Category: Uncategorized

What is Reversible?

This is one of those “I’m-not-totally-sure-what-this-is-but-it-seems-like-it-might-be-interesting/important” posts.

Creating a link to this site, say like this one, actually creates a new page on that site, much like how using a WikiWord works within a wiki (eg unlike regular web pages, where you need to create the thing to be linked to before you can link to it, the very act of creating the link and following it spawns the new page). Apparently uses trackback and ping back as well. Curiouser and curiouser. – SWL

The CAPTCHA Project.

“A CAPTCHA is a program that can generate and grade tests that:

  • Most humans can pass.
  • Current computer programs can’t pass. “

You’ve seen this before – think of systems you’ve used that ask you to access a web page and read text off that page that was somehow obscured, then feed it back to the system to prove that you (and not some automated agent) are in fact there. But did you know they had a name? – SWL

Cooktop: The free XML/XSL editor for Windows

If you are a Windows user and at all involved with working with XML or XSLT, then you probably already know about this tool, but if not, I highly recommend checking it out. Before I came across this editor I played around with both XMLSpy and eXcelon’s Stylus Studio, two of the seemingly more prominent commercial XML/XSL tools (actually, I don’t know for certain they are the most widely used, but their names kept coming up when I was first looking for an XSL editor).

Cooktop strikes me as a strong entry in the field, and well worth playing around with if you are just trying to get your head around XML, XSLT what extending RSS with learning object metadata might look like and what the XSL files needed to render it might be. The basic model is to provide it an XML file and some XSL and it will allow you to see on the fly what the results would look like. The tool has built in support for XML Tidy and can generate DTDs from existing XML documents, if you so choose. And I love the fact that all of it’s configuration is in XML files, so by tweaking the tool you actually learn more about the technology the tool is intended to build – SWL.

The Tip Jar as Revenue Model

This post to kuro5hin.org by the original author of a story that was distributed for free via kuro5hin but had a ‘tip jar’ attached that let readers donate if they felt so inclined has some interesting anecdotal observations on distributing free content online versus going through traditional publishing mechanisms. He eneded up making $760 in tips (US!) which seems pretty good to me – it’s hard not to think that his ‘reputation’ on kuro5hin didn’t have something to do with it. – SWL

Headshift – An introduction to online social software methodology

In summary, social software should be:

Smarter

  • XML/RDF/RSS syndication technologies
  • Distributed, collaborative metadata
  • Ontology development and the Semantic Web
  • Adaptive design and context-awareness

Simpler

  • Smaller, modular software with common methods and properties
  • Web services and shared protocols
  • Usability and ‘unfinishedÂ’ user experience design
  • Shared and open source code

Social

  • In the way it is conceived: stakeholder engagement, inclusive process
  • In the way it is built: collaborative development, partnership
  • In what it does: augments social networking; weblogs, wikis, messaging, etc.
  • In how it works: adaptive qualities, personalisation, agent technologies, etc.