After posting about Dissertation time again… and late night lectures. I have been offered the chance to try something out for the college. So if your one of my ex-students reading this, contact me via my ravensbourne email address and I will add you to the group. As it sounds, its a experimental online learning community which I will use not only for dissertation but for teaching and learning over the next year. Oh by the way this applies to 1st, 2nd and 3rd yrs mainly in interaction or subjects close to interaction.
Day: 19 September 2004
IT conversations
Its one of those things I've been meaning to blog for ages but forgot due to the reshuffle of cubicgarden.com (comments and trackbacks should be fine now). IT conversations is how to do streaming audio correct. Not only does it host some of the best talks from some of the best conferences, oh no they host it using streaming mp3 or windows media. Theres an option to just download the mp3 if you like too. Theres full text transcripts and they syndicate new streams with enclosures. I mean things can not get any better, oh did I forget to say you dont even have to register if you want to… Excellent resource and I'm proud to say its what I listen to at work.
I highly reccommend listening to Tim O'Reilly's Watching the Alpha Geeks. Covers a lot but well worth it. It also reminds me to check Dan O'Brien's Intro to life hacks. Which is still not completed. Saying that, I've still not sorted out the copyright vs community audio and video streams!
Flickr useage
I've got a presentation coming up tomorrow and I'm just adding the finishing touches now. Now this is quite interesting and a lesson to myself. In one of my slides.
Minning against searching
Google and other search engines work on page-scraping technology. Google will for example ignore html metadata.Technorati, Daypop and Feedster work on content syndicated rss feeds only. Minning content like this, better represents BBC content as it keeps content in context.
I've been searching for images using google image search but the results when looking for certain subjects or topics are not good. Gogle relies mainly on the image filename and webpage it sits in. Well thats ok, but Flickr does a much better job because people actual asign metadata to the pictures. Then I've been thinking actually this is better way to get pictures because you can see the copyright licence straight away, for example Perfect morning by Bmann has a creative commons licence. I love flickr so much that I've actual signed up myself, wont be put too many pictures up because I'm not totally sure about storing personal data on a beta service (much my same problem with Gmail and del.icio.us). But I'll put up some photos which I dont mind other people using, glad to see flickr makes it super easy to do this. I picked Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike for obvious reasons, and incase you didnt guess my flickr address is http://www.flickr.com/photos/cubicgarden/ and http://www.flickr.com/people/cubicgarden/. Good to see Flickr is making use of all the backend data (EXIF, XML, RSS) as well as making great web interfaces. Just dont understand why there using Flash 7 to display images?