Michael's starting page for his 2 year-old. I like the idea.
Behind the Scenes at News Aggregator Topix.Net: "In 1998 we did a project called NewHoo, which was acquired by Netscape/AOL, and is now called the Open Directory Project (ODP). It used a massive group of volunteers to build the web's largest human-edited directory. The ODP now has 60,000 volunteer editors, and the data powers Google Directory.
Our team left Netscape/AOL in 2002, and rather than using human labor again, we wanted to explore emerging AI (artificial intelligence) techniques for classifying and extracting structured data from the web. The goal for Topix.net is to make a web page about everything -- every person, place, and thing in the world -- constantly machine-summarized from the Internet." Topix.net
Ask Tony Archive -- CMSWatch: "I have been analyzing [Vendor 1], [Vendor 2], [Vendor 3], and [Vendor 4] -- all XML-based vendors -- as content management solutions for our university. We also have a university portal we would like the systems to publish to.
From my interaction I am starting to feel that [Vendor 1] the best solution for our university given that we have under $100k to spend and the fact that we do not need a lot of the features that an "ECM" solution offers currently. Do you think this is the correct choice?"
Tony says assemble a team. Good. Then he says "have them prioritize selection criteria". Sounds good, but the danger is the selection criteria will be a list of features and some requirements about the vendor. Not good. The best approach I heard of came from DonnaM: they had that team come up with a set of practical scenarios, and then used those scenarios to select a CMS. That feels like a winning approach.
The Morning News - Reality's Apprentice: a fascinating New York story of reality shows, blackouts and more.
PHP Comes of Age - SitePoint PHP Blog. Harry Fuecks is my PHP guru, and he blogs on Sitepoint (as does Simon Willison): "Oracle (yes Oracle) have an interesting article up titled PHP Comes of Age which reflects on PHP's past and makes some insightful observations on "Culture Clash", PHP being, in many ways, a meeting point for programmers of many backgrounds." It's part of Oracle's series The Hitchhiker's Guide to PHP, with articles by Rasmus Lerdorf and other PHP heavyweights.
A UML Introduction Tutorial Information Architects need to learn object modeling, and UML is as good a place to start as any. This tutorial seems pretty good.
SemErgence: What Sucks About PlanetRDF.org: "My problem with planetrdf.com is that it syndicates all posts from blogs it has chosen, instead of those posts that deal only with RDF and the semweb."
Exactly what XFML can be used for :) But I like PlanetRDF just the way it is.
IntellectRPD is another prototyping tool (like Ubiquity RP) that generates documentation. Could be useful for Information Architects.
Veepers seems to let you take a simple picture (of, say, a salesperson), and a text file, and it generates audio and an animated video version of that picture that realistically blinks eyes, moves head and mouth and such. Creepy, but cost effective! They have a great logo, too.
All we need at hand, already. Go! | Metafilter: "There may be no single, organic and living font of solutions to many of the world's most pressing problems than Curitiba (previous link from Wikipedia, and a bit more of a wonkish summary here), a Brazilian city of 1.5 million that urban planners from around the globe make pilgrimages to, to learn."
Google plans trademark gambit | CNET News.com: "What's new: Google plans to remove limits on sales of trademarks in its popular keyword advertising service. Bottom line: The move signals Google's increasingly aggressive posture in defending its primary source of revenue, according to some legal experts, who call the plan a gamble."
By the way, I love CNET News' What's New/Bottom Line box for high impact stories. I love the fact that they identify high impact stories as such. CNET News actually doesn't just follow Jakob's old writing for the web rules, they improve on them.
Simon Willison: A myriad of markup systems: "It's hard to avoid the legions of custom markup systems out there these days. Every Wiki has it's own syntactical quirks, while packages like Markdown, Textile, BBCode (in dozens of variants), reStructuredText offer easy ways of hooking markup conversion in to existing applications. When it comes to being totally over-implemented and infuratingly inconsistent, markup systems are rapidly catching up with template packages."
Onfolio Products Overview: "Onfolio is a PC application for collecting, organizing and sharing information you find online. Fully integrated with Microsoft Internet Explorer and Office, Onfolio has tools for capturing a wide range of content including links, text snippets, images, web pages, and documents. Onfolio lets you organize and find captured content quickly and easily. And with Onfolio, you can easily share your research in documents, presentations, emails, and research reports."
Looks like a "blog this" bookmarklet on enough steroids to have become a client side app.
The difference with a blog is that it lets you download pages in collections and search them. It also lets you create webpages, RSS feeds and other types of documents from your collections. I'm going to stick with my blog though.
640KB ought to be enough for anyone: "In each case, the designer encountered requirements that made it difficult to build their application on top of standard relational databases or file systems. And in each case, the designer ended up saying "now that we've invested in this framework, let's offer it as a platform so that other developers can plug in their own modules and custom schemas, and a powerful ecosystem will naturally emerge!" But it hasn't happened."
BBC NEWS | Europe | Translating is EU's new boom industry: "When 10 new countries join the European Union on 1 May, they bring with them an extra nine languages to add to the EU's existing 11. Translators, builders and electronics suppliers are busy ahead of 1 May
There could even be 10 new tongues, for if Greek and Turkish Cypriots vote for reunification before then, Turkish will become the EU's 21st language. How will it cope? Even with 20, Europe's tower of Babel is creaking. Twenty languages gives a total of 190 possible combinations (English-German, French-Czech, Finnish-Portuguese, etc), and finding any human being who speaks, for example, both Greek and Estonian or Slovene and Lithuanian is well-nigh impossible."
Follow up post at Languagehat. One possible outcome of all this is that Europe will become the world leader in translation services. Another is that the EU will go down in flames when translation costs soar beyond its means. More: "My theory, which is mine, is that the best way to deal with this problem would be to set up a hereditary caste/guild of translators with branches in each EU country. Childrens born into the guild would be circulated around guild-run boarding schools in a suitable selection of countries to acquire native speaker aptitude while the acquiring is good. "
New mailing list: Techie Librarians: "Discussions about the creation and nature of taxonomies, ontologies, the Semantic Web, RDF, Information Architecture, Knowledge Management, Thesaurus building, XML, Schemas, OWL, Topic Maps, controlled vocabularies, authority control, data management, and much more. You do not have to be a very technical person to understand and participate in this list, you must though, be familiar with cataloging terms and how to manage information (good librarian skills)."
BBC NEWS | Technology | Workers find voice on the net: "A leafy suburb of north London may seem an unlikely spot for an international radio station devoted to workers' rights.
But it is home to Radio LabourStart, which is using the internet to broadcast reports on the plight of workers around the world."
Online radio will obviously never replace real radio, which can reach millions of people with hardly any bandwidth scaling issues. But niche online radio can take advantage of that other property of the internet: it's global. A niche online radiostation can have a small to medium large audience, and go where normal radio could never reach.
Labels seek end to 99c music per song download | The Register: "The Wall Street Journal reports that the major five labels think that 99 cents per song is too cheap, and are discussing a price hike that would increase the tariff to $1.25 up to $2.99 per song."
Hahahahahahahaha!
Cover Pages: TMAPI 1.0 Alpha Release: Common Topic Map Application Programming Interface.: "The goal of TMAPI is "to allow developers to learn and use just one programming API for work with any topic map processing engine."
Gmail accessibility [dive into mark]: "The only way to use Gmail is the way that the Gmail designers use Gmail. The only way Gmail could be less accessible is if the entire site were built in Flash."
InterWikiMarkupLanguage (IWML): finally: ""InterWikiMarkupLanguage, intended to capture an interoperable subset of common wiki functionality. It is not meant to support everything that any wiki syntax is capable of representing, it is for reliable interchange between wiki systems."
We need this, I'm glad someone is tackling it.
Yahoo! Groups - Groups Abuse: I can't seem to access Yahoo's feedback forms. Everytime I click a link to contact them I get an error page. Anyone?
Doing subtitles in Vegas: Export the audio of your movie, get this free subtitling tool, subtitle, save subtitle file, install a plugin and import the subtitle file like this. (I haven't tried this out yet.)
Another First-Time Filmmaker (11/99).
Sound is by far the most technically complex aspect of the documentary, at least for me. We used an excellent shotgun mike. I plugged it in the wrong hole a few times, and for some tracks, for some strange reason I haven't been able to figure out, the sound was recorded mono (not stereo) and too loud. It doesn't sound good. I'll try to figure out a way to reduce it's volume while making it sound better.
$14 Steadycam: build your own steadycam.
On a related note, I've started editing the Colombian documentary using Vegas 4.0 on my $800 Windows XP computer (+ $160 external 160 Gig harddrive).
I've already uploaded 3 hours of video in my project and Vegas hasn't flinched. I was worried about being able to edit 20 hours of video on my cheap machine, but now I feel confident. I love Vegas.
I skimmed through the manual today on the train (for about 1 hour), and I think I know everything I need to now. The interface is remarkably easy to learn, because everything maps to easy to visualize real-life metaphors.
One thing I'm trying to figure out that the manual didn't talk about much is how to organize all that video while editing. I created a "temp" track where I park stuff temporarily, a "final" track that should contain the final edit, and a track for each of my 23 tapes (so I can easily refer to my printed log that shows all the scenes on each tape with notes).
Vegas lets you add notes and stuff, but even after only having 2 tapes (2 hours) of video on their tracks and taking out cuts and moving them into the final track, I'm getting confused on how to manage this.
I am cutting out cuts of their track and moving them into the "final" track so I know which cuts I already used. I can then look at the tape 7 track for example and see if there's anything else in there (not yet cut out) that should make it into the final track. I think this will work.
I also created a "filler" track: images of mountains and roads and nature and such that can be used as filler pretty much anywhere in the documentary - as opposed to cuts of action or interviews that need a specific place.
Any ideas on organizing this stuff in while editing are very welcome!
Big Fractal Tangle: the deal with don: "Ten years ago today, I signed away 51% of my second software company, Gravity Systems Inc, to a businessman with an incredibly deep gravely voice named Don Van Natta.
[...]
Aside from my plasma trips, I made cash developing a custom estimation package for Don's mechanical contracting company. My plan was to make and market "Vienna Estimator" to plumbers, electricians, and HVAC shops, then use those profits to fund my Gravity & Colony dreams. That was mistake #1, resulting in me spending three years writing plumbing software instead of riding the wave like the Netscapes of the world."
Grammar [dive into mark]: "Also, a snide note from a grammar nazi who took umbrage with the sentence 'There is a zen to it which I am not one with.'"
Grammar nazi's are sad. They, like, really miss the point of language altogether, all while professing they love language. Ay! Study linguistics, not grammar, dudes!
Note: The Anti-Worm Guys Don't Like "Financial Sustainability" in a Development Context: Archive Entry From Brad DeLong's Webjournal: "While sustainability is certainly a desirable goal, it may be difficult to achieve. Teaching people to fish rather than providing fish is great if it works, but this method works only if the donor knows more about fishing in the local area than the people who live there, and only if the donor can transfer this knowledge."
The Shifted Librarian: "My parents just got back from two weeks in Belgium and environs. When we talked on the phone tonight, the very first thing they both described was not the beauty of the land, how expensive things were (Euro against the dollar), or even the chocolate. No, the one thing they wanted to talk about first - and which obviously had a quite an impact on them - was the ubiquity of cell phones in that area."
I had a cut in my head sown a month ago, and it healed very nicely, but there's a little thread sticking out of my head. Aren't those supposed to just fall out?
Some thoughts on Drupal, an excellent open source community system. I've played with it for over 6 months now, and am using it on a live site. It's not perfect though (is anything ever perfect?)
1. Good code. Drupal, as opposed to, say, PHPNuke, contains good code. The developers continually attempt to keep the codebase clean and modular. The Drupal culture is a coders' culture.
A very nice advantage of this approach is that there are many modules available that extend Drupal's functionality. It is hard to figure out which module is up to date and being maintained, and it's hard to figure out exactly what a module does until you install it, but those are small problems that I'm sure the Drupal team will fix soon.
A disadvantage of Drupal's coders culture, is that features are sometimes coders toys instead of what users really need. For example, the "remember me" feature still doesn't work well, and was removed from the latest version. Big mistake for a community site! On the other hand, you can request features, and offer to pay for them (which is great).
Still, all in all, the approach works. The problems mentioned above are fixable.
2. Limited templating. The templating system of Drupal is built with the purpose of letting an admin user customize their site through their browser interface. By clicking some checkboxes, you can customize navigation, and add "blocks" to your site. However, this means less support for easy template coding.
Drupal uses 1 file for your template (as opposed to a separate file for each section of your site, like Moveabletype does). This means that, if your entire site has the same structure to it, you're fine. If you want different parts of your site to look differently, you end up coding a lot of PHP.
A second problem with the template file is that it is full of php code. There is no clean separation using tags, like most template engines use. The template file uses functions. This means that, to customize the template beyond small html changes, css changes and what you can do in the admin section, you will be coding PHP. Bad. In my opinion, this part of Drupal needs an overhaul.
There is a Smarty wrapper available, but until that becomes the standard (and until you can use multiple templates for different sections of your site), my complaint stands.
If you're a Drupal coder: I know you can do anything with Drupal. That's not what matters. It's about how easy it is to do things out of the box, and how easy things are to customize with limited understanding of PHP and Drupal's architecture.
Multiple languages.
It is possible to provide multiple languages for the templates of Drupal (the text that lets you sign up and such), but the "nodes" (the basic content container of Drupal) do not provide the ability to have multiple language versions of an article (for example).
There are some modules that try to address this problem, but until Drupal provides a standard, out of the box facility to have multiple language versions of an article (including translation facilities), Drupal only partially supports multiple languages out of the box.
Scaling of the UI.
Like many open source CMS's, Drupal needs to think about how it approaches growing websites. Out of the box, the system is optimized for medium size websites. There are too many options, too many pages, and many things take too many steps. Drupal should be optimized for small websites, and allow scaling the UI and functionality to medium and large scale websites. But start with small - that's how most of your users will start.
Overall, I think the Drupal team needs to focus on the basics. Drupal is at a level of maturity now where it is more important to improve basic usability and functionality (like the install process, which they are improving) than to come up with more new and exciting functionality.
If they improve their focus on improving basic functionality and usability, Drupal can become a real standard CMS. If they don't, it risks to become a feature bloated open source CMS as there are already dozens if not hundreds on the market.
IBM Usability: Role by phase matrix
AlterNet: Globalization vs. Americanization: "I grew up a patriotic South Vietnamese living in Vietnam during the war. I remember singing the national anthem, swearing my allegiance to the flag, and promising my soul and body to protect the land and its sacred rice fields and rivers. Wide-eyed child that I was, I believed every word.
But then the war ended and I, along with my family (and eventually a couple of million other Vietnamese), betrayed our agrarian ethos and land-bound sentiments by fleeing overseas to lead a very different life.
Almost three decades later, I make a living traveling between East Asia and the United States of America as an American journalist and writer. My relatives, once all concentrated in Saigon, are scattered across three continents, speaking three and four other languages, becoming citizens of several different countries. Once sedentary and communal and bound by a singular sense of geography, we are now bona fide cosmopolitans who, when we get online or meet in person, still marvel at the difference between our past and our highly mobile if intricately complex present."
Fast Company | Fresh Start 2002: Weird Ideas That Work: "Personally, I think failure stinks. But the fact is, every bit of evidence demonstrates that it is impossible to generate a few good ideas without generating a lot of bad ideas."
A clever way of categorizing! New Scientist: "A new system that can caption your digital photos by listening to you and your friends chat about them is being developed by Hewlett-Packard in California.
Digital photography is booming, and people are storing ever greater volumes of photos on the hard drives of their PCs. The trouble is that people rarely label their photos.
"This is the weak link for digital photo collections," says Margaret Fleck at HP's lab in Palo Alto. "In 10 years' time, finding something amongst them will be very difficult."
Fleck's answer is to tap into the wealth of information in the conversations we have when we talk about our photos with friends. She says the stories we tell do not merely describe the photo, but also talk about the events that happened before and after the picture was taken.
[...]
To harness this information, Fleck has developed software that records these conversations to hard disc, converts the speech to text using a speech-recognition program, and then extracts keywords with which the photos are captioned and indexed."
Sounds like a mistake though: the problem with our digital pictures is not finding them, it's sharing them and the stories around them. (This is a new interest of mine.) Recording those stories to then throw them away just to extract some keywords is a waste.
This is the kind of fresh thinking that puts a smile on my face.
Situated software - megnut.com: "This gets to something I've been thinking about for sometime now, the possibility of using personas to represent groups rather than individuals. In fact, I even proposed it as a talk for the last O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference but it wasn't accepted.
I'm still tickled by this idea of modeling the groups, because as Clay writes, there's a power in groups that you don't find when the same individuals operate in isolation. By creating group personas (groupas? grouponas?), perhaps we could better design and hone our software to utilize the group's power."
InfoWorld: Toshiba, Sandisk develop 4Gb flash memory: "The new chip can store 4Gb (512KB) of data and the companies said they are also working on a second new chip that contains two of the 4Gb chips inside a single case for what is effectively an 8Gb (1GB) flash memory chip."
Is that "4Gb (512 KB)" just an editing mistake, or does it mean something?
WorldChanging: Another World Is Here: How to Build a Coral Reef: "This group has come up with a process for building new coral reefs. It involves wire-mesh frameworks, low-voltage currents creating mineral accretion, and the transplant of broken pieces of coral."
OK, instead of me posting every single story Worldchanging runs, why don't you add them to your newsreader. I don't really post every story, so if you like this stuff check them out.
BBC NEWS | Technology | Radio mail links Pacific islands: "A internet connection speed of 2Kbps may not sound like much, but it is providing a lifeline for the people of the Solomon Islands.
[...]
But for the past four years, the People's First Network has tried to mend fences by using high frequency radio to send and receive e-mail.
[...]
The two main ways of getting in touch with people are short-wave radios or satellite telephones. But radio offers no privacy, whereas satellite phones are too expensive for most to use regularly."
Not to speak of the other advantage of email over radio/phone: asynchronicity (sender and receiver don't need to be there at the same time).
"At the moment that are 14 e-mail stations in schools or clinics in rural areas. The stations are owned by the community, with decisions taken by a committee of village chiefs and religious leaders.
The stations are a pretty basic affair, consisting of an ageing laptop, radio and modem. The kit is powered by a car battery, which itself runs off a solar panel as in most areas there is no electricity. The total cost of the equipment runs to around $8,000."
You'd think that can be done cheaper. Then again, cheap supplies aren't as plentiful everywhere in the world as they are in the USA.
The project uses WaveMail: "WaveMail is optimized for use over relatively slow links like radio-links (Pactor / Packet radio), Inmarsat and telephone lines. In order to use the slow links in an efficient manner, all messages are compressed and a very efficient protocol is used for message transfer (compression and decompression is done automatically without user intervention)."
Next they'll try to provide internet access. See World's poor to get own search engine: "Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) are developing a search engine designed for people with a slow net connection. Someone using the software would e-mail a query to a central server in Boston. The program would search the net, choose the most suitable webpages, compress them and e-mail the results a day later.
[...]
The thinking behind the TEK search engine is that people in poor countries are short of money but have time on their hands, whereas people in the West are cash-rich but time-poor."
Seems like solid thinking.
Percepnet: "Thus, while we would sense lights, sounds, tastes, smells and touches, we would perceive them as, say, a chocolate ice-cream or a glass of lightly chilled Burgundy.
[...]
The research that is being conducted in developmental neurobiology, neurophysiology and cognitive neuropsychology is suggesting that the processes involved in perception are so intermingled that there is little value in trying to divide them up neatly into sensation and perception."
Learn Dutch. Nice site.
(via Phil Bradley) Inside the Searcher's Mind: It's a Jungle in Here!: "There's No Such Thing as an Average Searcher." A study by a marketing agency, and therefore suspect, but still worth a read.
"For instance, women tended to scan all organic [he means non-sponsored] results and read titles and descriptions more carefully than men."
Mmm...
Other conclusions are about banner blindness ("It seems that people have already mentally divided the results page from their favorite engine into sections"), search behaviour ("A person searches, chooses a result, visits a site, and hopefully converts. In reality, we see the typical search pattern is quite different.").
Nothing you don't know and haven't seen analyzed better.
They do have an interesting section about what Jared Spool calls "the seducible moment". In short (and this is my interpretation of their results): don't pitch products during search, instead help users refine their search towards your product. Again, this is my interpretation - the article talks about the "Anonymity threshold". ("If given the choice between getting information and remaining anonymous and getting the information through registering, people will always choose the former.")
Nagging seems to work: Alex has started writing a Topic maps tutorial entitled "How to sort your CD collection with Topic Maps", following up on my post Why is it so hard to learn topicmaps.
NewsForge | Builder.com outsourcing content production to India: "Builder.com, CNET Networks' site aimed at application developers, plans to begin offshoring authoring of many of its articles to India shortly."
urlgreyhot : $10 to whomever figures out my anonymous user page not found problems.
So it's not just me.
Drupal is a great CMS product, and has a wonderful developer community, but something bothers me. The "remember me" login feature was broken in version 4.3, and now it's been removed from 4.4.
A question on the mailing list got me this answer:
"The reason "remember me" was removed is not because the remembering is broken per se, the problem is that it is not possible to choose the
behaviour anymore due to PHP overriding Drupal's cookie. Whether or not you are remembered depends on the session persistence and lifetime settings in php.ini / htaccess. Check PHP's documentation if you are not getting the behaviour you want."
Developer hogwash! A community CMS should not be released with such a central feature broken.