A project I worked on with Multimedia students and colleagues (see previous post Virtual Cities) won a prize from Ontario Association of Art Galleries. See the
McMaster Daily News story. We got a varnished stick with “Good for you!” on it! Not sure what we will do with that?
Buckets of Grewal
An interesting Canadian example of a political and timely blog is Buckets of Grewal which looks closely at the Grewal controversy and the tapes. Buckets has been systematically tracking the changing transcripts and politics around the tapes. He/She has a very nice use of Flikr to show slides of the trascripts with the differences (between old and new transcripts) hightlighted. See buckets’ Grewal’s meeting w. Dosajnh & Murphy slideshow on Flickr.
CTV.ca | Rookie political blogger tackles the Grewal tapes is a good article about the Buckets of Grewal blog and its reception.
Ethics of Blogging
Today I participated in a meeting of the Bioethics Interest Group in the Faculty of Health Sciences at McMaster University on the subject of ethics and blogging where we had a lively conversation around the use of blogs for medical research. For that I created (with Lisa Schwartz who organized the meeting) a fictional case to problematize the issues. See the extended entry for the case. BIG is a monthly informal discussion of topics related to ethics in health care and biomedical sciences. Some interesting questions that came up:
- What can we assume about a blogger? Can we guess at how they assumed their blog would be used?
- Is quoting a blog comparable to quoting an online article? or should we try to get consent? More generally, what can we compare blogs to was we try to work out the ethics?
- Would getting consent change what was being written?
- Would podcasting conversations like the one we had help develop community awareness around the issues?
fondation Daniel Langlois
The Fondation Daniel Langlois has a very cool Flash web site. Everything launches little windows that let you switch from French to English, resize the window, and get a unique URL if you are trying to reference a specific item. This is useful given that the interface is in Flash.
In particular check out Eisensteins Early Drawings (go to the parent block and open the interactive sketchbook). They have an interactive interface for the pages of the sketchbook which is compelling.
Escape Route
Escape Route is a “photographic travelogue” which shows a 3D itinerary or 2D itinerary of locations for which there are photos. The itineraryies are mapped onto 3d or 2d globes space. There are neat animations for when you collapse from 3d to 2d. I’m so intrigued by the navigation interface I haven’t really looked at the snaps. Thanks to Drew Paulin for this.
Yahoo Mindset
Yahoo! Mindset is a search demo that lets you sort the results with a slider that lets you choose the weight of “commercial” against “research”. I assume they look at the source of the link. Thanks to Matt Patey for this.
Continue reading Yahoo Mindset
Online Polling
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.