Category: Internet Culture and Technology

CiteULike

CiteULike: A free online service to organize your academic papers is a social (or public) bookmarking and referencing project similar to del.icio.us which I blogged before. The focus in CiteULike is citations to papers; such a service could replace private EndNote bibliographic databases. Looking at it quickly, I am not sure it can generate a reference for a paper I am writing using different styles the way EndNote can, but that must be coming. The added value is that you could have other people writing sharing notes (since the main issue with reference databases is remembering what the hell the reference was about a year later) that would help you remember what you have supposedly read. Another added value would be to provide a persistent citation to something where I could cite the CiteULike page in addition to the online doc. Now … I wonder if this could be connected to the Internet Archive so that cached versions of papers from when I read the paper could be called up?

iTunes in Canada, finally

As the Winnepeg Sun reports, Canuck iTunes music to a fan’s ears (Dec. 3, 2004). When I first learned about iTunes I bought an iPod – it seemed the perfect match and an easy way to learn about and buy music. Then, like many Canadians with an iPod I waited … and waited … Finally we have iTunes in Canada. How will my music consumption habits change? I’ve learned that with my iPod I tend to just listen to the same things over and over – will iTunes change that?

Culture Tracking

Alexa is now tracking sites. On their home page they tell you what sites have jumped and they have a “Traffic Watch” feature in their Related Info for: pages that graphs “reach”. A neat feature is that you can compare any of the sites they track.
A couple of years ago I gave a paper on tracking culture by graphing web hits. We (Skip Poehlman, Michael Picheca and I) built a system that could track keywords and store results from daily searches. One could then graph any two against each other and so on. I see now that Alexa now has this feature and has been tracking some cultural comparisons like “Liberal Talk Radio”. Will they generalize this? Will they let us track our stuff?

Google Scholar

Google Scholar is a beta service that is aimed at academics. In their words,

Google Scholar enables you to search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research. Use Google Scholar to find articles from a wide variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web.

Continue reading Google Scholar

Stephenson on Hardware: The Spaceheater

Slashdot | Neal Stephenson Responds With Wit and Humor is a long interview with Neal Stephenson. I love what he has to say about

My thoughts are more in line with those of Jaron Lanier, who points out that while hardware might be getting faster all the time, software is shit (I am paraphrasing his argument). And without software to do something useful with all that hardware, the hardware’s nothing more than a really complicated space heater.

Now, one could construct an argument against Raymond Kurzweil to the effect that hardware may be getting faster, but the software is just getting hairy (as in hair ball). The inevitability that Kurzweil and others see in the improvements in hardware are a false evolution – a bit like thinking that humans will be superseded because cars gets faster.
This link is courtesy of Matt K.

CAIDA: Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis

CAIDA (Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis) has a wealth of information, papers, analysis, and tools on their web site, including mass information visualization tools that have been developed and links to information about the visualization techniques. You can also get cool posters of the Internet. In their “about” page they write that CAIDA is,

a collaborative undertaking among organizations in the commercial, government, and research sectors aimed at promoting greater cooperation in the engineering and maintenance of a robust, scalable global Internet infrastructure. CAIDA provides a neutral framework to support cooperative technical endeavors.