Time to reconsider your Facebook account. In the past Echelon, Crucible and others have been secretly gathering data on everyone for years. Now the only difference is we’re willingly giving our personal data away.
Category Archives: Geekorati
Amazing dynamic fluid image resizing
This is just the coolest new software I’ve seen for a long time. These guys have created a method for image resizing using a technique they call seam carving. The effect is that images resize, either scaling down or incredibly up in size just as fluidly as resizing a CSS text-based web page. It’s best to watch the video to see how it works.
Publication lists and ePrints self-archiving with PublicationsList
Self-archiving of publications must be the next big thing in academic repositories because hot on the heels of the Depot is PublicationsList.org. Unlike the Depot, PublicationsList.org is a commercial offering with a basic service allowing you to maintain a list of your own publications for free and for $20 they’ll host your self-archived ePrints for 12 months. Why would you pay to have your ePrints hosted when there are other free academic services offering self-archived ePrints? Well one reason might be ease of use. Maintaining a publications list is something I’ve never been able to do in a systematic way because a) I’m lazy and b) all the other services I’ve tried to date have poor interfaces when adding publication details. The Depot claims that it is easy to use because it only takes 10 minutes to add an article by typing into a series of web-based forms. Ten minutes per article? As all publications are indexed electronically I’m not sure why should I be typing anything.
I registered for a free account on PublicationsList.org and had my modestly small list of 14 journals articles and a book chapter imported complete with either PMIDs or DOIs in about 5 mins flat for the lot. You see PublicationsList.org have integrated something the Depot should seriously consider, integration with PubMed and Web of Science. Through a combination of these two databases I found all my publications and imported them directly into my PublicationsList.org account. Abstracts, keywords, PMIDs and DOIs automatically get imported too so even without including self-archived ePrints (which I don’t have anyway) you can link directly to citations or even electronic copies of my publications where available.
Another useful feature of PublicationsList.org is that you can include a list of your publications on a web page such as an institutional research group page or your virtual research environment either as a simple button (see below) or as an embedded list. On the down side PublicationsList.org doesn’t interoperate with other ePrints repositories such as institutional repositories but it remains to be seen if this is a serious limitation. The Depot for example only seems to have a couple of dozen entries in the publicly available browse list.
It’s early days yet for ePrints repositories but there are ways of making these services easy to use and many could learn from PublicationsList.org’s example. Now if the Depot or equivalent institutional repository services could make importing of publications as easy then they’d probably get a lot more takers, me and my whopping 15 publications included.
In the future we the people will be web 2.0 ready
A year ago this month I wrote the edublog simile generator. I’ve not sought its wisdom for some time but as I’ve been struggling with some edublogging nonsense recently I thought I’d look it up to get some inspiration. It’s still amusingly relevant as the first simile I got was “In the future we the people will be web 2.0 ready”.
Second Life – your experience may vary
I was planning a serious piece about the educational uses of Second Life, not least because a session from the recent JISC online conference was conducted in SL. This is an interesting example and something that deserves proper discussion. I was thinking about how the Second Life environment enhanced or detracted from the conference session participation. Did people get too distracted for example by being in an unfamiliar environment, did they feel part of a group, etc. But I’m afraid I got completely side-tracked while discussing this with a colleague who pointed me at this hilarious SL spoof. Well I thought it was hilarious, because it matched my own early experience of SL beautifully.
Could Yahoo Pipes make repository interoperability obsolete?
Being able to search aggregated RSS feeds is nothing new, but the combination and filter functions offered by Yahoo Pipes is. One obvious early use of this technology is repository searching. Although some but by no means all repositories allow you to subscribe to search results as RSS feeds, the ability to search across multiple repositories in this way could offer considerable benefits. It’ll be interesting to see if this simple front-end approach overtakes repository back-end interoperability.
I’ve created a few example Pipes to try this service out. In the UK the HE community has a national repository called JORUM. Unfortunately, though understandably, you need to sign-in via Athens to access this so apologies for those who can’t access this resource.
JORUM repository search – selected sub-set of MeSH
The first Pipe searches a sub-set of the JORUM repository, the second searches an aggregate of JORUM and another UK repository, Intute, (formerly the Resource Discovery Network).
For all you non-Brits out there unable to log into JORUM, here’s a Pipe for you:
Aggregated public health repository search
Because users can make these kinds of custom searches very easily for themselves it is going to ask some important questions of repository providers. Do you open up your repository systems to allow for user-defined RSS-based search applications? Or do you close these interfaces down because of unforseen use of content stored within? If you were a user, would you look elsewhere if a repository didn’t allow you to access its contents using RSS?
RSS as commodity
Now I want to share these RSS feeds. So I send you my feed on RSS resources [...] You receive it, like it, but want to add some of your own links and re-annotate some of mine. By doing so you then make a new feed that can be shared back with me or with a 3rd party and so on. The RSS feed becomes a commodity.
As I wrote in 2003 now looks possible with Yahoo Pipes. In case you haven’t seen the service, Yahoo Pipes allows you to aggregate, filter, combine, and republish RSS feeds. You subscribe to a number of feeds and filter them all for your favourite subject then republish a new feed containing just those items. It’s a copyright nightmare of course but ‘meh’, in a web 2.0 world where user-generated content was made for sharing, we need services like this to find new ways of adding value to content. Once again the web challenges traditional publishers of content to adapt, and the best of them surely will.
What interests me most about this service and those that will inevitably follow is the ability to create a semi-permanent record of a variety of information sources and publish this as a trail that others can follow. At present, RSS is transient. It presents a moving window of time, a snapshot of the blogosphere for example with items that quickly get replaced as new items are added. Take your favourite weblog for instance. You’ve probably subscribed to its RSS feed in your aggregator. What you’ll likely have therefore is the most recent 10 or 20 posts. The rest, the older posts, are history and no longer show up in the feed. Now that’s not a problem to most people, largely because of the ephemeral nature of weblogs. But my point is that RSS could give us so much more.
Suppose I’m interested in a health topic. I could search a database of published literature to find the latest evidence for a new treatment, and if I’m lucky I can save that search as an RSS feed (although every time new evidence is published in this topic the new data will push the old data out of the feed). I can also subscribe to a variety of other information sources on the same topic. I can aggregate for myself at least some of the information I’m looking for. It is not so easy though to then pass this information on to you, and certainly not in a way that you can add value to and pass it on to others. I think this is where Yahoo Pipes, and future similar services with a slightly more intuitive interface fit in.
One final example. Suppose I’m learning about a topic as part of a course, or maybe I’m the teacher. I find some great resources scattered across a number of RSS feeds, plus many resources that aren’t yet in a feed (because sadly most academic sources of content such as libraries and repositories are slow to pick up on RSS). Add to this some resources that I might have created for myself. What I’d really like to do is to share my resources as a trail of content links for my fellow learners. This is a great application for RSS. It’s important to recognize that this isn’t the same as blogging about them and having people subscribe to my blog’s RSS feed. Not the same at all. I believe we’ve only just started to see the usefulness of RSS, and Yahoo Pipes is one of the first services to show us new uses.
Geotag your WordPress posts
If you’d like to geotag you WordPress posts you can do so using my Technotags plugin. The plugin does two things. It allows you to add metadata to your posts including geotag coordinates and it automatically creates a link to Google Maps to show the location of your coordinates.
Get the latest version of the plugin here.
To use this geotagging goodness simply add a custom field key called ‘gmap’ to your post and enter the latitude and longitude in decimal format as the value. Coordinates must be in decimal formal e.g. 52.4509934727,-1.93881244894 rather than as degrees, minutes and seconds e.g. +52° 27′ 3.57", -1° 56′ 19.72" for this to work. Most if not all GPS devices will give you coordinates in decimal format.
The custom fields from an example geotagged post will look like this…
Your post is now geotagged! By adding coordinates to your post’s metadata you will be future-proofing your geotags because any future applications that can use latitude and longitude data will be able to extract these without affecting the post itself.
To help your readers visualise the location specified by your geotag coordinates the Technotags plugin creates an link to Google Maps using your coordinates at the end of your post. Because you entered coordinates using custom fields, the Google Map link is separate to your post, like all good metadata should be.
The Technotags plugin does other cool things like create links to Flickr and Technorati tags and much more. Check it out!
Have fun and let me know how you get on. Happy geotagging!
Edublog simile generator
I’ve noticed that the edublogging space is getting increasingly crowded. Seems like anyone with a blog is now an education expert. A related problem seems to be a lack of imagination when coming up with post titles, snappy catchphrases, and edugeek similes. The often quoted “markets are conversations” cliche is getting hackneyed with a proliferation of other things also being conversations. Then there’s the future predictions. The best prediction I saw recently was “… In the future of media, which is now, …”. Classic. The future is now, so what’s tomorrow? Two days after yesterday I suppose, or the day before the day after tomorrow.
So anyhoo in order to help budding edubloggers I’ve created a little edugeek simile generator which may even help you come up with ideas for your post titles.
If your web browser doesn’t like iFrames then try this link.
iSync sinking feeling
You’d have thought that by now synchronizing calendar, to-do and contact lists between computer and portable devices would be a reasonably straightforward task. Well I’d have thought so anyway, especially as I have a Mac and iSync is a service built into the OS. Inspired by my progress with Getting Things Done I had envisaged syncing my lean and mean task lists to my Sony Ericsson P900 so that even when away from my desk I’d always know what the Next Action is. How naive I was. It took ages to reconcile synchronization conflicts and duplicates and I’m still not convinced I have all the data that I started with. But the biggest problem is much more fundamental. Despite finally getting my desktop Mac, laptop and phone to talk to each other and sync properly, the most important data doesn’t sync. Categories do not make it through iSync conduits.
It seems that there is no standard way of implementing category metadata across different platforms. Some cross platform category sync seems possible, for example Palm sync appears better integrated and preserves more metadata (can anyone verify this?) but I’m out of luck with my Symbian UIQ phone. Can anyone suggest any Mac solutions for creating task and calendar information with categories that syncs with a mobile phone PDA?
So how come learning technologists can get their metadata standards sorted but consumer electronics companies can’t?