Brewster Kahle's Internet Archive organization has a freely accessible moving images archive.

Why do I care? Because a historian I'm working with, while a great guy, seems a bit touchy about copyright on the materials we're going to use. (related to 1909 Plan of Chicago). Heck we're not even sure what the rights will be for the stuff.

One of my theories is that software can help build, organize, and direct an open inquiry community. Of course a reasonable body of interesting content is needed. I think the Prelinger Archives might qualify. And no permission required to work with it!

Chris Adamson, previously blogged in this space regarding parsing the QuickTime file format, has popped up again in O'Reilly's OnJava.com. Now Adamson is taking apart the QuickTime for Java library. His first article contains an interesting discussion of SMIL usage as well.

Apropos of nothing, I ran across an insider history of arsDigita by Eve Anderson. philg is a hero of mine, having been one of the first to codify the essential points of database backed websites. It's a shame that his company went down the crapper like it did.

Thanks to Joel Spolsky

Looks like MIT's Haystack project finally shipped something people can kick the tires on. Given the titles of their papers, it could be called a PIM for the Semantic Web. RDF inside.

I'm parking this link on Yalta, a system that combines dynamic public key infrastructure with tuplespaces until I get a chance to read it closer.

Adam Gaffen (sp?) at Network World alerts folks to the fact that the publication has RSS feeds for overall Wi-Fi news, wireless security, and wireless LAN switches.

Thanks to Glennf at Wi-Fi Networking News.

Like I need anymore RSS feeds.

Over at the BBC, Bill Thompson attempts to burst the "social software" bubble before it even expands. Thompson is spot on with his criticism, especially the point about ignoring previous HCI, psychology, and computer mediated communication research. I would also add all of the effort by the CSCW community.

He paints with a little too broad a brush, leaving out such folks as the Social Dynamics Lab at HP, who really do solid principled work. But maybe that's his point. Those talking a lot about social software aren't doing much and don't fundamentally know what they're talking about. However, there are folks out there getting stuff done and investigating the frontier. They're just not overselling the short term gains and self-promoting their ass off.

Nancy Lutz is previewing an archive of historical NYC maps. They're meant as a means to see what you buy before shipping off funds to her in exchange for a map copy. Not sure it's really smart to be putting these up, but the wheels are churning again in my head.

Get map gifs. Enter into a photowiki type system. Open to NYC public. Let folks tell their stories. See what happens.

Pick city. Repeat.

Get rich!!

It could happen in our lifetime!

Don Park gives name to the concept I'm implementing for posts in NusRooms, each post/item becomes it's own Micro-Wiki. Both people and automated services can annotate the Micro-Wiki and many concepts such as TrackBack, comments, recommendations, fold in uniformly.

Apropos of nothing, here's a bunch of icon buttons I was digging around for.

Even worse is the fact that I already posted about this, with almost exactly the same text!! Right down to the "Apropos of nothing...".

I tried to find the link first on this here blog but failed miserably. Honest!

Bert Krages, registered attorney, has put together a pocket flyer regarding photographer's rights. I've been wondering what the extent and limits of public photography are. With the proliferation of digital cameras knowing these rights is increasingly important, especially with folks posting them onto the Web.

Thanks to Flutterby for the tip.

I'm starting to get obsessed with combining the nostalgic and archival features of news organizations. Previously I commented on Time magazine making a cover archive available. Screw the cover archive, just do a weekly "This Week In...". Pick a year, post some content, and ask users to write up their memories. Select the best. Promote to the front page (website or Tempo section).

How to get rich? Free for users, charge exorbitantly for sponsorships. This also covers your prizes too.

Casey West catalogs some really useful modules in the Perl core. High on my list of new discoveries is are the Env, File::Temp, and Shell modules. Kewl beens!

The about page for memigo talks about customized, news, peer communities, and implicit/explicit rating. MovableBLOG seems to think memigo uses RSS to watch what you link to and TrackBack to ship stuff back into your weblog. Of course I could just follow the link to where memigo documents this interaction, but that would be too easy. Interesting idea, although once again, linking is the only gesture that can be observed by the service.

Guess I should sign up and see what it's all about.

The Corante Social Software blog directed me to Nick Yee's homepage and weblog. Haven't had time to dig in yet, but looking at some of the link titles, Yee executes seriously rigorous investigation into Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games.

I'm still keeping warm the idea of documenting emergent free press like institutions in MMORPG games. Maybe Yee has some grist for the mill.

The cost of Wi-Fi chips is falling through the floor, according to Glenn Fleishman of Wi-Fi Networking News. Given the floor prices of WAPs he's talking about, you could start talking about Redundant Meshes of Inexspensive WAPs.

But that doesn't make a good acronym.

At xml.com, Erik Benson digs into All Consuming, an ad hoc web service wired together out of the Google, Amazon, weblogs.com, and blo.gs web service APIs. All Consuming trawls weblogs for book references, comes up with a top 10 mentioned books, and grabs further information from Amazon. This also includes Amazons recommendations.

Key nugget: these services require low to no permission to utilize, so developers can scratch their itch as need be.

Through CNet's Big Picture feature, Michael Sippey has a minor epiphany regarding the usage of TrackBack. In the process, he explains way better than I can, how TrackBack can be used to display the social life of a news item.

Brian Carnell was knocking about installing MovableType on a laptop, and mentioned the Abyss Web Server. Looks nice and lightweight and could someday be used to create a fully standalone NusRoom install.

Apache's really cool, but the only significant lock in feature is mod_perl. Maybe mod_rewrite too.

Tom Coates continues serious thinking regarding how blog networks, discussion, and information interact. I'm still skeptical about blogs as discussion vehicles, but he's starting to make a much more principled case.

Fabrice Bellard has cooked up TCC, the Tiny C Compiler. It's so small you can use it as an embedded C compiler within an application. Meaning that now you could use C as a "scripting" language, although I would never call it one.

I wonder if TCC's embedding interface is better than Perl's. Hard to believe it could be any worse.

Thanks to Patrick Logan.

How did I miss Sleepycat's new Berkeley DB XML which is looking to be a really good XML database? Something I've been looking for for a long time.

John Merrells, a Berkeley DB XML developer (the prime one?) is keeping a related weblog.

Brian Hayes, of American Scientist magazine, has a nice overview of small world graphs in two parts. If you don't have time to read "Linked", "Small Worlds", or "Six Degrees", these article's will do in a pinch.

Brilliant idea by Greg Elkin. Annotate areas on photos using a Wiki like Web interface, indicate annotations visually right on the photo.

In my course last quarter, some students developed Web based annotation of historical JPEG images. They didn't go the last 2 miles by making it Wiki like and showing the annotations on the image.

Here's a next step for Fotowikis. Use Flash to display the images + annotations, and then employ Magic Lenses and Photoshop style layers to deal with plethoras (is that a word?) of annotations.

Philip Graham writes the review that Jason Levine wanted to write...

And me too. I couldn't have said it better.

Small world moment. Andrew Tomkins and I lived in the same dorm at M.I.T. A very nice guy, he was one of the major foosball comptetitors me and my buddy The Fongmaster played against.

Oh yeah, and even though he's not first author, this WWW 2003 paper on how blog communities evolve that lists him looks pretty damn cool.

Memo to self: get a copy of this paper.

Evan Nisselson explains, to professional photographers, why digital phone cameras are a really big deal.

Executive summary: it's the ubiquity stupid!

Maciej Ceglowski, of Idle Words, is doing yeoman's work building a world wide list of weblogs.

John Noring explains the requirements demanded of an eBook standard and how the existing Open EBook Publication Structure meets those demands. Also, he makes a case for proprietary standards not fitting the bill.

It's a pretty long article (disclosure: I haven't finished it), but well documented and explained.

Given what I now know of PDF, QuickTime, Flash, SMIL, et. al. if OEBPS is the real deal it would also make a nice format for news publishers.

Apparently, where your navigation rail appears on your web page, left or right side, doesn't make much of a difference.

Memo to self: check out the Journal of Digital Information.

Elwyn Jenkins, propietor of Microdoc News, attempts to analyze the lifecycle of a story in the blogosphere. There's some interesting thinking here, including the notion that a story is really a network of commentary and the classification of the commenters.

However, no source data or methodology is provided, so it's unclear how scientific the result is. A thin veneer of legitimacy is given by a few real numbers, but I would be leary of accepting the conclusions as fact.

Albert Einstein's personal writings have been digitized and put online. I wonder how a community of scholars will form around that content.

Thanks to Mary Hodder at bIPlog.

Patrick Logan links to a paper on view centric reasoning about tuple spaces that might be useful for programming PlaySpace, a tuple space framework that a colleague of mine is cooking up.

Mark Granovetter of "weak ties" fame now chairs the Stanford Sociology Department, and is running a project to map the Silicon Valley social network of insiders.

Maybe it's a good sign that the project website carries the odor of 1995 web design, meaning they may actually be getting work done, but at least they have an interesting collection of social network analysis software links.

I don't know jack about BitTorrent, but I've got a gut that P2P distribution of large media files will make a post-Napster comeback.

Thankfully, a duo over at MP3newswire.net have written up a tutorial for me. Even better is the link to 1/2 a gigabytes worth of MP3s on a keychain. Kewl!

In an OnLamp article, chromatic waxes on why he hates various programming languages. A provocative title but it's backed up with some good criticisms of various languages including our favorite scripting languages, Perl, Python, PhP, etc. All in all a good discussion of how to think of programming language designs.

Apropos of nothing, what do you get when you mix Hong Kong Kung Fu, Matrix Effects, Futbol, and The Bad News Bears?

Check out the trailer for Shaolin Soccer to find out.

Tom Coates riffs on how full insight can be achieved in the blogosphere. The gist is that you don't need to read everything to be fully informed.

Unfortunately, Coates correlates linking with the "insightfulness" of commentary. Also, order and context of item arrival are ignored in terms of gaining insight. In short, when you come into the story, what order you receive followup information, and also what else is competing for your attention are all important elements.

However I think it's a nice initial stab at thinking about information distribution and "journalism" within small world graphs.

Observation: there don't seem to be any good models of what it means to be "fully informed" on a particular topic.

Lawrence Lessig thought he had a congress critter lined up to introduce some basic legislation to free lots of abandoned material that should really be in the public domain. The stuff is being held hostage to potential litigation.

Said congressperson is getting heat from the copyright cartel's lobbyists and is starting to wilt. Support is needed from other congress critters and you, yes you, can help out by prodding your rep, even if you didn't vote for 'em. Lessig tells you how to pitch in.

HP's Information Dynamics Lab is at it again. They've released a short paper entitled "Information Flow in Social Groups", discussing an epidemic model of information distribution in social networks. Looks like they include some empirical observations from HP e-mail flows.