J.D. Lasica in the Online Journal Review article: Blogging as a Form of Journalism writes,
"While no one is really sure where this is all heading, my hunch is that blogging represents Ground Zero of the personal Webcasting revolution. Weblogging will drive a powerful new form of amateur journalism as millions of Net users -- young people especially -- take on the role of columnist, reporter, analyst and publisher while fashioning their own personal broadcasting networks. It won't happen overnight, and we're now seeing only version 1.0, but just wait a few years when broadband and multimedia arrive in a big way."
I had forgottent that April 23rd is St George's Feast Day. The St George's Day site has some interesting bits and pieces.
At the DC Commuters Pages today I stumbled across eGO Vehicles Inc.. They make an electric bike that looks pretty nifty.
The folks at OQO have announced a WIN-XP computer at the size of a paperback book. Pretty neat and it comes with 802.11b built in.
Some more letterboxing sites from Sarah Scott.
It's spring, no it's summer today, with a vengeance. In the US Airways magazine I ran into a little sidebar on Letterboxing. It reminded me of the Smithsonian Article April 1998, They Live and Breathe Letterboxing.
This looks like it could be really nifty. I mean it's sORt of a win-win: It uses rubber stamps (yay); there is riddle and puzzle sovling (scritch, scritch); map reading and orienteering (Sally's a champ here); outdoOR hiking (Sally excels here too) and all around adventure.
The following is an excerpt of an email I sent this morning:
As you all know I've been informally exploring different tools to use as collaboration spaces for some time now. At the moment I'm using at least four different online channels: 1) traditional email listservers (E2Eperf-interest@internet2.edu); 2) traditional web pages (http://www.internet2.edu/e2epi); 3) a "discussion board program" (http://e2edev.internet2.edu/cgi-bin/forum/discus.cgi); and 4) a web log / blog program (http://people.internet2.edu/~ghb/e2einfo/). The links there point to the sites I'm managing.
The web log / blog I am calling a notebook to avoid scaring some of the folks I work with. They understand the idea of a notebook. The package I'm using came from Movable Type ( http://www.movabletype.org/ ) You can check their site to see the myriad different styles and formats that folks have developed for this media.
I have some ideas of how a blog can be used as a collaboration tool.
First idea is that as with newsletters we can have a pool of reporters and editors. These people have write permission to the notebook (pardon me, but I'm going to switch between blog and notebook depending on which one sounds right....) So, for the E2Epi there are a number of people who have permission even though so far I've been the primary publisher of content. OK, big deal -- what's the difference from web page or the BBS/discussion board?. IMHO the difference here is what might be considered a limited two-way channel. New content or articles are posted by those with permission. Then the community can respond via the "comment" boxes. These responses setup a conversation of sorts that should be on topic, on focus to the original message. The editor can prune inappropriate materials or fire up a new branch. So, this is more interactive than what we find with web pages.
Second, the mechanics of the blog makes it very easy to publish content. Therefore, I've been using it to do quick snapshots of info from other websites. In one case Russ Hobby received a list of papers that I managed to locate on the net -- so, I captured the links with abstract info and now in a more public space for our group we have those citations. Another attribute that makes publishing this sort of info so easy is a "button," a java script, that sits on my favorites bar. When I am viewing a page with good stuff -- I click the button and it captures the page title and URL plus any text I have highlighted and places this all in a small pop-up form on the page which I can edit and then publish. Actually, it took me longer to type the last sentence than it would to publish some info. So, ease of use is a big plus here.
Third, Movable Type has a nifty ability to duplicate itself or to run mutliple blogs from a core set of cgi scripts. What this means is that I installed and setup one blog for myself (http://people.internet2.edu/~ghb/infoark/) and now am operating 6 different blogs from the same core script. The Administration package is straight forward. I can assign different users to be reporters or editors on different blogs or multiple blogs. To be honest I do not know what the ceilling is on the number of blogs permitted by the core application. Oh, another point is that the core application downloaded as a zip file of cgi and text scripts that unloaded as less than 500K total onto an intel box running Linux. Pretty spiffy.
Fourth, as a personal choice I'm using the notebook as the front end to other files or html pages I'm publishing. This way I am hoping to avoid setting up FTP site. What I mean is that I can upload power point files or word docs or well, you get the picture. Then I post a blog entry with the file name link via URL. Bingo, they get the file they want.
Fifth, through the blog support user group I figured out that I could attach a search engine to the notebook. So far I have done that only for the http://people.internet2.edu/~ghb/e2einfo/ notebook but could do it for others. This engine is from Atomz ( http://www.atomz.com/ ). One thing I discovered a bit later is that the engine does a weekly update of the index or else I can do it manually. So, if currency is important, I'd update it manually after important content was loaded.
I'm beginning to run out of thoughts on the matter. But, one thing I'll mention now is that with respect to the XML qualities, I have not really explored the ramifications of using XML nor have I tried syndicating the content. I am thinking of how this will eventually impact on a more synthetic or interactive content space that relates to the idea of Negroponte's "My News" -- or what I think a "portal" ought to be. So, eventually, the E2Epi web pages should be database driven. As reader or contributor you should be able to select information channels of interest / relevance to you. It would be fun to have a random channel too, that would present random bits and pieces to tweak your thinking processes. But that's down the road a piece.
Here are some fotos of the BS Memphis Thang Hot Air Expedition. This was the first time I have ever flown in a hot air balloon. It was breathe taking and a bit scary for the first 30 seconds and then became incredibly wonderful!!
Thanks Martin!!
I'll be posting some more fotos of the weekend as well as pointers to short movies for you all to download soon.
THe University of Maryland, Human-Computer Interaction Lab is where lots of really important user interface and resource discovery work is being done.
From the Jazz Newsroom:
"The Jazz group is developing Jazz in many ways, such as:
> Building a reliable and efficient engine.
> Developing KidPad, a collaborative story-telling authoring tool for children.
> Developing a zoomable presentation authoring tool. "
Here's a pre-print of "A Zooming Web Browser"
"We are developing a prototype zooming World-Wide Web (WWW) browser within Pad , a multiscale graphical environment. Instead of having a single page visible at a time, multiple pages and the links between them are depicted on a large zoomable information surface. Pages are scaled so that the page in focus is clearly readable with connected pages shown at smaller scales to provide context. "
Cincro Zanvas seemes to be an interesting idea of zooming in and out of information.
This is something like Pad++ which I saw a couple years ago from Unv MD. They call it a ZUI -- Zooming User Interface.
This weekend I will be attending a get together of a group of people I've been communicating and working with online since 98. It should be a most interesting weekend!!
I'll be staying at the Best Inns & Suites in Memphis