Science Library Pad

sending trackbacks from TypePad basic

via email discussion with The Distant Librarian (who has just updated his blog with a new look) I discovered that it's possible to send trackbacks with a basic TypePad account, but for some reason, only if you use the QuickPost bookmarklet (you can set this up once you're logged into TypePad).  Also it will only show the Trackback option if the target links in your posting support that feature.  On the downside, the bookmarklet doesn't appear to support setting multiple categories.

UPDATE 2006-01-03: As part of new(er) TypePad features, you can now send TrackBacks to a list of addresses you just provide in the regular web editor (a box "Send a TrackBack to these addresses") underneath the "Accept TrackBacks" checkbox.

Yahoo Term Extraction Service Available

Yahoo! Web Services blog: Term Extraction Service Available.

Takes some text, tries to extract key concepts.

5th Annual Search Engine Watch Awards

If you're a search addict (and who isn't?) you may be interested in the 5th Annual Search Engine Watch Awards.

SOA site and training

The author of the SOA book I like, Thomas Erl, seems to like creating a profusion of web sites.
The latest one to come to my attention is

www.serviceorientation.org

via ZDNet SOA blog Some clarity about 'services'

On his book site www.serviceoriented.ws I see that he will be offering SOA training in Vancouver April 26-27, 2005

SPC Springboard: Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and the Principles of Service-Orientation

wireless hot spot or not spot?

WiFi users feel the sting of 'evil twins'

a new type of attack by a hacker using a fraudulent WiFi hot spot. Commonly known as "evil twins," the fake hot spots are set up close to legitimate public wireless access points in an attempt to trick users into logging onto the rogue site while believing they're using the trustworthy site. "Users think they've logged on to a wireless hot-spot connection, when in fact they've been tricked to connect to the attacker's unauthorized base station," said Dr. Phil Nobles, a cybercrime expert

in today's Globe and Mail

Remember that any time you're not using your computer or your network, you're at risk of having your information intercepted.  VPN, SSH tunnel, or other ways of sending your data encrypted are best.

MSN video downloads

www.msnvideodownloads.com

Welcome to the MSN® Video Downloads service, your daily source for downloadable video content that you can take with you anywhere. MSN Video Downloads is optimized for high-speed Internet users.

Get started today in experiencing more entertainment wherever you go. MSN Video Downloads is the only one-stop source for a variety of high quality news, sports and entertainment videos that work on select Windows Mobile devices.

from Slashdot MS Launches Video Download Service /.

CIL2005 presentations are up

www.infotoday.com/cil2005/Presentations/

via dave's blog

Here's one of interest to me:
Harvesting Metadata Using OAI-PMH

Iowa State U wiki

Iowa State University is running a wiki using Atlassian Confluence.

podcasting and hype

I guess I am curmudgeonly in my old age.
I've been doing Internet audio, photos, telephony, video for like a decade.
So I am not so clear about all this IM, podcasting, Skype hype.

Anyway, maybe it's all more wonderful than ever before.
Darren Barefoot is dubious about podcasting.

I guess my main issue is: who has this much attention.
You're going to read your 100 RSS feeds AND listen to a dozen podcasts AND watch some videoblogging AND answer some IM requests AND chat over Skype AND watch some screencasts, webcasts, ... ?

I'm not saying that all these technologies don't all add some small useful additions to the technoverse.

metapages - add your own content to web pages

Simon Wilson writes about Greasemonkey as a lightweight intermediary.

He describes using it to inject additional content on-the-fly onto webpages you are using.

The latest release of the swiss army knife of Firefox extensions adds support for cross-domain XMLHttpRequest calls from greasemonkey scripts. What that means is that you can create a user script (a short JavaScript that will be executed whenever your browser loads specific pages) that can then pull extra data in from another server. This new ability is described in the greasemonkey documentation.

found via trendalicious

books on hacking Firefox

O'Reilly - Firefox Hacks by Nigel McFarlane.  ISBN 0-596-00928-3.

It looks like the following will be a more general Firefox intro books
PH PTR - Firefox and Thunderbird Garage by Marcia Knous and others.  ISBN 0131870041.  Two sample chapters available.
O'Reilly (Sitepoint) - Firefox Secrets

Related articles:
Slashdot Firefox Hacks /.
PH PTR Firefox Beyond The Box

narrowsearch - LookSmart unviels new sites

Of particular interest in my info space:

24HourScholar.com
aimed at university students
"your full-time study resource" ... "Thousands of original articles in the sciences and humanities.  Research your term paper without leaving your desk."
Has automatic integration with Furl.

Here's the complete list:

• the trendy www.teenja.com for teens;
• the more studious www.gradewinner.com for "tweens;"
• and www.24hourscholar.com for college students.

Two additional resources are dedicated to parents:

• www.parentsurf.com for all family matters;
• and www.gobelle.com for moms on the go.

via LOOSE wire

podcast jukebox

Podcast Jukebox @ Search 4 RSS

tracking podcasts with Bloglines

Once you subscribe to a podcast feed in Bloglines, it will be added to your personal My Feeds list. When a new podcast is available, you�ll see the alert next to that feed. Each podcast update has a text note accompanied by an �enclosure� icon that links to the audio podcast file. Simply click on that enclosure link to start the podcast. That will launch your desktop media player or specialized podcasting software ..., and the podcast of your choice will play right from Bloglines.

from Open Stacks: Bloglines gets hip to podcasting

This is handy for me since most of the new podcasting software doesn't run on my older version of MacOS X.

hotel Internet at SLA2005

j's scratchpad has a detailed posting on the hotel Internet situation for the SLA2005 conference coming up in Toronto

Internet Access at SLA Annual Conference Hotels

moving data around with RSS

Any time you have a standard, you can enable unexpected things using it.
Amazon's A9 does that with RSS and search.
Jon Udell talks about it:

A9 doesn't subscribe to my search-results feed in the way Bloglines or FeedDemon or NetNewsWire would. It doesn't poll for changes. Instead it sends a request to my site when an A9 user with an active InfoWorld column performs a search. The response packet I send back just happens to be formatted as RSS 2.0, but from A9's perspective, it could be any XML format.

Why RSS 2.0, then? Because it creates network effects that go way beyond the point-to-point relationships between A9 and its search partners. The work I did to export RSS 2.0 search results served double duty. It accomplished the integration with A9, but it also dramatically expanded InfoWorld's RSS surface area. Now, for the first time, you can subscribe to any InfoWorld search in a feed reader. Want to be notified when the next review of a VoIP product shows up at InfoWorld.com? Run the query, and subscribe to its results.

Most people nowadays use RSS for person-to-person communication. You know the pattern: When a publisher posts a blog item, subscribers are alerted. A growing number of folks are also using RSS for process-to-person communication. Subscribing to searches is the best example of this pattern.

A9's use of RSS for process-to-process communication represents a third pattern. We'll be seeing a lot more of it. Not because RSS enables process integration in special ways -- it doesn't -- but rather because RSS helps us blur the boundaries between human network and process networks.

Also noted by Panlibus: Udell wooed by OpenSearch.

Previously:
2005-03-16 Etech 2005

 

more wiki options

www.seedwiki.com offers both free and pay wiki
There is a community for developing seedwiki at www.seedwiki.org

via Weblogg-ed Project Wiki

DesignPattern.org reports  "WikiCategory is provided in WikkaWiki"

I have a dynamically generated task page based on the category meta data on an existing wiki page. The real task with associated detailed information and context is in a wiki page for the task. So if a task is coming up, I put a meta category data, like “ToDo”, “ToDo5″, “AtComputer” on the wiki page of the task. Then if you go to “ToDo” page, it has a dynamically generated list of all the pages with ToDo meta data.

Seems to me you could do the same thing with blog categories.

Economist on collaborative filtering

United we find

keyword-based search engines (such as Google) have a fundamental constraint: they can only help you find something if you already have an idea of what it is. Two people's idea of “good music” may differ substantially, but Google would return the same results to both of them. To find things you might like, but are not already familiar with, requires a different technology, known as “collaborative filtering”.

This increasingly pervasive technology looks for patterns in people's likes and dislikes, and uses those patterns to help people find things they did not know they were looking for.

via Library Stuff

InfoWorld on enterprise blogs and wikis

Enterprise collaboration with blogs and wikis

Where do you find all the bits and pieces that comprise your business intelligence? Some of the more interesting snippets are probably trapped in thousands of e-mails languishing in cluttered inboxes or in archived instant messages that no one will ever bother to access again. And no doubt there’s a lot of useful information stuck in stagnant documents or databases, moldering away on the intranet.

...

To facilitate the exchange of information and to establish customized, user-friendly data archives, companies such as Cisco, Disney, Hewlett-Packard, General Motors, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Nokia, Novell, and Yahoo are turning to a new breed of collaboration tools: blogs and wikis. Each helps fill the gaps left by traditional groupware in a different way.

“Blogs and wikis play opposite roles,” says Martin Wattenberg, a researcher on the collaborative user experience team at IBM Watson Research Center. “Blogs are based on an individual voice; a blog is sort of a personal broadcasting system. Wikis, because they give people the chance to edit each other’s words, are designed to blend many voices. Reading a blog is like listening to a diva sing, reading a wiki is like listening to a symphony.”

via Moonwatcher

I have updated my Xwiki page on academic and corporate blogging.

Globe on podcasting

Have you ever wished you could download your favourite radio program and listen to it later, perhaps while making dinner or the next morning on your drive to work? Have you ever wished you even had a favourite radio program, one that specialized in snowmobiling, say, or Canadian tax law?

No matter how narrow your niche interest or how peculiar your audio wish, it's probably already come true thanks to brand-new software that is storming the Internet and sparking a renaissance in radio.

The concept is called podcasting.

from the Globe and Mail Radio blogs get great reception
via Dysart & Jones

I still don't exactly get what's so hot about podcasting since you could already, for years, download MP3s or listen to streaming radio.  But apparently the tiny layer of automation / notification that podcasting adds on top of this has got everyone hot hot hot.

document delivery review, discussion of OA

Mike McGrath, Interlending and document supply: a review of the recent literature, Interlending & Document Supply, 33, 1 (2005) pp. 42-48. ...
Findings - Finds that Open Access does not seem to have a great impact on document delivery at present but its influence is growing and may well accelerate.

via Open Access News

ICSTI/CODATA portal on access to scientific data

ICSTI and CODATA have launched a Prototype Portal on Permanent Access to Scientific Data and Information.

from Open Access News

Incidentally, ICSTI is not CISTI.
Just to make it even more confusing, the French for CISTI is ICIST.
AND we sometimes work with ICSTI.

successful software development and innovation

My background is grad CS and Physics so I have to remind myself that not everyone has a depth of training in software development.  One of the classic books in the field is The Mythical Man-Month, by Fred Brooks.

You can read an excellent summary at Wikipedia.

One approach to encouraging innovation is Google's "20% personal project" idea.
I had looked around for information on this and basically all I could find was that they took one day a week for personal projects (they don't smear it throughout the workweek).  I was glad therefore to find a bit more information in a Slashdot posting: Google 20% Time from Software Development Practices At Google /.

Reading through the Slashdot thread leads to a report on a talk by Fred Brooks at GDC2003 (Game Developers Conference).

You can watch the video and see the slides at Gamasutra - GDC 2003 Video: Fred Brooks' "Little to Big: What Changes?"
If you encounter a Gamasutra login, I suggest you use BugMeNot, as Gamasutra's signup form is ridiculously long and detailed.

Just to save some time here is a direct link to the slides (PowerPoint).

If you do watch the video, you probably want to skip the introduction, the talk starts at 4:24.  Unfortunately the video and audio quality is only moderate at best (seemed better on the Mac than on Windows).

He talks about the challenge of putting in process and control for software development without stifling creativity.

You may be wondering, Why a game development conference?
Well, computer games are a huge industry.  Bigger than movies.
Keys to success are delivering an innovative product on time.
That is a huge software engineering challenge.

You can check out the conference site: Game Developers Conference.
They have archives of presentations going back to 2000.

wikis and tools to support research and task management

Tom Keays points out a bunch of interesting tools.

I was really caught up in the thread on the 43F group about using wikis for GTD [Getting Things Done]. Seemed like a good idea to me and I have been messing around with an easy to use, lightweight wiki called DokuWiki, the main attraction of which being that I saw that it might be a way for me to implement a GTD system that was both accessible on my webserver and available in some form on my Palm.
...
Chris Metcalf posted his announcement of a his adaptation of PhpWiki (an environment I have also installed and played around with) specifically for GTD. He's calling it GtdWiki and, even in its preliminary form, it looks really excellent.

from Messing About in Getting Things Done

A thread on the 43 Folders group on Macs and Academia lead me to Steven Berlin Johnson's blog entry on how he uses Devonthink to organize and retrieve his research materials. His blog entry is, in turn, a follow-up to the essay he wrote for the New York Times Book Review on how uses software to help him find connections and patterns in what he's read and previously written that can then be incorporated into new works.

Addendum: A later posting in that 43F thread, lead me to Wikindx, a wiki environment for managing bibliographic citations, notes, and quotations.

from Tool for Thought

HALbar library toolbar

Chris King has mentioned this in a comment before, and also in an email, so here it is.

Appalachian School of Law (ASL) Firefox toolbar for Holston Associated Libraries (HAL) catalog.

It provides a toolbar, but it also has right-click functionality (you can highlight titles, authors, keywords, or ISBNs and have the extension "smart search" the library catalog).