Web Tools
I had the opportunity to attend a Tufte workshop a few years ago.
His books are recommended to anyone who is interested in the visual display of information.
His website has a news and updates section where he occasionaly comments on visual information design. The site also has an "Ask E.T." section.
How Trackback WorksThis page illustrates how Trackback works. Think of it as comments to someone's post that appear on your weblog, but are referenced from theirs...
For more information take a look at the TrackBack Development page at Six Apart. Mena Trott notes that it is sometimes easier to demonstrate than to explain...
Brooklyn BloggEd Manila is a very powerful tool but it's not for everyone. Lots of teachers won't take the time to learn it in anything close to its current form. Simply put, it's more than most teachers need and the learning curve for a teacher not fascinated by technology is too steep. Joe makes a point that Manila may be too difficult for the average teacher to use as a web publishing tool. I have used Manila for over 2 years. When it was first pointed out to me by Dick McPartland of Lincoln High School in Portland, I was taken by its ease of use. It allowed folks not familiar with web publishing and web methods to upload content. We utilized it with our Teachers on Special Assigntment (Curriculum Specialists) to allow them to post information about their particular curriculum area on the web.
While much easier than traditional web posting methods, I found that the interface was not as intuitive as I first thought. For example the seperation of Stories and News Items was confusing for some of our folks. If they wanted to make a post about an upcoming workshop, they would first have to create the story and then the news item that pointed to the story. While this did not seem like such a problem to me, time and time again the content people found it confusing. Movable Type makes this much easier with the Extended Entry field. No need for a seperate story and a seperate news post about the story.
The uploading of images is another area where I find Movable Type to be more intuitive. The ability to upload the image, create a thumbnail, and then edit a post to go with the image is another example of why I like Movable Type.
Nothing against Manila, but I'm finding for my work at Buckman, Movable Type is a better choice.
The T-Mobile Sidekick mobile communicator, (also known as the Danger Hiptop), which you can use for email, instant messenger, and to surf the Web, is now free at Amazon after rebate and new service activation. Comes with a digital camera attachment as well. [by way of...Gizmodo]
Okay, now I'm thinking I've got to get one of these... Of course it most likely means that the color version is about to ship...
heraldtribune.com: Southwest Florida's Information Leader Library of Congress Starts Sound RegistryBy CARL HARTMANAssociated Press WriterClose your eyes and just listen.There's President Theodore Roosevelt denouncing corporate swindles. Robert Frost reading his poetry. Buffalo Bill Cody urging war with Spain over Cuba.They are joined by 2.5 million other voices - some famous, some not - and sounds - the huffing and puffing of a steam locomotive is one - preserved at the Library of Congress.On Monday, Librarian of Congress James Billington was announcing the first 50 sounds to be entered in a National Recording Registry. It seeks to ensure even greater protection for some of the most notable songs, speeches and other utterances.
[By way of...The Shifted Librarian]
oreilly.com -- Online Catalog: Content Syndication with RSS Ben Hammersley's book about RSS syndication will be published in March by O'Reilly. A sample chapter is available for download....
Jon Udell: Politics and audioblogging Let's think about how this might have played in 2003. There's a really good chance those students would have blogged the incident, with accompanying audio if not video. Having done so, there's a really good chance the blog community would have noticed and amplified the students' blog.
Jon Udell, one of my favorite bloggers, writes about how technology may have a transformative effect on politics. The example he quotes is about an Al Gore quote from 1999 taken out of context by the media, to the dismay of those who actually heard his talk. He makes the point that blogging and searchable audio could be used to fact check media stories.
OpenP2P.com: An Interview with Tim O'Reilly [Dec. 03, 2002] Very interesting interview with Tim O'Reilly of O'Reilly Publishing. It covers, among other things, networking technology like Rendezvous, digital rights management issues....
We're really at a bit of an impasse right now, because the music industry and the film industry want to restrict technologies that have substantial uses--uses that are very desirable to consumers for sharing their own information.
Audio Blogger is a simple tool to create URLs of simple audio messages that can easily be added as entries to a weblog or other web page.... The example below is a recording of my friend Vince playing our piano...
Phil Gyford: Writing: Festive taping vs festive downloading This article by Phil Gyford discusses his feelings of recording broadcasts off the Internet. He compares it to recording with tape over the air broadcasts. In the article he mentions an interesting tool I am going to look into... Audio Hijack
New York Times: New Test Site From Google Focuses on Products for Sale One of the main uses of general search sites like Google is to look for things to buy. But the new service focuses specifically on products for sale, displaying pictures of the items and their prices at various merchants. It lets users narrow a search by the category of product and the price.
raelity bytes Rael Dornfest points to a little menu bar application ( Searchiling ) that allows for searching of places like Google right from the menu bar. He has written a bit of code to add the capibility to search O'Reilly's Meerkat.
Homemade Dot-Mac with OS X, Part 2
O’Reilly: “Jaguar has made significant improvements to aspects of Mac OS X. These features make setting up a home Web server easier and more powerful than ever, and I’ll touch on some of them while digging deeper into the homemade Dot-Mac project.” [Ranchero.com]