Google Sitemaps
Google Sitemaps is a service to allow webmasters to describe what is changing on a site to make it easier for Google to index. There is an interview with the Google engineer at New “Google Sitemaps” Web Page Feed Program on SearchEngineWatch.
I wonder if wikis could be set up to create the sitemap automatically? This is courtesy of Matt Patey who pointed me to the Slashdot | Google Launches Google Sitemaps post.
Microsoft Embraces XML
According to a Microsoft Media Alert: Microsoft XML Architect to Unveil XML in “Office 11” At XML Conference & Exposition 2002. In Office 11 the native file formats will be XML! Neat, but will Microsoft the start extending and extinguishing XML once they have embraced it?
See also, Next Version of Office Will Use XML as the Default File Format. Thanks to Matt and Dwayne for alerting me to this.
3D Scanning for People
What every Humanities Computing center needs – the ability to scan humans. See Cyberware Products. I rather like the desktop model, but the scans don’t look that impressive.
World’s Strangest Online Museums
I have long loved obscure museums, and so I was thrilled to discover a site dedicated to Unusual Museums of the Internet.
My favorite (so far) is FUNOMENA: WEIRD AND STRANGE MOBILE MUSEUM – one of the world’s smallest traveling exhibits. Another is the The Zymoglyphic Museum which I wouldn’t dare describe. Others will care more for toilet related museums, but there are toilets everywhere.
MLAgazine
The NEW MLAgazine: About Computers and the People Who Made Them is a strange magazine with long interesting articles on the historyof Netscape and a lot of stories about Macintosh history – including a good one on the history of the Mac OS. Looks to be the work mostly of one fan. I’m not sure what the title stands for or how it is a magazine, but the content is interesting.
Text Analysis of E-Mail
StÈfan Sinclair has blogged an interesting story from the New York Times on how Enron Offers an Unlikely Boost to E-Mail Surveillance. Researchers, including Dr. Skillicorn at Queen’s, are using a large collection of Enron e-mail posted by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to experiment with e-mail tracking and analysis. A large corpus like the Enron one (over a million messages) can be used as a testbed for social network analysis or diachronic trend analysis. The article also talks about fears that government Echelon-style surveillance of e-mail may become available to corporate intelligence types. I wonder if we can develop useful text analysis tools optimized for e-mail collections like a dialogue of messages on a subject, or the Humanist archives. Some thing for TAPoRware.
Scientists had long theorized that tracking the e-mailing and word usage patterns within a group over time – without ever actually reading a single e-mail – could reveal a lot about what that group was up to. The Enron material gave Mr. Skillicorn’s group and a handful of others a chance to test that theory, by seeing, first of all, if they could spot sudden changes.
For example, would they be able to find the moment when someone’s memos, which were routinely read by a long list of people who never responded, suddenly began generating private responses from some recipients? Could they spot when a new person entered a communications chain, or if old ones were suddenly shut out, and correlate it with something significant?
NITLE: National Institute for Technololgy and Liberal Education: Semantic Indexing
National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education or NITLE (pronounced “nightly”?) have a free semantic indexing tool written in perl that you can download. Their page also has useful starting links on semantic analysis. The project was/is funded by Mellon.
In particular I recommend the introduction to latent semantic indexing they have put up at, Patterns in Unstructured Data: Discovery, Aggregation, and Visualization by Yu, Cuadrado, Ceglowski, and Payne.
Continue reading NITLE: National Institute for Technololgy and Liberal Education: Semantic Indexing
Clusty: Cluster Searching
Clusty the Clustering Engine is a meta-search engine which uses VivÌsimo which is based on technology from Carnegie Mellon. Clusty does a nice job of clustering results from multiple search engines into folders that actually make sense. There are some other neat interface issues that Google could learn from.
They do the clustering by crawling and running some sort of cluster processing on the information. I’m not sure how this works over the engines, though it makes sense over a domain. VivÌsimo also offers enterprise solutions – I wonder if they could be adapted to crawl and cluster humanities texts?
Continue reading Clusty: Cluster Searching
Toogle and Woogle
Woogle – Words in pictures is a art project that takes a phrase and builds it from Google retrieved images.
Toogle Image Search takes a word, finds an image from Google and then converts it to a text version of the image/word where the word is repeated in different colours to make up the image.
Both are neat art toys that nicely play on Google by C6.org and Gu Jian. I’m not clear as to who C6 is – an art collective in the UK? – but they have a number of clean and irreverant projects. Thanks to Robert for pointing this out to me.