Shaping Things…

Footnote: “Access” Millions of Original Documents

This is a fascinating idea with a dark cloud. These guys have made a deal with the National Archives to provide online access to some 4.5 million primary source documents with a Flash/AJAX-based image browser/annotator. If it ended there it would be interesting, but they’ve added the ability for people to flag certain parts of documents and annotate them for transcription, names of people, dates, and locations. These annotations can be searched and become context to the document, forming an invisible army of annotators and transcribers. The problem is money. Aside from a couple of documents, all the images I was looking for were “premium content” and cost $9.99 per month. Granted, the Archives are open to this access from anyone, but I feel funny about paying for government resources, twice.
http://www.footnote.com/

S3 Browser

An open-source browser to Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3) has been released. The Mac-based browser makes is easy to upload, download, and browse “buckets” of information stored. Amazon S3 is a service provided by Amazon designed to provide high performance, easy to use and low-cost database online storage. They charge no upfront fees and charge by the amount of data stored ($0.15/GM per month and $0.20/GM of data transferred). Data is accessed through REST and SOAP web service protocols.
http://aws.amazon.com/s3

Microsoft’s Grava Educational Software SDK/Toolset

Microsoft will release a platform this coming fall that will supposedly make it easier for non-programmers to develop educational software. Grava was jointly developed with ETS will enable media-rich interactive programs in Windows, and smells suspiciously like a “Flash-killer.” It is based on the new GUI maker embedded in the new Vista programming SDK and in .NET that is miles beyond Microsoft’s traditional application development tools in terms of ease of use.
https://connect.microsoft.com/Grava
www.eschoolnews.com/news/showStoryRSS.cfm?ArticleID=6816

The Ad Generator

For his MFA thesis at Parsons The New School for Design, Alexis Lloyd confirmed my suspicion that advertisers pull most advertising concepts from their derrières. His Ad Generator remixes and randomizes real corporate slogans into seemingly meaningful new slogans coupled with images pulled automatically from Flickr. Very entertaining. The show is different each time you view it.
http://www.theadgenerator.org/

Zoho Notebook

The maker of a whole suite of online office-like tools, Zoho, has previewed an interesting new member to their ensemble. Zoho Notebook is kinda like Google Notebook meets Microsoft OneNote, an interactive online scrapbook to store and share with people. It stores a variety of different media types (audio, video, text, RSS, links, etc.) and promises to use RSS in interesting ways to collaborate. The Zoho suite is pretty good, mainly free, and worth looking into.
www.zoho.com/notebook

Harvard Business Review 2007 Breakthrough Ideas

Harvard Business Review has an interesting article containing essays by technoratis Clay Shirky, Duncan Watts, Michael Schrage, Linda Stone, Dave Weineberger, and Eric von Hippel. They pontificate about emerging ideas in a variety of fields. The article is free until Feb 6th.
http://harvardbusinessonline.hbsp.harvard.edu/hbrsa/en/issue/0702/article/R0702A.jhtml;jsessionid=0JB2ELYCIQCKWAKRGWDSELQBKE0YIISW?type=F#section20

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Audio of the Week

The Paradox of Choice: Why Less is More

. Swarthmore psychology professor Barry Schwartz gives an engaging talk about his book that questions the American value that the more choices we have, the better off and happier we are. The book is great too.
54 minute Presentation at the 2004 Pop!Tech Conference
www.itconversations.com/shows/detail252.html
www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0060005696/stagetoolscom (book)

Book of the Week

Shaping Things (2006) by Bruce Sterling. A thoughtful little book about design and the nature of human-created objects in our world, Shaping Things looks at the roles of objects, their makers, and their impact on the world. www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0262693267/stagetoolscom

Got News?

If you have any items you think fits this NewsWire, please feel free to email me at bferster - @ - virginia.edu (remove the dashes and spaces).

Thanks!

Bill

Tagging...

ESPGame / Google Image Labeler

There are a number of experiments in trying to harness some of the things people can do well, but computers can not, such as describing the contents of an image. Tim O'Reilly has coined the phrase "bionic software to describe them.

CMU computer scientist Luis Van Ahn introduced a novel way of tagging images using a game. In the ESPGame, people are paired up with an anonymous partner and both are shown an image and asked to type tags that describe it in a small amount of time. Each player does not know what the other is typing and gets points when they agree on a tag.

The game is apparently so compelling that Ahn had to put a 15-hour continuous play limit out of moral deference to America's employers. The tags are fairly accurate and he has a number of fascinating tweaks. His video of his talk at Google is very interesting. Ahn claims that he could tag all of the images on Google in less than 3 weeks.
www.espgame.org
http://images.google.com/imagelabeler (Google's version of ESP Game)

Polar Rose

Swedish startup Polar Rose also tries to use social web techniques to identify pictures and the people and objects within those pictures, coupled with some 3D facial recognition algorithms to attach human context to images.
www.polarrose.com

Steve: Art Museum Social Tagging Project

The Steve project asks users to tags works of art in various museums in an effort to improve access to museum collections through the use of a folkasomic approach to identifying key words with artwork.
http://www.steve.museum/

They Say, I Say: Dialogical Writing

Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein-Graff propose an alternative to teaching kids the five-paragraph essay in their "They Say, I Say" approach which uses a dialogic approach. Kids are encouraged to treat their writing as a conversation using structure to help scaffold arguments by incorporating other people’s ideas and reacting, contrasting, and expanding upon it.
http://tigger.uic.edu/~ggraff/research
http://forum.wgbh.org/wgbh/forum.php?lecture_id=3270 (lecture)
www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0393924092/stagetoolscom (book)

Random Fact

Apparently the actress Hedy Lamarr, who played Delilah in Cecil B. DeMille's "Samson and Delilah" was as inventive as she was beautiful. She holds the 1942 patent (2,292,387) on the first spread spectrum (a.k.a. frequency hopping) technique for sending secret messages over many channels.
www.google.com/patents?vid=USPAT2292387

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Audio of the Week

Clay Shirky’s Ontology is Overrated. NYU professor Clay Shirky lays out the case that rigid hierarchies and taxonomies, like the kind libraries use to organize access to information may be a dinosaur, related more to physical convenience than effective access in a virtual work. He is engaging, articulate, and convinced me of the increasing value of folksonomies.
44 minute Presentation at the 2005 Emerging Technology Conference
www.itconversations.com/shows/detail470.html

Book of the Week

Beautiful Evidence (2006) by Edward Tufte. The latest addition to Yale professor Tufte’s four volume set of beautifully realized books on information visualization. If you haven’t read “The Visual Display of Quantitative Information,” that’s probably the best one to start with, and well worth the journey.
www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0961392177/stagetoolscom

Got News?

If you have any items you think fits this NewsWire, please feel free to email me at bferster - @ - virginia.edu (remove the dashes and spaces).

Thanks!

Bill

Audio...

Online Audio Editing

A number of innovative webapps have been popping up that make it easy to upload, mix, edit, and store sounds. SpliceMusic has a 5 minute demo of how it works. All the content is available under a CreativeCommons license, so it can be freely shared. JamGlue has a very slick Flash webapp along the same lines. Both webapps allow you to download your final mixed audio as an mp3 file, or play it from their site.
http://splicemusic.com/
http://www.jamglue.com/

Free Audio Content

ccMixter is a part of the CreativeCommons and provides access to thousands of freely available sounds and music. The freesound project is a collection of links to many sounds available under cc licenses and uses innovative search techniques from AudioClas to aid discovery. Magnatune uses a juried review process to keep the quality of their audio selection high, and provides a venue for artists to sell their audio, or give it away.
http://www.ccmixter.org/
http://freesound.iua.upf.edu/
http://magnatune.com/

Dabble DB

Google got the ball rolling by putting spreadsheets online as a webapp, but Dabble db puts data management to a new level by making the process of creating, exploring, and visualizing data using an online webapp. This 7 minute online demo gives a good overview of how easy they’ve made it.
http://www.dabbledb.com/

Pandora

Pandora is a great free online “radio station” (listen-only, no save) which uses some software developed by the Music Genome Project that has developed rated a set of attributes that has been used to rate thousands of songs. They ask you to identify music you like and they match those attribute to create a personal playlist containing songs the software “thinks” you will like.
http://www.pandora.com/

Pew Report on PodCasting

The Pew Internet Life folks have released another survey report, this one finding higher number (12%) of Internet users downloading podcasts up from 7% just six months ago. The distribution was relatively even across age and income, but nearly twice as many men listened as women. These are promising figures, even though only 1% listens daily.
www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_podcasting.pdf

BubbleShare

BubbleShare is an interesting webapp that makes it easy to create online slide shows by uploading your own photos, recording an audio track directly on the webapp, and adding cartoon-like bubble captions to pictures (kind of like Beavis and Butthead). Good potential for simple digital storytelling projects using stills, as a precursor to using DigitalStoryTeller, iMovie, MovieMaker, or Photo Story 3.
http://www.bubbleshare.com/

Deep-Linking Ruled Illegal

The common practice of linking directly to content on someone’s website when they explicitly ask you not to, was ruled illegal by a Texas judge. This is the first judgment about this kind of deep linking of content and while the defendant was clearly in the wrong in this one, it sets the stage for stronger copyright enforcement in the future.

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Audio of the Week

Malcolm Gladwell on "Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking" Are our judgments influenced by the amount of information used in arriving at them? Does more information lead to better judgments? Gladwell is as engaging a speaker as he is writer and it’s worth listening to, even if you’ve read the book as he cites new cases.
50 minute Presentation at 2005 South by Southwest Conference www.itconversations.com/shows/detail478.html (audio)
www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0316172324/stagetoolscom (book)


Book of the Week

The Emotion Machine: Commonsense Thinking, Artificial Intelligence, and the Future of the Human Mind (2006) by Marvin Minsky. As one of the founding fathers of AI, this book updates his notion of the mind as a collection of lots of smaller processes he talked about in his 1988 book “Society of Mind” (a great read).
www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0743276639/stagetoolscom

Got News?

If you have any items you think fits this NewsWire, please feel free to email me at bferster - @ - virginia.edu (remove the dashes and spaces).

Thanks!

Bill