Category: Internet Culture and Technology

The Stoa is a site/blog by Ross Scaife. The Stoa project has been reviewing and publishing online works especially works about classical subjects like our Trajan’s Column Project. Ross has changed the interface of the home page to a blog. I wonder if this will become a trend – that people use blogs for the entry points as they allow easy updating of news and ideas?

The Berlin Declaration is a manifesto for creators of digital knowledge who believe in open access. This came to me from stoa.org.
Continue reading Open Access: Berlin Declaration

BlackBerry fuels nasty campaign brush fire is a front page story in today’s Globe and Mail (Campbell Clark, Steven Chase, and Jane Taber, Friday, May 28, 2004, Page A1). This is the second time this meme has surfaced in the Globe – it was embedded in an earlier story by Taber (see below) so I can’t help thinking the Globe was planning this technology angle and waiting for an event hook to get it onto the front page.
That said, it is interesting that BlackBerrys have surfaced as the new technology to watch and that they have become mainstream news. This may be due to the fact the RIM is a Canadian company. It could be that we have a critical mass of people doing instant e-mail. It could be that we are beginning to think of the cultural effects of instant messaging and portable Internet enabled technologies. Elections make great turning points with which to date and explain change.

So powerful is the use of digital technology in the election that single comments can spread like wildfire along broadband lines and satellite signals, from war rooms in Ottawa to campaign buses rolling along distant highways in the Maritimes.The wireless war of 2004 erupted Wednesday night when the NDP Leader went, as political operatives like to say, off message.

Remember Carter and how his election win of 1984 was reported to have been helped by the use of e-mail. Likewise we saw
Howard Dean get attention this year for his web enabled campaign. Technology news and elections make interesting combinations.
Continue reading Blackberry Politics

In the comments to the entry on Tool and Technology I commented on the paragraph numbers in Chris Dent’s essays. He responded by pointing me to PurpleWiki Archive. Thee is also an essay on An Introduction to Purple which connects the granular addressability of Purple to Englebart.
Continue reading Purple Granular Addressability

MacWarriors TrailBlazer is a project from Illinois that provides a browser (for Panther) that has a visual history. The visual history shows thumbnails of screens and a graph of your trajectory. Neat. Thanks to Matt and Slashdot.

Google has just changed their interface. They now point to a “more” section with more services. Google Labs is one of the new services which has a number of interesting experimental projects including one that allows you to volunteer processing for academic use – like the SETI screen saver, but a generic service. Now they should try a Beacon-like volunteer archiving project. See my note Freenet and Beacon.

Vivisimo Clustering – automatic categorization and meta-search software is a meta search engine with a great outliner like interface that lets you move through lots of hits. They gather hits from other engines and cluster them into a hierarchy that can be browsed. The idea is obvious once you try it for searches where you want to manage lots of hits. Thanks to Matt for this.
Continue reading Vivisimo Clustering Engine

A comment to a note on Annotations had an intriguing comment by Seb who has a blog at seb.notlong.org. I went there, and, because the server was busy it dropped me into the notlong.org site which provides simple service where people can get a short url created that resolves to their longer url. Thus XXX.notlong.org resolves to something entirely different. (Thanks Seb – this is the second note with something I have learned from him.)

See notlong Short URL Redirection: Make a long URL notlong. This suggests one could create a long term url that would travel with you like a life phone number. (What would I do with all my stuff at Mac if I left?)
Continue reading notlong.org: Short URLs

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?

Can we solve the spam problem?

Sorting e-mail friends from foes: Identifying networks of mutual friends helps filter out spam is another project that uses networks of friends to filter mail. This project, in effect, acknowledges that we may have to give up on the anonymous and democratic Internet and go back to other types of networks to decide who we correspond with.

What do I mean by this? Another post.