Shrook 2 – RSS and Atom for Mac OS X is a cool aggregator tool for surfing your feeds. Works with a free account from shrook.com.
Blog Spamming and MT
Have you found that your bogs are getting spam comments? My blogs are getting a trickle of comments for products. Here is a discussion of how to deal with it if you use Movable Type. Learning Movable Type: Concerning Spam. I am trying the approach of forcing spammers to preview their comments. Lets see if that works. Sorry for the inconvenience.
Aggregators
Feed on Feeds is a server side aggregator which the author claims is “itch-scratch-ware” (great word). See feed on feeds – about. I found this at, /r – echos/ an interesting blog site with a bricolage old newspaper graphic feel.
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A Manifesto for the Humanities
The Chronicle: 2/13/2004: A Manifesto for the Humanities in a Technological Age is a short essay on the importance of the Humanities. It reminds me of the Martha Piper lecture, but comes from an American liberal arts perspective. At times it sounds like a rehash of Cardinal Newman on the liberal and servile arts.
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Visualizing Social Networks
Matt drew my attention to PieSpy in a comment. Here is a link to information and downloadable code, PieSpy – Inferring and Visualizing Social Network on IRC. See the page on Social Shakespeare where there are graphs of the networks of people in plays and animations of the networks over the extent of the play.
VOG: Video Blogs
How can we use streaming media? Most uses of streaming media are remediations of existing video like trailers online or streamed lectures. Who is trying to find a way to use streaming media in an original way?
Adrian Miles has a VOG or Video Blog (see videoblog::vog 2.0) that “is not streaming video” yet uses the technology in an appropriate way. (I would say his VOG is new streaming media, as opposed to remediated video.) Check out how he theorizes it.
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Ethics in MUDs
Do online multiplayer games raise ethical issues?
We think of games as places free of ethics because they are isolated from the “real” world. Instead of ethics we have concepts like “fair play”. You don’t try to behave ethically in a game, but you are called upon to follow the rules and not cheat.
Lev Grossman has a good article on the ethical questions raised by games like Ultima that slip into becoming worlds for virtual living. See The Village Voice: Machine Age: Bloody Ethics by Lev Grossman.
Streaming Media
How can we use streaming media on the web?
There isn’t a lot out there on streaming media. A good site on the technology is CITES EdTech: Help Resources – Multimedia and Graphics which has annotated links to useful documents. But who is theorizing how this can be used? Is it just video delivered over the web? or can we do new things with it?
Does anyone have links to suggest?
Continue reading Streaming Media
Spam Research
What do we know about spam?
This report (PDF) is from graduate students at the Helsinki University of Technology on P2P and Spam. The Spam papers are at the end. Great stuff.
Why use email at all?
Having complained about spam and sporn, I am led to the question of when does one give up on email entirely? Donald Knuth gave up in 1990 – see his reasons here: Knuth versus Email. Must we be retired and have secretaries to give up?