Continuing last week's theme of Jason finding extremely exciting, anything that presents typical linear information in a cool, revolving circular format, I present to you: Tag Galaxy
(via Reddit)
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Friday, May 30
Friday Fun Link - Flickr Tag Galaxy (May 30, 2008)
by
Jason
on Fri 30 May 2008 11:49 PM CST
Thursday, May 29
Google X: A Tribute to OS X
by
Jason
on Thu 29 May 2008 07:05 PM CST
Here's some love for you Mac people out there...
What if Google modeled its interface on the OS-X one? I like it and am thinking of changing my default search to this one. Seriously. Monday, May 26
Kiva.org
by
Jason
on Mon 26 May 2008 10:09 PM CST
Kiva is a web site that helps facilitate micro-credit loans to entrepreneurs around the world. (As always, Wikipedia has more information about this organization if you're interested.)
Shea got a Kiva gift certificate as a Mother's Day Gift and is helping two people: Ruth Celenia Santana Morales who sells clothes and jewelery in the Dominican Republic and Umedjon Nurov who raises beef cattle in Tajikistan. One of the coolest things about the site is that once the loan is repaid (the loans have a 99.7% repayment rate) you can either withdraw it or turn around and loan it to someone else. I first heard about Kiva via the Bill Clinton book, Giving: How Each of Us Can Change The World. There are various other organizations out there that are similar to Kiva but which have different approaches and cater to different needs, groups, countries and so on. Heifer International is one I heard about via Cenobyte for example. Friday, May 23
Friday Fun Link - Spectra Visual Newsreader (and Some Thoughts on Some Other, More World-Changing Future Technologies) (May 23, 2008)
by
Jason
on Fri 23 May 2008 11:39 PM CST
Spectra is a new visual news reader from MSNBC. I haven't played around with it much but it looks cool, mostly because the news spins in a circle instead of the old-fashioned columnar approach. Whoo-hooo!
On a much broader scale, I've recently come across a couple lists predicting of technologies that will change the world put together by groups that know a thing or two about cutting-edge technology. IBM has posted their second annual "Five in Five" list and MIT's "Technology Review" journal has posted their list of "10 Emerging Technologies for 2008". What's especially cool about the MIT list is that you can click to past lists going back to 2001 (excepting 2002 when their super-secret crystal ball technology apparently broke down) to see if their predictions have come true yet or not. Here's the 2001 list and I won't be so presumptuous as to pretend I have a clue as to where the world is at with most of these (or even what some of them mean!). Brain-Machine Interface Flexible Transistors Data Mining Digital Rights Management Biometrics Natural Language Processing Microphotonics Untangling Code Robot Design Microfluidics But some, like data mining and DRM are definitely ones people involved in the information world are struggling with now. One final thought...my own bold prediction for the future. At some point in the very near or not so near future, people will begin to wear a small recording device that constantly captures the video and audio of every moment of their lives. This will be stored by some sort of advanced system (think Google on crack - voice recognition, natural language processing, high level artificial intelligence) that allows people to search for pretty much any type of information about their lives instantaneously: "what did I have for lunch in that cafe in Montreal in 2009?", "where did I leave my sunglasses?", "how much have I spent on gas in the last 12 months?" I recently heard about U of T engineering prof Steve Mann during Michael Ridley's presentation at the SLA conference and he's been on this path for, oh, almost thirty years already. I also came across an article (which I didn't bookmark and can't find now but maybe it was in Wired?) about somebody else who was doing something similar - wearing a computer that could OCR things he looked at like his hotel and flight reservation then transfer it into a database for easy retrieval later. I think there was also a web site that performed this function for him or that was trying to do something similar for people mentioned in the article but again, can't remember the name of it. Not keyhole.com but maybe something like that? [Edit: Found it. Twine.com] Oh, and I'll also predict that the natural reluctance people feel towards this privacy-destroying, possibly society-altering device will be no different than the acceptance rate for any other new invention. [2008-06-29 - Edit #2 - I don't think Twine was what I was thinking of. Here's the article from Salon about someone using a technology called Evernote that I think was what I was looking for originally. And while I'm adding stuff, here's a story about how new technologies will eventually allow us to add 1 TB of data on a thumbdrive. Doesn't this sound exactly like I what I'm talking about: ""All the current limitations in portable electronic storage could go away. You could record video of every event in your life and store it."] Tuesday, May 20
Friday, May 9
Friday Fun Link - TimeTube: YouTube Timelines Mashup (May 9, 2008)
by
Jason
on Fri 09 May 2008 09:46 PM CST
TimeTube is a site that creates a timeline of YouTube videos based on any keyword you enter and sorted based on the date they were added. You can also
view the results in a couple other modes - "list view", "flipbook" and
"map view" for videos that have been tagged with a location.
They have some samples of how this works best - things like major news stories that develop over time. For example, you can see a timeline of Barack Obama videos from when he first came to national prominence on through the Democratic primary right up until his most recent speech. It's not just for news stories - trying pretty much any keyword can provide interesting results. I've tried "Saskatchewan" and "Library 2.0" so far although, for these types of searches, it's probably just as easy to look at YouTube's "Sort by Date Added" feature. One other major shortcoming of the site, evidenced by the lack of links for my sample timelines above - you can't link directly to a TimeTube that you've created. Still, a very cool mash-up that has a lot of potential, especially as YouTube continues to gain content about all manner of subjects over time. (via Reddit) [2008-05-11 - TechCrunch has a good summary of the site's good and bad points as well.] Thursday, May 8
Wikipedia Goes To...Print?
by
Jason
on Thu 08 May 2008 10:23 PM CST
Seems counter-intuitive but apparently a Slice of the German Wikipedia is to Be Captured on
Paper.
(via Sandra M.) Wednesday, May 7
Canada Is Today's Frontier Upon Which The War of File-Sharing Legality Is Being Waged
by
Jason
on Wed 07 May 2008 07:11 AM CST
I have to admit that I've been cheating on MetaFilter. Once a site that I had to spend quality time with on a daily basis, it had slipped and been replaced in my affection by Reddit, a sexy little site which has a lot more technology news, a lot more politics, a lot more humour, all in a "what will it have today?" format that makes for quick and easy browsing. (Put another way: MetaFilter = The New Yorker, Reddit = People).
So anyhow, my recent visit with Jessamyn inspired me to try to make at least a little bit of time to get back to checking MetaFilter on a more regular basis. My decision was quickly rewarded when I came across the following post which I've copied verbatim from MetaFilter. "With the possible exception of Sweden, Canada is today's frontier upon which the war of file-sharing legality is waged, with the greatest number of file-sharers per capita, and a steady increase in the number of persons who partake (according to the OECD). Historically, the CRIA's own piracy campaign (2004) was given birth only one year after the RIAA began suing individuals (2003) for participating in peer-to-peer file distribution. Unlike the RIAA, the CRIA was shot down by the courts, establishing a sort of precedent in favour of the end-user which has been upheld ever since, and indeed even reinforced. However, we may be seeing the beginning of the end as QuebecTorrent now fights the good fight to prevent a legal precedent outlawing Canadian BitTorrent trackers." (via MetaFilter) Monday, May 5
I'm So Proud - My First Official Copyright Violation Notice (a single tear rolls down my cheek)
by
Jason
on Mon 05 May 2008 07:49 PM CST
The funniest part is that I've got nothing but positive comments about my Pace montage on YouTube and I probably encouraged one or two people to seek out (and maybe even buy!) this old country tune. Dear YouTube Member:
Well, I can't complain too much - Universal Music Group is progressive enough that they let the video stay up at least. Of course, if ads start showing up on something that is at least 50% my content, I think I might have to upload another video named "Tippy Toeing by Loreta Lyn" with a whole other set of photos behind it. --- UMG has claimed some or all audio content in your video Pace Owen in "Tippy Toeing" by Loretta Lynn. This claim was made as part of the YouTube Content Identification program. Your video is still live because UMG has authorized the use of this content on YouTube. As long as UMG has a claim on your video, they will receive public statistics about your video, such as number of views. Viewers may also see advertising on your video's page. Claim Details:
UMG claimed this content as a part of the YouTube Content Identification program. YouTube allows partners to review YouTube videos for content to which they own the rights. Partners may use our automated video / audio matching system to identify their content, or they may manually review videos. Sincerely, Copyright © 2008 YouTube, Inc. Sunday, May 4
"[We] discussed who had learned to drive on a tractor [answer: almost everyone, including me]"
by
Jason
on Sun 04 May 2008 08:39 PM CST
Well, the conference is over for another year! We finished off the joint SLA-MLA conference with a great social event at the Cathedral Village Free House where I was finally able to meet Jessamyn West.
Well, that's not quite true - I've "met" her before but this was the first time meeting her in person. Since long before I became a librarian, I've been reading Jessamyn's posts on MetaFilter and librarian.net. I first made official contact with her while in library school (I tried to bring her in as a "Lunch Bucket" speaker but wasn't able to pull it off...one of my great regrets of my time at FIMS) and have occasionally been in contact since then. Jessamyn wrote a bit about her time in Regina on her personal blog (which is where the title of this post comes from) and highlighted the presentation given by Sabina about the BC Evergreen initiative on librarian.net. Very cool! Saskatchewan public libraries had a massive project underway during the past year to create a similar province-wide library system but didn't receive funding in the most recent provincial budget. The project is still moving forward but in a modified form. I don't know if we'll use an open ILS like BC has but I hope so. Perhaps the lack of government funding may turn out to be a blessing in disguise if it encourages the participants to more seriously consider the open source route. I'd seen a presentation by Sabina's boss on the BC experience during a meeting of the Saskatchewan Single Integrated Library System project late last year so decided to skip her presentation for one on "open" libraries by Patricia Moore from U of S (who happens to be in the background of the photo below.) (And as an aside, my preference is conferences where similarly themed presentations don't overlap so you can hit all the "technology" ones in a row or all the "management" ones or whatever without being forced to choose between two similar ones.) One really good point by Pat was that we have to shift the perception of open source software and technology as somehow inferior to its commercial counterparts. "Open source is essentially peer-reviewed software and if that's the gold standard for the journals we supply in our libraries, it should be the gold standard for the technology that we utilize too." What else? Jessamyn's presentation on "Towards Open Libraries" was excellent - full of humour and insight into the current trends in librarianship and seemed to be very well received by the crowd. She usually puts slides and notes from her presentations on librarian.net - the Saskatchewan one isn't up as of this writing but I assume it will be eventually. I think Pace enjoyed meeting Jessamyn too!  [Edit: I see that Jessamyn added some of her own photos from her Regina visit to Flickr. Shea's quote upon seeing the following photo: "You don't even look that drunk." Me: "It was early..."]  |
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