MetaMap is a project by James Turner and VÈronique Moal at the UnivÈrsite de MontrÈal that nicely presents a subway map visualization of the variety of metadata standards. You can travel the subway lines of standards learning about this virtual underground polis.
Continue reading MetaMap: Metadate Subway Map
Bill’s spam is 4 million a day!
The Guardian reports that Bill Gates gets 4 million emails a day (David Teather, Friday Nov. 19, 2004). I’m glad someone gets more spam than I do.
The next time you’re sifting through the mortgage offers, cheap Rolex watches or dubious business proposals from Nigeria, spare a thought for Bill Gates. The Microsoft founder is the most spammed man in the world, with 4m emails arriving in his inbox each day.
Brian Cantwell-Smith was discussing the development of e-mail and made an interesting claim that some of its flaws can be traced to the way e-mail in the 70s was designed for people like the engineers who were developing it. As a result it doesn’t work well for someone who needs to have a secretary filter e-mail as the engineers were not managers and did their correspondence themselves. One could respond that it was exactly such a design that made the net feel democratic – even if you had staff there was no way to get around answering your own.
Nanopublishing
The Word Spy has an entry for nanopublishing – a narrowband publishing model aimed at a specific audience. Sounds like an academic journal to me. I prefer “nonnopublishing” which is aimed at granfathers.
How a Computer Works: 1970s books
From Matt Patey, How It Works…The Computer is a site with the 1971 and 1979 Ladybird books on ‘How it works’; The Computer. The pages are scanned so you can see images of the illustrations used.
Euclid’s Window: Geometry to Hyperspace
Euclids Window : The Story of Geometry from Parallel Lines to Hyperspace
Book suggested by Guy
del.icio.us
del.icio.us is an interesting pre alpha project on social bookmarks where the path is the interface. I am not sure I get it, but my intuition is that this could be a much better way to handle links if the work of entering them isn’t too cumbersome.
For an article on it at the O’Reilly XML.com site see, XML.com: Introducing del.icio.us. I love the domain name! This is courtesy of Matt P.
FireFox is Here
FireFox, Mozilla’s multiplatform browser has been released in version 1.0. It is time for us all to switch – if only because Microsoft is getting sloppy. For a review see, Mozilla Firefox Browser Review, by About.com
10X10
10×10 / 100 Words and Pictures that Define the Time / by Jonathan J. Harris is another cool visualization text experiment by the developer of WORDCOUNT. It analyzes the news and puts up 10 by 10 images that represent the keywords. It is done with a Flash interface.
Applied Arts in Toronto
Applied Arts has a nice list of the Greater Toronto Area education programs in applied arts and computer graphics.
University of Toronto: KMDI
KMDI is a neat interdisciplinary institute at the University of Toronto on Knowledge Media Design. They have a graduate study/collaborative program that spans Architecture, Computer Science, Information Studies, Medical Science, Mechanical Engineering and Sociology. I wonder if it works?