Regular readers will have noticed that I’ve implemented a new look for the blog. I am currently making a few modifications to enhance readability (the font size has been increased and the quote font colour darkened) but if you have any other comments please tell me. The previous look/skin on the site had been around [...]
Entries from June 28th, 2007
A reminder about user incentives
June 27th, 2007 1 Comment
Since Friday at UK Museums and the Web 2007 I keep being asked about my scepticism over explicit tagging in museums. “Why do I think that users don’t really have much natural incentive to tag our collections or content?” Over at Bokardo there is a post dating back to 2006 which looks at why Del.icio.us [...]
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Visualising a metasearch with SearchCrystal
June 26th, 2007 Comments Off
SearchCrystal is a very nifty search visualisation tool. Above is the results of an image search for ‘Sydney’ across multiple engines – you can see clearly in the visualisation where results crossover and there is similarity. I really like the different types of search that can be done in this way – web searches, image [...]
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Amazon and rare books on demand
June 26th, 2007 1 Comment
A very interesting new development in the digitisation space as reported in The Chronicle (via Siva Vaidhyanathan). Amazon, which made its name selling books online, is now entering the book-digitizing business. Like Google and, more recently, Microsoft, Amazon will be making hundreds of thousands of digital copies of books available online through a deal with [...]
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Prometeus – the Media Revolution
June 25th, 2007 Comments Off
Here’s another take on ‘the media revolution’. Prometeus reminds me of a more uptopian view of the fantastical EPIC2014‘s Googlezon dystopia of a few years ago. In Prometeus, Google buys Microsoft instead of Amazon while Amazon buys Yahoo. Possibly even more interesting than the future thinking ideas contained in these viral narrowcasts is their increasing [...]
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Good Copy, Bad Copy – the developing world and Copyright
June 24th, 2007 1 Comment
Good Copy, Bad Copy is a rather splendid hour long documentary exploring Copyight law as it applies to remix culture. Unlike a lot of similar projects Good Copy, Bad Copy is truly internationalist and the most fascinating voices come from the developing world – a Nigerian ‘Nollywood‘ film company that has been producing ‘straight to [...]
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Follow the map . . . in 3D
June 23rd, 2007 Comments Off
Mike Ellis from the Science Museum showed some great stuff today at UK Museums and the Web 2007. I have a full blog post waiting for some daytime editing to clean it up. So in the meantime, if you haven’t already seen Flickrvision in 3D then you need too. These are images that are mapped [...]
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Potential of social networking / Peer to Patent
June 23rd, 2007 Comments Off
How do we re-build our patent system in light of the technology that enables the crowd-sourcing of scientific information? A very interesting and wordy post from Beth Noveck on Peer to Patent, a pilot project that aims to examine how social networking may offer new possibilities for analysing the enormous backlog of US Patent Office [...]
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‘Web Dos’ and internet connectivity in the developing world
June 18th, 2007 6 Comments
The reason why there haven’t been any posts recently is because I’ve been in the Cuba speaking to a lot of Latin American and Caribbean cultural portals (as part of the 5th International Congress on Culture and Development and the 3rd annual Culturemondo roundtable)- helping people comes to terms with the opportunities of ‘Web Dos’. [...]
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