Category: Uncategorized

Largish set of pointers to education-focsued databases or directories. Mostly a note to self to come back later and investigate to see if any new and valuable sources are hidden within. – SWL

EdTech blog out of SDSU, which would be hugely of interest IF THERE WAS AN RSS FEED!!! Sorry, but for me ‘blogs’ without RSS feeds are a non-starter. – SWL

New to me – a comprehensive list of (and interface to) ways to search (and be found in) the blogosphere. I knew of and have submitted to a number of these, but they are literally coming so fast and furious that I can’t keep track. Thus this will become an invaluable resource – SWL

– via [Seb’s Open Research]

Micah Alpern’s wicked blogroll search application using the Google web services API has got me thinking of all sorts of other possible applications, which led me to search for a comprehensive listing of all applications people have currently created using this API (I was pretty sure *someone* would have created it already – almost inevitably *someone* already has and you just need to look hard enough). There may be others out there – this one seems a good place to start. Notable applications on the list are Aloogle (searches Google and displays Alexa Traffic results on the same page) and the Google API Proximity Search (which allows you to specify the required proximity on a page of two search terms) – SWL

At some point in the not-so-distant-future I may well have to start looking for work again (funding and other circumstances are currently uncertain at best.) So I have been doing some thinking and some searching about what is it I can do, what I have done before and what is it I want to do.

Which lead me to this helpful little document by the folks at Sage Learning Systems. While I’ve worked more in higher ed and its focus is more on industry training, much of the job types and skills seemed relevant. I’m sure there are lots more of these types of documents out there (anyone have other references) but this at least seemed like a place to start. – SWL

“What do content syndication, Vannevar Bush’s Memex trails, RSS feeds and Radio UserLand have in common? Read this to find out!”

Once again David Davies is himself blazing new trails in the Radio tool figuring out a way to use it to produce RSS feeds of URLs that represent paths through the net (or collections of URLs) instead of blog posts. – SWL

– by [David Davies: Edtech]

This via the extensive article I posted on yesterday by david Mattison on all things wiki, a wiki page listing every piece of software they know about that combines both wikis and blogs. Now if we could patch these together with some other personal information management tools and other general office tools…scratch that – I actually like getting up from my computer and I fear the combination of these would simply be too addictive 😉 – SWL

So I installed this software at work and have used it a few times on some fairly complex documents, as well as on some more straightforward ones. It’s o.k. as far as these things go – I guess I was hoping for a little more vulcan mind-meld type functionality; the reality is that even with the summaries it produces you still have to work through these, and they can be lengthy, and I question whether I don’t naturally do a better job myself in skimming through documents (e.g. it seems mostly to look at work frequency and placement, and summarize based on initial sentence in paragraph, though it is doing some analysis of structure that enables it to grab phrases that are buried more deeply.)

Still, an interesting experiment; when I get some time I’m going to dig further into the field of latent semantic analysis (partly based on Bruce’s recommendation that I do so) to see what developments there have been of recent days in this field. This as part of my belief that the solution that will emerge to find order amongst the chaos of the net will be a combination of automated techniques and methods that analyse actual behaviour of users and help aggregate their decisions and choices. – SWL

“Everything you need to know to connect Radio and Zope via XML-RPC can be found at these three links:” Apologies for all of these blog-tool type posts, I am working on the site infrastructure itself and so it reverts back to its original role as my online knowledge base as I find new things I want it to do and need to remember. – SWL

Another tool in the endless battle to deal with the ever growing mass of information we deal with daily. This product uses “sophisticated statistical and linguistic algorithms, [to] pinpoint the key concepts and extract the most relevant sentences, resulting in a summary that is a shorter, condensed version of the original text.” It will be interesting to contrast this approach with the one we tried at the last company I worked at, speed reading software. – SWL