By Stephen Downes
May 18, 2004
Welcome from Embrun
NRC is taking
most of its web services offline in just a few minutes (so
my web site may be unavailable this evening until tomorrow
morning), so I have to rush. I'm still in Embrun on
vacation, visting my family. If you are wondering about my
high school reunion, well, it was disappointing - people
from every year from the last 50 years attended, with
relatively few from any given class (and in my case, one
other person from my class). And it was funny - looking
through the memorabilia, my footprint at the high school is
effectively zero. Not that I wasn't active - I was on the
debating team, Reach for the Top, model parliament, soccer
team, and more - heck, I won public speaking three years in
a row - but none of this seems to have made its way into
the records. Nope, just football, cheering, and 'head boy /
head girl'. Oh well. By Stephen Downes, Stephen's Web, May
18, 2004
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
inDiscover
RSS
Sometimes when you ask, you receive.
inDiscover, covered here a few days ago, now has 4
different types of RSS feeds: newest artists, newest songs, songs for a artist and favorites. There will also be a feed for
the top 10 in all genres against all attributes. Nice
addition. Several other people have written to me about
various recommender systems; I will be covering these and
related matters next week. By Sean McGrath, inDiscover, May
18, 2004
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
Paypal No Friend of FreeNet
On the
one hand you could say that a private company like PayPal
should be free to conduct business with whomever it
chooses, and you would be right. But on the other hand,
when control of the financial infrastructure is used for
political purposes, that's another thing. How would you
react if the banking system refused to clear your cheques
because you were a member of Greenpeace? Some troubling
issues are raised here with PayPal's actions. By
blacklily8, Kairosnews, May 18, 2004
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
ALOHA
2
Scott Leslie writes, "New site for the release
of Aloha II, the reworked metadata editor/content packager
from the University of Calgary, which is now based on the
RELOAD tool from the U.K. The version available right now
is an alpha release - no news on their news page (and no
RSS feed!) about when to expect beta or gold releases, but
hopefully things are moving along swimmingly." By Various
Authors, Netera, May 18, 2004
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
Writing for Google
This is an
interesting item because it captures the flavour of writing
content for an unknown audience. Typically, articles are
written in the context of a certain journal - or in our
field, for a certain course. But when harvested by Google,
it is not clear who will read the article or how it will be
used. So the article must be written with this in mind - it
must be reusable. Sound familiar? By John Gruber, Daring
Fireball, May 5, 2004
[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]