January 30, 2007 By Swanie Citizendium is almost ready to give Wikipedia a run for its money. For the first time, the site -- a "progressive fork" of Wikipedia that puts scholars in charge of content -- is inviting Web surfers to register and start making editorial contributions.Citizendium was created last year by Larry Sanger, a founder of Wikipedia who has since criticized the site for being too easy on vandals and too hard on scholars (The Chronicle, October 27). Mr. Sanger announced that his encyclopedia would resemble a representative democracy: Any Web user would be allowed to edit content, he promised, but experts with "the qualifications typically needed for a tenure-track academic position" would be authorized to override any alterations.During a pilot project that started in November, Mr. Sanger and a team of Citizendium administrators created articles and hashed out procedural guidelines. Now, they say, the site is ready for outside contributions -- and, before long, for an official public unveiling.More than 150 editors and 350 authors participated in the pilot project, according to Mr. Sanger. "We are demonstrating that experts and nonexperts can work shoulder to shoulder on a wiki, using their real names, in a collegial atmosphere," he said in a news release. "We didn't know whether this would work, but it has so far, quite well. We are learning that accountability has merit in the world of wikis."Plenty of Wikipedia watchers have expressed doubt that Citizendium will ever amount to much. But as the site gets off the ground, its attempt to infuse open-source ideals with a sense of hierarchy should be interesting to watch. --Brock Read
http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/category/Research/
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- Posted on: Tue, Jan 30 2007 1:40 PM
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By Swanie
Michael Seringhaus and Mark Gerstein
The Scientist, September 2006
The scientific manuscript as we know it has outlived its usefulness.
Genome-scale inquiry and high-throughput experimentation yield enormous data sets, straining the established article framework; meanwhile, isolated findings or negative results are seldom published at all. Databases are already the primary form of information storage and access for genomics and protein structure research.
http://www.the-scientist.com/2006/9/1/25/1/#abstract
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- Posted on: Tue, Jan 30 2007 1:12 PM
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January 29, 2007 By Swanie January 29, 2007 / Written by Charles S. Knight, SEO, and edited by Richard MacManus. The Top 100 is listed at the end of the analysis. Ask anyone which search engine they use to find information on the Internet and they will almost certainly reply: "Google." Look a little further, and market research shows that people actually use four main search engines for 99.99% of their searches: Google, Yahoo!, MSN, and Ask.com (in that order). But in my travels as a Search Engine Optimizer (SEO), I have discovered that in that .01% lies a vast multitude of the most innovative and creative search engines you have never seen. So many, in fact, that I have had to limit my list of the very best ones to a mere 100. But it's not just the sheer number of them that makes them worthy of attention; each one of these search engines has that standard "About Us" link at the bottom of the homepage. I call it the "why we're better than Google" page. And after reading dozens and dozens of these pages, I have come to the conclusion that, taken as a whole, they are right! The Search Homepage In order to address their claims systematically, it helps to group them into categories and then compare them to their Google counterparts. For example, let's look at the first thing that almost everyone sees when they go to search the Internet - the ubiquitous Google homepage. That famously sparse, clean sheet of paper with the colorful Google logo is the most popular Web page in the entire World Wide Web. For millions and millions of Internet users, that Spartan white page IS the Internet. Google has successfully made their site the front door through which everyone passes in order to access the Internet. But staring at an almost blank sheet of paper has become, well, boring. Take Ms. Dewey for example. While some may object to her sultry demeanor, it's pretty hard to deny that interfacing with her is far more visually appealing than with an inert white screen. A second example comes from Simply Google. Instead of squeezing through the keyhole in order to reach Google's 37 search options, Simply Google places all of those choices and many, many more all on the very first page; neatly arranged in columns. Artificial Intelligence A second arena is sometimes referred to as Natural Language Processing (NLP), or Artificial Intelligence (AI). It is the desire we all have of wanting to ask a search engine questions in everyday sentences, and receive a human-like answer (remember "Good Morning, HAL"?). Many of us remember Ask Jeeves, the famous butler, which was an early attempt in this direction - that unfortunately failed. Google's approach, Google Answers, was to enlist a cadre of "experts." The concept was that you would pose a question to one of these experts, negotiate a price for an answer, and then pay up when it was found and delivered. It was such a failure, Google had to cancel the whole program. Enter ChaCha. With ChaCha, you can pose any question that you wish, click on the "Search With Guide" button, and a ChaCha Guide appears in a Chat box and dialogues with you until you find what you are looking for. There's no time limit, and no fee. Clustering Engines Perhaps Google's most glaring and egregious shortcoming is their insistence on displaying the outcome of a search in an impossibly long, one-dimensional list of results. We all intuitively know that the World Wide Web is just that, a three dimensional (or "3-D") web of interconnected Web pages. Several search engines, known as clustering engines, routinely present their search results on a two-dimensional map that one can navigate through in search of the best answer. Search engines like KartOO and Quintura are excellent examples. Recommendation Search Engines Another promising category is the recommendation search engines. While Google essentially helps you to find what you already know (you just can't find it), recommendation engines show you a whole world of things that you didn't even know existed. Check out What to Rent, Music Map, or the stunning Live Plasma display. When you input a favorite movie, book, or artist, they recommend to you a world of titles or similar artists that you may never have heard of, but would most likely enjoy. Metasearch Engines Next we come to the metasearch engines. When you perform a search on Google, the results that you get are all from, well, Google! But metasearch engines have been around for years. They allow you to search not only Google, but a variety of other search engines too - in one fell swoop. There are many search engines that can do this, Dogpile, for instance, searches all of the "big four" mentioned above (Google, Yahoo!, MSN, and Ask) simultaneously. You could also try Zuula or PlanetSearch - which plows through 16 search engines at a time for you. A very interesting site to watch is GoshMe. Instead of searching an incredible number of Web pages, like conventional search engines, GoshMe searches for search engines (or databases) that each tap into an incredible number of Web pages. As I perceive it, GoshMe is a meta-metasearch engine (still in Beta)! Other Alt Search Engines And so it goes, feature after feature after feature. TheFind is a better shopping experience than Google's Froogle, IMHO. Like is a true visual search engine, unlike Google's Images, which just matches your keywords into images that have been tagged with those same keywords. Coming soon is Mobot (see the Demo at www.mobot.com). Google Mobile does let you perform a search on your mobile phone, but check out the Slifter Mobile Demo when you get a chance! Finally, almost prophetically, Google is silent. Silent! At least Speeglebot talks to you, and Nayio listens! But of course, why should Google worry about these upstarts (all 100 of them)? Aren't they just like flies buzzing around an elephant? Can't Google just ignore them, as their share of the search market continues to creep upwards towards 100%, or perhaps just buy them? Perhaps. The Last Question Issac Asimov, the preeminent science fiction writer of our time, once said that his favorite story, by far, was The Last Question. The question, for those who have not read it, is "Can Entropy Be Reversed?" That is, can the ultimate running down of all things, the burning out of all stars (or their collapse) be stopped - or is it hopelessly inevitable? The question for this age, I submit, is… "Can Google Be Defeated"? Or is Google's mission "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful" a fait accompli? Perhaps the place to start is by reading (or re-reading) Asimov's "The Last Question." I won't give it away, but it does suggest The Answer…. Charles Knight is the Principal of Charles Knight SEO, a Search Engine Optimization company in Charlottesville, VA. The Top 100 For an Excel spreadsheet of the entire Top 100 Alternative Search Engines, go to: http://charlesknightseo.com/list.aspx or email the author at Charles@CharlesKnightSEO.com. This list is in alphabetical order. Feel free to share this list, but please retain Charles' name and email. | A9 | www.A9.com | | AOL | www.aol.com | | AURA! | http://aura.research.microsoft.com | | blinkx | www.blinkx.com | | boing | www.boing.mobi | | bookmach.com | www.bookmach.com | | BOXXET | www.boxxet.com | | ChaCha | www.chacha.com | | ClipBlast! | www.clipblast.com | | Clusty | www.clusty.com | | collarity | www.collarity.com | | CometQ | www.cometquery.com | | CONGOO | www.congoo.com | | d e c i p h o | www.decipho.com | | del.icio.us | http://del.icio.us | | digg | www.digg.com | | digg labs swarm | http://labs.digg.com/swarm/ | | Ditto | www.ditto.com | | dumbfind | www.dumbfind.com | | exalead | www.exalead.com/search | | factbites | www.factbites.com | | fazzle | www.fazzle.com | | FEEDS|2.0 | www.feeds2.com | | Feedster | www.feedster.com | | FindSounds | www.findsounds.com | | GIGABLAST | www.gigablast.com | | girafa | www.girafa.com | | gnn o d | www.gnod.net | | GoDefy | www.godefy.com | | goshme | www.goshme.com | | GoYams | www.goyams.com | | grokker | www.grokker.com | | ICEROCKET | www.icerocket.com | | ixquick | www.ixquick.com | | KartOO | www.kartoo.com | | last.fm | www.last.fm | | Lexxealpha | www.lexxe.com | | like | www.like.com | | LiveDeal | www.livedeal.com | | liveplasma | www.liveplasma.com | | Local.com | www.local.com | | lurpo | www.lurpo.com | | MetaGlossary | www.metaglossary.com | | mnemomap | www.mnemo.org | | Mojeek | www.mojeek.com | | Mooter | www.mooter.com | | MrSAPO | www.mrsapo.com | | MS. DEWEY | www.msdewey.com | | nayio | www.nayio.com | | Octora | www.octura.com | | OiHoi Search | http://oihoi.com | | Pagebull | www.pagebull.com | | PlanetSearch | www.planetsearch.com | | pluggd | www.pluggd.com | | PODZINGER | www.podzinger | | Previewseek | www.beta.previewseek.com | | pronto.com | www.pronto.com | | QTsearch | www.qtsearch.com | | Quintura | www.quintura.com | | Releton | www.releton.com | | retrevo>gamma | www.retrevo.com | | riya | www.riya.com | | ROLLYO O | www.rollyo.com | | SearchTheWeb2 | www.searchtheweb2.com | | SEEQPOD | www.seeqpod.com | | sidekiq | www.sidekiq.com | | Simply Google | http://www.usabilityviews.com/simply_google.htm | | Singing FISH | www.singingfish.com | | Slideshow | http://slideshow.zmpgroup.com/ | | Slifter | www.slifter.com | | soople | www.soople.com | | Speegle | www.speegle.com | | Sphider | http://www.cs.ioc.ee/~ando/sphider/ | | SPURL.net | www.spurl.net | | S R C H R | www.srchr.com | | SurfWax | www.surfwax.com | | Swoogle | http://swoogle.umbc.edu | | TagJag! | www.tagjag.com | | thefind.com | www.thefind.com | | Trexy | www.trexy.com | | turboscout | www.turboscout.com | | UJIKO | www.ujiko.com | | url.com | www.url.com | | VMGO.com | www.vmgo.com | | Web 2.0 | www.web20searchengine.com | | Webaroo | www.webaroo.com | | WEBBRAIN | www.webbrain.com | | What to RENT? | www.whattorent.com | | whonu? | www.whonu.com | | WIKIO | www.wikio.com | | WiseNut | www.wisenut.com | | Yahoo! MINDSET | www.mindset.research.yahoo.com | | yoono | www.yoono.com | | yoople | www.yoople.com | | yubnub | www.yubnub.com | | YuFind | www.yufind.com | | ZABASEARCH | www.zabasearch.com | | zapmeta | www.zapmeta.com | | Zippy | www.zippy.co.uk | | ZUULA | www.zuula.com
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http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/top_100_alternative_search_engines.php |
- Posted on: Mon, Jan 29 2007 6:02 PM
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January 28, 2007 By Swanie | One of the nice things about Flickr is that because of their open API a whole host of developers have built more and more interesting things to do with the site. It's interesting to me today that so many of the ways that I use Flickr are not even through the site as designed by Yahoo, but instead through the work of outside developers who are constantly creating new and interesting ways to experience the site. Today I thought I'd share what I think are the top 10 Hacks on Flickr.
This list is by no way exhaustive or complete, but as somewhat of a power user who uses the site every day I thought I'd offer some tools that you might want to try out. One note is that many of the best hacks on Flickr today are being done through Greasemonkey scripts. These will not work with Internet Explorer but will work with Firefox or Flock.
So on with the list.
1. The number one hack for Flickr would have to be Flickrleech. Flickrleech is a site developed by Andrew Houser (who is also a kick ass photographer), or simply Houser as he is often called, with the tagline, "because paging sucks."
When Houser released Flickrleech originally it would allow you to pull up any Flickr user's photos as a full page of thumbnails with no pagination. Although very cool, loading up 7,000 thumbnails wasn't exactly the nicest things to do to Flickr's servers and Houser actually changed his site to load 500 thumbnails at a time and today it sits at 200 thumbnails at a time.
Still, having the ability to browse a flickr user's photos at 200 thumbnails at a time is remarkable and allows you more photos on a single page than anything Flickr offers up themselves.
I'm constantly using Flickrleech to check out a new photographer's photos or to rapid fire go through someone's stream.
 2. The number two hack for Flickr is a newer one and was released earlier this month by Intel's Eric Appel and is called SmartSetr. One of the annoying things about Flickr is that when you want to create a set you must do it manually. Even with batch tools this gets tedious and having to add every new photo to a set every single time sucks. So Eric developed SmartSetr. SmartSetr allows you the ability to build sets that are organized around the concepts of tags, dates, and other metadata associated with a photo.
If, for instance, you want to build a set called Neon Days and Neon Nights (like I did) that holds all of your photos of neon signs, by building a SmartSet you can simply tell flickr to add any photo tagged neon to this set. Although SmartSetr isn't dynamic, Eric refreshes your sets for you once a day and things get updated. It's also really cool that you can organize your set by interestingness, so that your best photos show up first in the set -- something you can't do on Flickr. More from Eric directly.
 3. The number three hack for Flickr is a greasemonkey one called Flickr Multi Group Sender. It was developed by Steeev (who does some of the best Flickr development work around) One of the problems with Flickr's add to group function is that it is painfully and woefully slow. I'm not sure if this is because Flickr is trying to load up little mini thumbnail icons for every group or if it's something to do with how you access their database but it's weak sauce. But multi group sender makes this much easier. Multi group sender allows the add to groups function for photos on flickr super fast. You can also add to multiple groups at once by simply holding down the control key... opps, I mean command key (I keep forgetting I'm on a Mac).. and selecting another group. Careful with adding your photos to too many groups though. Adding your photo to more than about 10 groups gets you dinged in interestingness.
 4. The number four hack for Flickr is another greasemonkey one. This one is called Flickr rich edit and it was written by Jason Rhyley. Sometimes when you say something, you really want to say something. Unfortunately natively Flickr has no rich edit tools and so users must be familiar with how to manually mark up their text or they can just use this tool. By using rich text edit you are able to add rich text edit tools above text boxes on Flickr so that you can better get your point across when you need to.
 5. Tabblo. This is kind of an unusual one. Maybe not so much of a hack, but it sure feels like one. Tabblo is a photosharing site that allows you the ability to customize the feel, layout, tone and design of your photo page. The yin and the yang of Flickr is that everyone's pages look the same. On the one hand this gives Flickr a very elegant, almost like a virtual art gallery or museum feel. On the other hand sometimes people want more customization over how their photos are presented. Some companies like SmugMug make this customization part of how they diferentiate from Flickr. Flickr is torn because while you might like to give users more control over the design of the photos, if you're not careful, the next thing you know the place ends up looking like MySpace.
Enter Tabblo. Tabblo uses the Flickr API to import your photos into their site and then allows you the ability to design a page however you like. The nice thing about Tabblo is that unlike SmugMug the site is free and with a direct Flickr import function makes it super easy to design special custom pages using your Flickr photos. Here's a tabblo with some of my shots from New Orleans last year.
 6. Flickrmud. One of the problems for some Flickr users is that because the site is popular ofentimes it gets blocked. A while back Flickr was being blocked in the entire UAE. There have been reports of libraries blocking Flickr and certainly businesses blocking Flickr who don't want their employees wasting away valuable company time on social networking or seeing the occasional porn shot that creates company liability. While one answer is to simply buy your own laptop with EVDO and bring it to work, this isn't always the most economical approach. But if you are experiencing Flickr blockage somewhere check out FlickrMud. How Flickr mud works is that you simply change the url to access Flickr. Instead of accessing thomashawk's flickrstream like this: http://www.flickr.com/photos/thomashawk. You access it with this url instead: http://www.flickr.mud.yahoo.com/photos/thomashawk. By adding the .mud.yahoo before the .com oftentimes you can access the site because this way of accessing Flickr is much less known and less likely to be blocked. Mum's the word on this one of course ;)
 7. Moo Cards. Again, not so much of a Flickr hack as a tool for the flickr photographer. One of the problems with the outside world (yes even with Stewart and Caterina on the cover of Time magazine, etc. etc.) is that outside your immediate bubble of friends, a whole chunk of the world has no idea what Flickr is. As a photographer out there shooting all the time people will ask me where they can see my work. Even if you say "flickr" "thomas hawk" etc. People will forget. By ordering up some Moo cards (they are only about $25 for 100) you can give these cards out to people when they ask where they can see the shots.
Of course one hack with your Flickr Moo cards is that you don't actually have to send them to your Flickrstream. My Flickr Moo cards have my Zooomr stream ID url on there instead. Opps, did I just say that, Doh!
 8. Slickr. One of the things that is cool about Flickr is that there is an amazing amount of fanastic images online. This is cool and all but Flickr's slide show functionality sucks, it's not full screen, etc. This is where Slickr comes in. Slickr allows you the ability to point Slickr to someone's photostream, your photos marked favorites, etc., etc. and then actually download full high res photos of all of whatever you point it to to your computer. It was developed by Gabriel Hanford. Once on your hard drive you can better make use of these images for your screen saver or for your desktop backgrounds and all that. One of my favorite things to do is to sit back and watch my Media Center PC rotate through my favorites from Flickr on beautiful full high res clarity.
One note with this. You might want to check out the photo license of the photos that you choose to download with Slickr. Although Slickr works with all licenses, technically you'd be breaking the rules by downloading an all rights reserved licensed photo. Creative Commons licensed photos of course (like mine) are free to use for non commercial (in my case) use and if you want to download all of my images for your screen saver, desktop, etc., or even just one of my sets like Superfaves, feel free.
 9. Flickr Friends (formerly Flickr Stalkr). Flickr Friends got off to a rough start originally at Flickr. Developed by James Newbery it was initially named Flickr Stalkr and well, that just didn't sound right and so they saw themselves get nipped in the bud early on. Subsequently though the site relaunched as Flickr Friend Finder and is a way for you to find all of your friends (or ex-girlfriends, opps, did I just say that too?) on Flickr. With Flickr Friend Finder you simply enter in a string of email addresess (or upload your address book to them) and they will return back to you everyone who is on Flickr. You can then add them as friends to make sure to keep tabs on what they are up to photographically speaking. James has the following privacy statement up on his site:
"Your addresses will not be stored anywhere, read by anyone, or made accessible to anyone. Any file you upload will be deleted from the server immediately."
...of course it's up to you whether or not you think it's a good idea or right to use your friend's email addresses this way.
 10. jUploadr. One of the things about Flickr's bulk uploader tool (in my opinion) is that it is not very good. Especially on a Mac it is very slow to load, won't strip the .jpg titles from the names of my photos, etc. jUploader was developed by Steve Cohen and offers a better, faster, way to upload. You can enter in default tags, descriptions, etc. for all of your photos or you can easily select photos to bulk tag/descript before uploading to Flickr. jUploader is also our official uploader for Zooomr as well and if you want to upload your shots to Flickr and Zooomr, once you are done with one you can simply click on the other to send your photos there as well. jUploadr runs on Windows, Linux and OS X.
Original post: Thomas Hawk's Digital Connection |
- Posted on: Sun, Jan 28 2007 1:47 PM
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January 26, 2007 By Swanie - Posted on: Fri, Jan 26 2007 9:34 AM
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By Swanie | As Wikipedia has become more and more popular with students, some professors have become increasingly concerned about the online, reader-produced encyclopedia. While plenty of professors have complained about the lack of accuracy or completeness of entries, and some have discouraged or tried to bar students from using it, the history department at Middlebury College is trying to take a stronger, collective stand. It voted this month to bar students from citing the Web site as a source in papers or other academic work. All faculty members will be telling students about the policy and explaining why material on Wikipedia — while convenient — may not be trustworthy. “As educators, we are in the business of reducing the dissemination of misinformation,” said Don Wyatt, chair of the department. “Even though Wikipedia may have some value, particularly from the value of leading students to citable sources, it is not itself an appropriate source for citation,” he said. The department made what Wyatt termed a consensus decision on the issue after discussing problems professors were seeing as students cited incorrect information from Wikipedia in papers and on tests. In one instance, Wyatt said, a professor noticed several students offering the same incorrect information, from Wikipedia. There was some discussion in the department of trying to ban students from using Wikipedia, but Wyatt said that didn’t seem appropriate. Many Wikipedia entries have good bibliographies, Wyatt said. And any absolute ban would just be ignored. “There’s the issue of freedom of access,” he said. “And I’m not in the business of promulgating unenforceable edicts.” Wyatt said that the department did not specify punishments for citing Wikipedia, and that the primary purpose of the policy was to educate, not to be punitive. He said he doubted that a paper would be rejected for having a single Wikipedia footnote, but that students would be told that they shouldn’t do so, and that multiple violations would result in reduced grades or even a failure. “The important point that we wish to communicate to all students taking courses and submitting work in our department in the future is that they cite Wikipedia at their peril,” he said. He stressed that the objection of the department to Wikipedia wasn’t its online nature, but its unedited nature, and he said students need to be taught to go for quality information, not just convenience. The frustrations of Middlebury faculty members are by no means unique. Last year, Alan Liu, a professor of English at the University of California at Santa Barbara, adopted a policy that Wikipedia “is not appropriate as the primary or sole reference for anything that is central to an argument, complex, or controversial.” Liu said that it was too early to tell what impact his policy is having. In explaining his rationale — which he shared with an e-mail list — he wrote that he had “just read a paper about the relation between structuralism, deconstruction, and postmodernism in which every reference was to the Wikipedia articles on those topics with no awareness that there was any need to read a primary work or even a critical work.” Wikipedia officials agree — in part — with Middlebury’s history department. “That’s a sensible policy,” Sandra Ordonez, a spokeswoman, said in an e-mail interview. “Wikipedia is the ideal place to start your research and get a global picture of a topic, however, it is not an authoritative source. In fact, we recommend that students check the facts they find in Wikipedia against other sources. Additionally, it is generally good research practice to cite an original source when writing a paper, or completing an exam. It’s usually not advisable, particularly at the university level, to cite an encyclopedia.” Ordonez acknowledged that, given the collaborative nature of Wikipedia writing and editing, “there is no guarantee an article is 100 percent correct,” but she said that the site is shifting its focus from growth to improving quality, and that the site is a great resource for students. “Most articles are continually being edited and improved upon, and most contributors are real lovers of knowledge who have a real desire to improve the quality of a particular article,” she said. Experts on digital media said that the Middlebury history professors’ reaction was understandable and reflects growing concern among faculty members about the accuracy of what students find online. But some worry that bans on citing Wikipedia may not deal with the underlying issues. Roy Rosenzweig, director of the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, did an analysis of the accuracy of Wikipedia for The Journal of American History, and he found that in many entries, Wikipedia was as accurate or more accurate than more traditional encyclopedias. He said that the quality of material was inconsistent, and that biographical entries were generally well done, while more thematic entries were much less so. Like Ordonez, he said the real problem is one of college students using encyclopedias when they should be using more advanced sources. “College students shouldn’t be citing encyclopedias in their papers,” he said. “That’s not what college is about. They either should be using primary sources or serious secondary sources.” In the world of college librarians, a major topic of late has been how to guide students in the right direction for research, when Wikipedia and similar sources are so easy. Some of those who have been involved in these discussions said that the Middlebury history department’s action pointed to the need for more outreach to students. Lisa Hinchliffe, head of the undergraduate library and coordinator of information literacy at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, said that earlier generations of students were in fact taught when it was appropriate (or not) to consult an encyclopedia and why for many a paper they would never even cite a popular magazine or non-scholarly work. “But it was a relatively constrained landscape,” and students didn’t have easy access to anything equivalent to Wikipedia, she said. “It’s not that students are being lazy today. It’s a much more complex environment.” When she has taught, and spotted footnotes to sources that aren’t appropriate, she’s considered that “a teachable moment,” Hinchliffe said. She said that she would be interested to see how Middlebury professors react when they get the first violations of their policy, and said she thought there could be positive discussions about why sources are or aren’t good ones. That kind of teaching, she said, is important “and can be challenging.” Steven Bell, associate librarian for research and instructional services at Temple University, said of the Middlebury approach: “I applaud the effort for wanting to direct students to good quality resources,” but he said he would go about it in a different way. “I understand what their concerns are. There’s no question that [on Wikipedia and similar sites] some things are great and some things are questionable. Some of the pages could be by eighth graders,” he said. “But to simply say ‘don’t use that one’ might take students in the wrong direction from the perspective of information literacy.” Students face “an ocean of information” today, much of it of poor quality, so a better approach would be to teach students how to “triangulate” a source like Wikipedia, so they could use other sources to tell whether a given entry could be trusted. “I think our goal should be to equip students with the critical thinking skills to judge.” — Scott Jaschik The original story and user comments can be viewed online at http://insidehighered.com/news/2007/01/26/wiki. |
- Posted on: Fri, Jan 26 2007 9:31 AM
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By Swanie College students certainly aren't afraid of technology, and they hate paying a lot for textbooks. So why aren't they buying e-books instead?Companies that sell e-books aren't quite sure, according to an article in The Miami Herald. "Publishers are having a hard time figuring out what they need to do" to make the technology catch on, says Bill McKenna, director of digital products at Follett, which offers about 1,000 titles as e-books.Analysts cite a few factors that have stunted the development of the digital-book industry. For one thing, there's still no generally accepted, standard file format for e-books. For another, since the books are sold online, not in campus bookstores, many students may not even know that buying digital titles is an option. --Brock Read
http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/index.php?id=1832
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- Posted on: Fri, Jan 26 2007 9:29 AM
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By Swanie THE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICAN PUBLISHERS has hired a
publics-relations firm with a hard-hitting reputation to
counter the open-access publishing movement, which campaigns
for scientific results to be made freely available to the
public, the journal "Nature" reported on Wednesday.
--> SEE http://chronicle.com/daily/2007/01/2007012601n.htm
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- Posted on: Fri, Jan 26 2007 9:27 AM
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January 25, 2007 By Swanie It's no longer safe to assume everyone will play by the unspoken Web 2.0 rules 1/23/2007 4:50:00 PM by Shane Schick
The truth can get very expensive if you have to pay for it. Lies could cost even more. Not that Microsoft has to worry about money.
A story surfaced out of Australia on Tuesday about a local software engineer who said he had been offered a contract from Redmond to edit some Wikipedia entries on OpenDocument Format (ODF) and Microsoft Office Open XML (OOXML), the competing desktop standards.
No one from Microsoft has confirmed the story, and the software engineer has not yet signed any contract, but that’s beside the point. The debate over pay-per-Wiki will make the one over pay-per-blog-post look trivial.
The premise of Wikipedia, and of wikis in general, is that the network effect will provide the checks and balances necessary to weed out overly biased information. The increasing skepticism around that belief has led to the introduction of more strict registration procedures at Wikipedia, as it likely has elsewhere. What Microsoft has allegedly done is not necessarily bribery – there is nothing wrong with paying someone qualified to do a job, and it’s not like the online public has taken any kind of collective oath to uphold wiki values, whatever those are. It would probably breach Wikipedia’s terms and conditions, but that would only become clear if the relationship between the wiki editor and his or her employer was known. This could be one of many such offers Microsoft, and a raft of other publicity-minded companies, have been making for some time.
Although there are many users who would not trust Wikipedia as their only source of information on a given subject, it provides an example of how predominance can lead to influence. As a volunteer-led organization, it depends in large part on the honour system for the integrity of its data. Like charities that get manipulated by profit-driven companies, however, Wikipedia and online resources like it will increasingly be prey to misuse that will be very difficult to detect.
The Microsoft allegations represent a much different spin on the kind of manipulation that Wikipedia has suffered in the past. In most cases, edits were challenged when it was obvious that the changes were made by the subject of the entry, or other people with vested interests in the subject. In this case, Microsoft reportedly was only looking for someone “independent but friendly” (which is a great way of describing bias with a lower-case “b.”). There’s no reason other vendors couldn’t solicit the services of similar experts-for-hire who voice their opinions based on who pays for them to speak.
It is tempting to think of such maneuvers as bad sportsmanship, but it depends on how deep your belief in the wiki model runs. If someone deliberately tries to substitute the truth for lies – and despite all its subjectivity, there are still a few facts in Wikipedia – shouldn’t that be considered a security breach of sorts? Malware cripples a piece of hardware or software, but there could be equally ominous dangers from the secret ways in which information is twisted to suit the ends of a few. It’s not a virus so much as a syndrome, and we have yet to develop the immune system for it.
sschick@itbusiness.ca |
- Posted on: Thu, Jan 25 2007 9:53 PM
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By Swanie The 2006 ChoiceStream Personalization Survey provides insight into consumers’ interest in, and perceptions of, personalization. Key findings: - 79 percent of consumers are interested in receiving personalized content, which is consistent with last year’s response of 80 percent.
- A significantly larger number of consumers are willing to trade off privacy for personalization as 57 percent are willing to provide personal demographic information in exchange for personalized content versus 46 percent in 2005 (a 24 percent increase).
- While interest in personalization remains high and consumers’ willingness to divulge information increased, concern about the security of personal data was consistent year over year with 62 percent indicating concern in 2006 versus 63 percent in 2005.
- 75 percent of consumers indicated that personalization would improve their social networking experience by introducing them to other members who share their tastes and interests.
- The types of content consumers want personalized are relatively consistent with the 2005 survey findings, with books, music and movies being the most popular categories.
View report http://www.choicestream.com/pdf/ChoiceStream_PersonalizationSurveyResults2006.pdf
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- Posted on: Thu, Jan 25 2007 10:06 AM
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By Swanie January 23, 2007 CANNES, France, Jan. 22 — As even digital music revenue growth falters because of rampant file-sharing by consumers, the major record labels are moving closer to releasing music on the Internet with no copying restrictions — a step they once vowed never to take. Executives of several technology companies meeting here at Midem, the annual global trade fair for the music industry, said over the weekend that at least one of the four major record companies could move toward the sale of unrestricted digital files in the MP3 format within months. Most independent record labels already sell tracks digitally compressed in the MP3 format, which can be downloaded, e-mailed or copied to computers, cellphones, portable music players and compact discs without limit. The independents see providing songs in MP3 partly as a way of generating publicity that could lead to future sales. For the major recording companies, however, selling in the MP3 format would be a capitulation to the power of the Internet, which has destroyed their control over the worldwide distribution of music. Until last year, the industry was counting on online purchases of music, led by Apple’s iTunes music store, to make up the difference. But digital sales in 2006, while 80 percent ahead of the year before, grew slower than in 2005 and did not compensate for the decline in physical sales, according to an industry report released in London last week. Even so, the move to MP3s is not inevitable, some insiders warn. Publicly, music company executives say their systems for limiting copies are a way to fairly compensate artists and other copyright holders who contribute to the creation of music. But privately, there are signs of a new appreciation in the industry for unrestricted copies, which could be sold as singles or through subscription services or made freely available on Internet sites that support advertising. The EMI Group said last week that it would offer free streaming music on Baidu.com, the leading Web site and search engine in China, where 90 percent of music is pirated. EMI and Baidu also agreed to explore developing advertising-supported music download services. This summer EMI licensed its recording to Qtrax, an ad-supported music distribution service. Experiments by Yahoo — last year it offered a handful of tracks from Norah Jones, Jessica Simpson, Jesse McCartney and Relient K without any digital restrictions — will continue this year, David Goldberg, vice president and general manager of Yahoo Music, said in an interview at Midem. Two of the major labels, Sony BMG and EMI, agreed to the tests in 2006. In a handful of European countries, especially in France, consumer frustration has led to government proposals to legislate interoperability. “There is a groundswell, and I say that on the basis of private conversations,” said Rob Glaser, chief executive of RealNetworks, which sells digital music protected against piracy through the Rhapsody subscription service. “It will happen between next year and five years from now, but it is more likely to be in one to two years,” he said.http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/23/technology/23music.html?_r=1&th=&oref=slogin&emc=th&pagewanted=print
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- Posted on: Thu, Jan 25 2007 10:01 AM
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January 24, 2007 By Swanie Ask almost any Wikipedia diehard how the site avoids becoming a morass of news releases and hit pieces, and they will give credit to the encyclopedia's "neutral point of view" policy -- one of a select few precepts that Wikipedia's founder, Jimmy Wales, has called "nonnegotiable."
The policy states, bluntly, that debates over contentious issues are "described, represented, and characterized, but not engaged in" by writers for the site. That language seems to rule out any article that could come across as a personal advocacy piece. But Gregory Kohs, a market researcher from Pennsylvania, decided to test Wikipedia's resistance to perceived conflicts of interest last
year: He started MyWikiBiz, a service that offered to write Wikipedia entries for businesses for under $100 a pop. Mr. Kohs said he intended to keep his articles objective and well sourced, but the pay-for-play scheme didn't sit well with Mr. Wales. After some wrangling, the chief Wikipedian decided to shut Mr. Kohs out from the site, according to the Associated Press. Mr. Kohs says he was hard done by, and he notes that Wikipedia has its own Reward Board -- a page on which Wikipedians can offer money or gifts to other authors willing to firm up specific articles. But it's hard to feel too bad for MyWikiBiz. Most of the posts to Wikipedia's Reward Board simply offer to trade work on one article for similar work on another piece. And the proposed trades that do involve money, like a standing offer of $55 to anyone who can elevate entries about Lithuania to "featured article" status, seem pretty altruistic. If the encyclopedia is serious about gaining acceptance from academe, surely it has a vested interest in dissuading companies from paying to improve their presence on the site. --Brock Read
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- Posted on: Wed, Jan 24 2007 10:34 PM
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By Swanie
College technology officials describe how they established "coursecasting" programs to put recorded lectures online in downloadable form.
--> SEE http://chronicle.com/weekly/v53/i21/21a03201.htm
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- Posted on: Wed, Jan 24 2007 6:24 PM
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By Swanie An interesting new search engine people might be interested in. Note it is still in Beta stage.
http://www.wikiseek.com/
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- Posted on: Wed, Jan 24 2007 6:19 PM
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By Swanie
As more and more librarians become "media specialists" or "information technologists," what happens to librarians who remain chiefly interested in collecting books, not in promoting information literacy? They get a bit jaundiced, writes Thomas Washington, the librarian at a school in the Washington area.
http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/index.php?id=1828
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- Posted on: Wed, Jan 24 2007 11:00 AM
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By Swanie - Posted on: Wed, Jan 24 2007 10:55 AM
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January 22, 2007 By Swanie An interesting piece detailing the development of the concept 'information'; perhaps someone should do the same for the concept 'knowledge'?
"Early on, in 1953, Shannon acknowledged that -
[t]he word 'information' has been given different meanings by various writers in the general field of information theory. It is likely that at least a number of these will prove sufficiently useful in certain applications to deserve further study and permanent recognition. It is hardly to be expected that a single concept of information would satisfactorily account for the numerous possible applications of this general field."
"Phrases like "information age" are bandied about with such numbing frequency that we can be sure that Shannon's subtly counterintuitive specification of information hasn't been reproduced with any accuracy at all. And those phrases are too often invoked as justifications for some sort of action or reaction - often "radical" adapting, moving, hiring, firing, restructuring, or replacing, for example - so we can be equally sure that the ways in which specific information is translated into specific consequences haven't, in the main, been guided by much science or art. On the contrary: it doesn't require much discipline at all to see that, empirically speaking, most uses of the word "information" are puffery."
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/01/02/wtf_is_information_part1/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/01/06/wtf_is_information_part2/
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- Posted on: Mon, Jan 22 2007 6:14 PM
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By Swanie
http://www.webcitation.org/index
Background
Authors increasingly cite webpages in medical and scientific publications, which can "disappear" overnight. The problem of unstable webcitations has recently been recently referred to as an issue "calling for an immediate response" by publishers and authors.
What is WebCiteR?
WebCiteR is an archiving system for webreferences (cited webpages and websites), which can be used by authors, editors, and publishers of scholarly papers and books, to ensure that cited webmaterial will remain available to readers in the future. If cited webreferences in journal articles, books etc. are not archived, future readers may encounter a "404 File Not Found" error when clicking on a cited URL.
A WebCiteR reference is an archived webcitation, and rather than linking to the live website (which can and probably will disappear in the future), authors of scholarly works will link to the archived WebCiteR copy on webcitation.org.
How do I use WebCiteR as an author to archive webpages I want to cite?
WebCiteR is an entirely free service for authors who want to cite webmaterial, regardless of what publication they are writing for (even if the journal/publisher authors are writing for are not yet listed as members.
Membership only means some sort of formal agreement with a publisher). We ask, however, to use WebCiteR primarily in the context of scholarly publications.
The author of a citing manuscript can:
* Either manually initiate the archiving of a single cited webpage (by using either the WebCite bookmarklet or the archive page) and manually insert a citation to the permanently archived webdocument on webcitation.org in his manuscript, or;
* Upload an entire citing manuscript to the WebCite server via the comb page, which initiates the WebCiteR tool to comb through the manuscript and to archive all cited non-journal URLs. The WebCiteR software also replaces all URLs in the manuscript with a link to the permanently archived webdocument on webcitation.org.
How can I use WebCiteR as an editor?
If you are a journal editor, publisher, or copyeditor, the first thing you should do is to insert a note in your "Instructions for authors" asking your authors to use webcitation.org to permanently archive all cited webpages and websites, and to cite the archived copy rather than the original link, which may be "dead" in a few weeks, months, or years.
Secondly, editors/copyeditors should initiate the archiving of cited webpages (see instructions above "How to use WebCiteR as an author") and replace all webcitations in a manuscript with links to the archived copy, before the manuscript is published.
Thirdly, please notify us that you are using WebCiteR -- you will become a member of the WebCiteR consortium (which is free) by filling in the form.
How can I use WebCiteR as a publisher?
Contact us to become a partner in the WebCiteR consortium by filling in the form.
Ask your editors to instruct their authors and copyeditors to cache all cited URLs "prospectively" before submission or at least during the copyediting process. Talk to us if you would like to submit XML files (for us to archive cited webpages automatically), or if you would like to have back-issues of your journal(s) analyzed for webcitations and the cited documents "retrospectively" archived.
Except for archived content, this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.
www.markperkins.info
https://keyserver.pgp.com/
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- Posted on: Mon, Jan 22 2007 6:12 PM
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By Swanie Librarians were the ultimate search guides before search was re-invented with the web. They are trusted, credible sources for historical information, and pioneers and innovators of taxonomy of information. Librarians witness, search for, find, organize and catalog knowledge.Online research and the power of the web, have made accessing information only fingertips away from all of us, but the taxonomies and standards used for search will impact how people learn online and off for years to come. Below are some of the things librarians understand about search - and things that anyone doing online research can benefit from.
http://www.degreetutor.com/library/research-tools/librarian-searchguide |
- Posted on: Mon, Jan 22 2007 4:15 PM
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By Swanie Many students choose e-mail over office visits to
communicate with professors.
http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/index.php?id=1818 |
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