Konfabulator Moves to Windows

According to Slashdot, Arlo Rose is porting Konfabulator to Windows. The Konfabulator site now goes to a strange “notebook” essay on “Ten Days In The Wild” which pretends to have discovered two types of creatures in the wild (Macs and PCs.) To see what Konfabultator in Windows would look like see image here.
This came to me from Chris. See also a previous grockwel: Research Notes: Konfabulator blog entry.

Stock Exchange: Free Photo Site

stock.xchng is a site with free photos that can be searched. By and large they are fairly good “office” quality – suitable for illustrating points in PowerPoint. I just went through grabbing images to put together an essay for students on working in groups in the workplace. The semiotics of stock images is interesting – search for “office” and ask yourself about the images available. Can you tell the difference between different office cultures? Do offices really look like that? Why are there so many images of simple office supplies like pencils and so few of messy desks? This link came from Audrey.

Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names Online (TGN)

The Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names is a ” a hierarchical vocabulary of around 1.1 million names, and coordinates and other information for around 892,000 geographic places.” (From Getty Vocabularies Download Center)
In other words it is an controlled vocabulary of place names that can be searched online or, with permission, downloaded in XML form (or relational database or MARC.) I wonder if this could be used to create text engines that search by place and use the TGN records (which contain hierarchical information) to provide context? To put it another way, is TGN an ontology?
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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.

Sabine Scholl: Book Interface

Sabine Scholl has a simple and interesting interface to her personal site which looks like a very tall book that you can scroll up and down. I don’t know if it is intentional, but there is a visual joke on flipping pages and scrolling up and down to the site. All the links are just to anchors further down the “page”. This is courtesy of Ross Scaife.

Jason Lewis: ActiveText

At the Textologies workshop organized here at McMaster by Travis Kroeker and Andrew Mactavish, I saw a neat project, ActiveText that was demonstrated by Jason E. Lewis at Concordia. ActiveText is a C++ library that can be used to make active text. Jason has gotten it right – the objects he handles go from glyphs up to passages. They can have behaviors so that segments of text are activated. See the animation.
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Mind Mapping

At the Burlington Art Centre I attended a day-long workshop on “The Art of Change” where the “mind mapping” software Mindjet: Mind Manager was demonstrated. Mind mapping apparently was invented by Tony Buzan as a way of unleashing the potential of the mind. See, Buzan Centres – Mind Mapping – Mind Map Definition. The presenter oversold mind mapping and it is not clear that visual thinking software running on a small screen is preferable to a good big peice of software or whiteboard, but at its heart mind mapping seems to be hypertext for thinking – drawing graphs of ideas. What is is strange is how this business technique has spawned software similar to what has come from the hypertext community, software like Storyspace, which bills itself as serious hypertext for writers.
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