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Zuckerman: Global Attention Profile

Not quite a Meta Weblog Service, but Ethan Zuckerman's Global Attention Profile charts news references on the web to countries.

Even better is Zuckerman providing source data someone can actually verify the results, and what looks to be a detailed paper on the work.

If more news moves to open RSS, it'll be easier to do these types of analyses.


Petersen: MSN Newsbot Insider

Josh Petersen works for MSN, seems to be on Newsbot, and keeps a weblog.


Kottke: Evolving Weblogs

Jason Kottke is reworking the presentation of his weblog, and in the process thinking about new frontends for micro-content, as Anil Dash calls it.


Proboscis: Urban Tapestries

A loosely knit organization in the UK called Proboscis is developing an interesting experiment, entitled Urban Tapestries, in decentralized location based services and content.


Objectis: Free Plone Hosting

Link parkin': Objectis is providing free Zope and Plone hosting. I'm something of a CMS wonk, so I'll probably take a look at some point.

Thanks to Steve Ivy.


Murphy, et. al.: Lime

Some of us here at NU CS are kicking around the idea of using the concept of Linda Tuple Spaces for ubiquitous computing infrastructure.

If I've learned one thing though, if you think you've got a good idea in computing, odds on someone else has done something like it already.

Enter Lime, Linda in a Mobile Environment, by Amy L. Murphy, Gian Pietro Picco, and Gruia-Catalin Roman.

Luckily, Lime doesn't really attempt to address some of the issues we're interested in, so it's not a direct competitor. Heck, it's probably worth investigating as an initial codebase to modify for our own ends.


Microsoft: Newsbot

Looks like the fine folks in Redmond are going after Google News with a beta version of MSN Newsbot. CNET has more details, but the major twist is that for Passport accepting folks, the service will customize the news presented based upon user behavior.

I was being mildly facetious when I wrote about "The Daily Me" sneaking up on us for our symposium this weekend, but this is getting pretty doggone close.


Coenraets: Flex Weblog

No not the Flex from your compiler class. Apparently, Macromedia's Flex is a markup + oop servlet based way to generate applications on top of the Flash VM. Sounds intriguing, but you have to inhale J2EE to use it. Granted there's a lot of Tomcat knowledge out there, but this ain't a low barrier to entry.

In any event, Macromedia has appointed Christophe Coenraets as their evangelist for this technology, and he has a weblog. There's also more information over at Artima, from Sean Neville.


Medill: Storytelling Symposium

The Medill School of Journalism is hosting a free symposium on technology and storytelling this weekend. The panels should be eclectic and entertaining. The topics are a little broader than just journalism, and the discussion should be quite accessible.

Just using the old soapbox for a little self-promotion.


ECSCW '03: Social Network Analysis Workshop

Link parkin: Following up on an old post, the papers for the Workshop on Social Network Analysis at the European CSCW 2003 conference are up.


Goranson: Mac Outliner Survey

Ted Goranson, in his webzine About This Particular Macintosh has been writing a monthly column on outliners. The first part presented an outliner history, while the subsequent two parts surveyed outliner details.

Personally, I'm still finding all sorts of interesting stuff in OmniOutliner, but Goranson's survey makes TinderBox sound really interesting.


Crumlish, et.al.: Radio Free Blogistan

How in the world could I have missed Radio Free Blogistan, a weblog about weblogging and nano-publishing?

Must be gettin' old.


Waypath: BuzzMeter's Back

The Waypath guys have reinstituted the BuzzMeter. With it you can track word and phrase occurrences across a large number of weblog postings.

Mildly useful, but has the problem that you actually need to know what the pertinent words are before you can watch them. Good for retrospective's but bad for forecasting.


NewsKnife: Google News Watch

Well at least somebody's watching Google News! NewsKnife tracks Google News and compares their top stories with the leading stories from some major news sites such as CNN and Yahoo! News. The goal seems to be to determine how close Google News can come to these established sources.

I'm glad someone's doing such tracking, but I'm not particularly down with the interpretation. Roughly speaking, Google News seems to be getting about 2/3 of the same stories. Great if you want the same-old, same-old, but Google News' real utility is bringing to light more of the news mix out there. Expanding the horizon if you will. The Google News guys say that the service is "not edited by a human", but they've never claimed that it will "edit as well as a human."


Heaton: Pomo TV News

Terry L. Heaton muses on the potential for wireless video, 3G & Wi-Fi, to enable new forms of broadcast news. Quote:

Meanwhile, another technology that is showing dramatic results in the U.S. is Wi-Fi, and I think this may become the most dramatic breakthrough in the video news business since the invention of video tape.

Pretty strong stuff. Heaton opines that this could eventually lead to a new, postmodern form of TV news that is rawer, more immediate, and less filtered. He (she?) goes off the deep end a little though, like some of the weblogs versus journalism types, predicting the fall of the current media structure. Then again, this is written from a European perspective.

Prediction: MTV, Entertainment Tonight, and ESPN will take advantage of this stuff long before ABC, NBC, CBS and the rest of the current news cabal.


ArsTechnica: Fixed RSS Feed

ArsTechnica is a nice tech oriented site. The RSS feed that they have used to not have descriptions, only headlines. Recently, I've been pruning such feeds from my blogroll, and ArsTechnica was next on the chopping block.

They must have had ESP, because just today, all of the ArsTechnica feed items have descriptions. Hopefully it'll stick.


Crosbie: Free v Paid Content, Hard #'s

Vin Crosbie of Digital Deliverance, gives a brilliant example of how to systematically dismantle a poor argument. Responding to Donn Friedman's Online Journalism Review article arguing that news sites should start charging fees for access to content, Crosbie addresses Friedman's claims point by point and leaves a pile of smoking rubble. Through hard won experience, Crosbie has solid numbers and real cases to back up his argument.

Best of all, he brings in the totality of Brand's dictum. Way too many people stop at, "information wants to be free". If they knew the balance that the remainder provides, then maybe they would balance their thinking regarding these issues.


Pollard: Salon Blogs Survey

Dave Pollard analyzed a random sampling of Salon blogs. The news strikes me as pretty dim, especially when active means "posted once within the last month". That's a pretty low activity threshold.

Barely sustainable growth based on software from a company struggling to stay afloat is not a recipe for success.

A while I go, I thought it odd that UserLand didn't pop up in more rumors when Blogger got bought. Now UserLand seems to be falling off the radar. Then again, maybe they're pumping the product in markets I'm unaware of. But other than Salon, what other media company is using Radio UserLand for publishing?


NMH: Intermittent Posting

Between giving a midterm, hacking, and a little symposium I'm helping to put together, updates have been a bit sketchy the past week or two.

For the 3.5 regular readers of this blog, sorry to inform you it's going to be like this for about another week and a half.


Karypis: Cluto

Need to do some clustering on high-dimensional datasets? If you're on Linux (or FreeBSD with Linux binary support) you could do a heck of a lot worse than George Karypis' Cluto package.

Clusters feature vectors, clusters similarity graphs, has 7 different clustering methods, 4 different similarity criterion, 12 different clustering criterion, and all of the standard scaling methods on the features/similarity.

And it generates pretty pictures too.

What more could you want?!

Okay, yes it comes with a static library so you can wrap your favorite scripting language around it. Short of being open source, it's quite the bee's knees.


Halepovic & Deters: JXTA Performance

Emir Halepovic and Ralph Deters examined "The Costs of Using JXTA" in a P2P03 conference paper.

Just keeping an eye on JXTA as a P2P infrastructure for the day I and the AquaLab get our act together.


Wired: Now Has Blogs

Wired News online now has blogs.

Well blog (singular) since Bruce Sterling is the only blogger, currently.

No RSS! Bad, blog!! no Flow!!


InkNoise: Layoutomatic

It doesn't have a huge amount of flexibility, but InkNoise's Layoutomatic is really handy for generating CSS based columnar layouts.


Blum: Pashua

Link parkin: Pashua is a toolkit for grafting Mac OS X user interfaces onto UNIX scripts.


Schubert: MacOS X PDF Plug-in

Just downloaded and installed Schuber it's MacOS X PDF Browser Plugin. First impressions are very positive. First, I'd just come to accept the horrible lag and cognitive dissonance from firing up Acrobat. This plugin nukes that issue. Second, it looks really smooth with a nice clean and quiet interface.


FTG: DIET Agents

Link Parkin: DIET Agents is a lightweight multi-agent system developed by the Future Technologies Group within BT Exact.

Thanks to Josh Lucas' Hacking Log


Bumgarner: PyObjC

PyObjC, an integration of Python and the Objective C API's on MacOS, is becoming very tantalizing, thanks to Bill Bumgarner's update on the project. I don't do any actual MacOS development, but PyObjC is starting to whet my appetite, given how much Python I write on a daily basis.

Memo to self: get Gigahertz AlBook, start hacking


Burkett: "Laws of the Web" Review

In my exploration of Internet growth models, I never ran across Huberman's book "The Laws of the Web: Patterns in the Ecology of Information". Due to Jeanette Burkett's review of "The Laws of the Web..." I'll probably be checking the stacks to see if Northwestern has a copy. From her commentary though, the book seems a bit lightweight and breezy.

If it was a zero knowledge, browsing opportunity, I'd just be inclined to buy a copy, but the Amazon reviews aren't all that positive either. I don't have any evidence to corroborate quality, but the list of books reviewed by the Resource Center for Cyberculture Studies looks quite interesting.


NMH: Medill, Storytelling & Technology

As an adjunct to the Online News Association's annual conference, Medill is running a 1/2 day symposium on "Storytelling and New Technology", on November 16th. Despite the focus on academics and journalists, it should be accessible and entertaining to a general audience. If you're in or can get to Chicagoland, come on down.

You can't beat the price!!


King: 40% Broadband Penetration

Andrew King (I'm assuming since he's the only named principal), of WebSiteOptimization.com is claiming that 40% of US Internet users now have broadband, with an increase of about 1% a year.


Shtull-Trauring: A DOM for Bad HTML

Link parkin': Looks like the Twisted developers have come up with a Python library for dealing with ill formed HTML.

On the one hand, I had just recently been lamenting the fact that Python didn't have anything like Perl's HTML::Tree. On the other, I wonder how much of an inhale Twisted would be just to get that one module.


NMH: Medill Global Program Blog

There's enough content now on the Medill Global Program's weblog, that I can delurk it. At least for the 5 or so people who read this weblog.

The blog is a low budget New Media Hack Production (TM), and a work in progress. No need to harsh on the design.

I'm just glad I helped get a distributed gaggle of international journalists giving us the back story on their experience.


Pilgrim: On Panther

Mark Pilgrim gives a rundown, with copious screenshots, of new user interface and system management features in Mac OS X Panther.


Halavais: Blogosphere as Urban Space

Link parkin: Alex Halavais posted his AOIR 4.0 conference paper and slides. I haven't had a chance to dig through them, but my read of the intro is that the current space of weblogs can be viewed in much the same fashion as unruly turn of the century cities. Cities which were eventually given shape and order by legendary urban planners. This suggests potential research directions regarding this media environment.

So where's the blogosphere's Daniel Burnham going to come from?


Johnson: Daily Us

Steven Berlin Johnson coins the term Daily Us while reporting on Technorati's Breaking News feature to capture the democratic nature of using blogs to highlight news. Personally, I like "Daily We" better, but the article provides a nice overview of the current state and promise of the technique.

As for the actual practice? Well, even Johnson recognizes that Technorati is a bit spotty these days.


Menczer: Alternative Web Growth Models

At least in the popular weblog consciousness, the Barabasi-Albert model of network growth is dominant. BA, for short, essentially claim that popular existing nodes get links from new nodes in proportion to their popularity. Rich get richer, power law, yadda yadda.

Besides skimpy supporting evidence (and no independent corroboration) I've always felt a bit uneasy accepting this model lock, stock, and barrel for weblogs and RSS feeds. Enter Filippo Menczer.

Menczer is a computer science and informatics professor at Indiana University. Among other interesting things (focused crawlers, data mining), he published a paper last year on a Web growth model based purely on local information. See the BA model implicitly assumes each new node has global information. While the model matches empirical data, it doesn't have much basis in reality.

Menczer not only proposes a new model that incorporates semantic distance as a linking factor, he also explores other alternative models for Web growth. In short, there's a number of different ways of explaining those "power laws" besides global popularity and this in fact has consequences for information seeking in such an environment.

Good stuff.


CSM: New RSS Feeds

The Christian Science Monitor has some new RSS feeds. Normally this wouldn't be that big a deal, but they used their preexisting feed to let me know (see below). It would have been slightly better to include the feed url so I could immediately subscribe, but I thought it was unobtrusive and cool.

csm-promo.bmp


CSW: Sports Stats

Link parkin: Being a bit of a sports geek, I've always wondered where you could get raw statistics if you actually wanted to do some analysis. Stats Inc and SportsTicker are pretty well known, but expensive. Computer Sports World stats look a bit more reasonable.

Update: The Sports Network also provides publisher friendly feeds, but like the rest you can't even get a sniff of their licensing.


Bray: FooCamp, Blogdex & Technorati

Tim Bray is ensconced at O'Reilly's FooCamp. One session he attended was the Technorati/Blogdex death match. I'm always interested in any nuggets that come out about each of these services, because they're fairly opaque operation. Sure there's a gut sense of how they work (calculate degree rank of a site or post, provide interpretation), but if you know of any published literature on the hairy details I'd appreciate hearing about them.

While I find the services that Technorati and Blogdex provide interesting, I'm also interested in what exactly they're telling us. Hard to say without any details and also hard to independently verify.

Finally, one provocative thought from Bray: "It’s more important to know how popular something is than to know what it’s about."


Caldwell: Mac OS X Emacs

I was just thinking today that WIBNI to have Emacs and Gnus to start reading mail on my TiBook. Entourage is really starting to give me a headache. Previous attempts to use Emacs on Jaguar were disappointing.

Then in my aggregator comes Mark Pilgrim pointing to David Caldwell's build of Emacs 21.3 for Aqua.

Serendipity baby.

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