OLDaily By Stephen Downes January 14, 2004 Vancouver A bit of a short OLDaily today since I've spent the day in planning meetings. This link is to my photos from my time here on the west coast, including some of one of my favorite places, Stanley Park. What's cool is that this is the first of my galleries to be created by my automatic photo gallery creator, a nifty piece of software I wrote while attending sessions at the Pan-Canadian Workshop (ah, I love wireless access). It's still rough; I'll release the code next week. By Stephen Downes, Stephen's Web, January 14, 2003 [Refer][Research][Reflect] Web services = or != distributed objects? This is a bit technical but there is a key lesson embedded in the middle. "HTML, and HTTP headers and even much of the URI spec, have a rule that any unknown content must be ignored. So if any content appears, in any place, and the receiver doesn't know about it, it can validate as if the unknown content was 'projected' out of the instance.... Distributed object systems made a critical decision that any kind of extension required that both sides understand the extended interface. This is the fallacy of 'single administrator'..." Yes. Exactly. Now I have been trying to treat and design learning objects and XML shemas along the lines of the HTML 'must ignore' rule, not the 'single administrator' rule. Not everybody gets this distinction. But it is crucial. Fuindamental. By Dave Orchard, January 14, 2003 [Refer][Research][Reflect] Dude, Check This Out! I mentioned something like this to someone here at the conference a day or two ago; here is a link to back up the reference. 'Dude, Check This Out' is a service that allows you to collect the links of sites you've visited and share them with your 'Dude Universe'. Text-free blogging. By Roland Tanglao, January 14, 2003 [Refer][Research][Reflect] Culture Swings After I spent much of the day arguing for an emphasis on individual self determination as opposed to institutional control, I see this from Jay Cross, suggesting it's all a phase. ;) While I'm visiting Jay, have a look at this well deserved criticism of corporate puffery. And this mapping of online collaboration. Jay is on a roll, and it's really good to see. By Jay Cross, Internet Time, January 14, 2003 [Refer][Research][Reflect] A New Website for Harper's Magazine Study this one closely. The author describes the recently launched redesign of the Harper's Magazine website. In addition to being compliant XHTML and providing RSS feeds, etc., the website is semantical web enabled. What this means is that articles are cross referenced with elements from the taxonomy, which is in turn drawn from the aricles and the index. "The best way to think about this is as a remix: the taxonomy is an automated remix of the narrative content on the site, except instead of chopping up a ballad to turn it into house music, we're turning narrative content into an annotated timeline." By Paul Ford, FTrain.Com, December 1, 2003 [Refer][Research][Reflect] Making Sense of Common Sense Knowledge Interesting interview looking at the nature and usefulness of common sense. Leaving aside questions of consistency and reliability, common sense is essentially the ability to make decisions based on partial information. This proves to be a particularly challenging task for artificial intelligence. For humans, too. By Unknown, Ubiquity, January 14, 2003 [Refer][Research][Reflect] Know a friend who might enjoy this newsletter? Feel free to forward OLDaily to your colleagues. If you received this issue from a friend and would like a free subscription of your own, you can join our mailing list at http://www.downes.ca/cgi-bin/website/subscribe.cgi [ About This NewsLetter] [ OLDaily Archives] [ Send me your comments]