their profile even after terminating their account.

Currently, personal information remains on Facebook’s servers even after a user deactivates an account.

BBC NEWS | Technology | Facebook faces privacy questions