Edu_Rss

Sexualities, Technologies, and the Teaching of Writing
One of the things that makes CCO special is its Print to Screen section where contributors to the current Computers and Composition have a chance to take their print article and give it the multi-dimensionality web-authoring makes possible. The Fall 2004 issue of Computers and Composition Online takes this a step further with guest editor Jacqeline Rhodes connecting our Theory into Practice, Virtual Classroom, Print to Screen, and Professional Development sections to September 2004's Computers and Composition's theme of Sexualitie From Kairosnews - A Weblog for Discussing Rhetoric, Technology and Pedagogy on September 12, 2004 at 10:57 p.m..

Latest thinking in usability & IA (Brisbane, Australia)
We've just announced a Brisbane date (18 November) for our half-day Latest thinking in usability and IA seminar. Details as follows: This half-day seminar will expose you to some of the latest ideas and approaches being explored in the fields... From Column Two on September 12, 2004 at 10:47 p.m..

CMS Myth #3: Products are pretty similar
This is something that I hear quite often, when talking to vendors or prospective purchasers: Myth: Content management systems are pretty similar in capabilities, and are rapidly converging on a single feature-set. In my experience, however, this is far from... From Column Two on September 12, 2004 at 9:47 p.m..

The Best of Eyetrack III
"In Eyetrack III, we observed 46 people for one hour as their eyes followed mock news websites and real multimedia content. In this article we'll provide an overview of what we observed." Some interesting findings here: "The Eyetrack III researchers discovered something important when testing headline and type size on homepages: Smaller type encourages focused viewing behavior (that is, reading the words), while larger type promotes lighter scanning." From elearningpost on September 12, 2004 at 9:47 p.m..

Less is more for government websites
Gerry's advice on designing for government websites: "Many governments have done great work on the Web, but in order to create a genuine knowledge society and economy, they need to reverse "the more the merrier" approach and focus on a "less is more" strategy." Now all we need is a good pitch to sell this to the government. From elearningpost on September 12, 2004 at 9:47 p.m..

Powell comes clean on Hussein and 9/11
Powell comes clean on Hussein and 9/11. Question: Will this get through to even one Republican? ¶ From Open Artifact on September 12, 2004 at 8:00 p.m..

Genre Theory Listserv
For any of you interested in genre theory, here's a discussion list you can join. The list's discussion centers on the North American school of genre theory, as opposed to the Sydney school. For information on the differences between the two, see Jean S. Mason's Genre Theory and Leen Breure's Development of the Genre Concept. From Kairosnews - A Weblog for Discussing Rhetoric, Technology and Pedagogy on September 12, 2004 at 6:56 p.m..

RSS Blender: Mix And Match RSS Content To Amazon Books
The team at Thinktank23 has once again come up with something worth pointing to. These are the same guys behind Waypath, its unique nifty set of tools, and behind Nav4 one very interesting piece of publishing software that allows rapid... From Robin Good's Latest News on September 12, 2004 at 6:49 p.m..

diaries
Did a first round of interviews with some representatives of the extranet I'm working on. There is one thing I can mention. They use project diaries to keep up with what's going on an th capture information (maybe knowledge) for co-workers. They are using a word-doc that sits on the LAN. Should be ready for weblog-software I'd think. Only a small step for them but .. From thomas n. burg | randgänge on September 12, 2004 at 6:47 p.m..

Shared ontologies
Paolo, Matt you should talk to David about the k-collector :-).[foo] Designing shared ontologiesJason Cole lead a session on how to design a tool he wants to build. He says most academic technology is aimed at teachers. How do we build tools that support learning? His wife just started grad school and From thomas n. burg | randgänge on September 12, 2004 at 6:47 p.m..

Teaching "introduction" courses to uninterested students
I guess it's the time of year, but I was intrigued to read "Pedablogue" (Michael Arnzen)'s post about teaching what he refers to as "101" courses. Such a course is a very basic introduction to a topic, required by the institution as a study skill, but not obviously connected to the course the students signed up for. This rang bells with me because two days ago I was suddenly informed that my lovely software development course aimed at working prefessionals (which I had spend months preparing for) ha From Frank Carver's weblog (Teaching and Learning category) on September 12, 2004 at 6:00 p.m..

Keyword Discovery Service For Your Google Adwords Campaigns: AdWordAccelerator
ActiveWordsAccelerator is an online service that provides a very convenient set of tools to identify the (cost-)effective keywords combinations to utilize with Google AdWords. Google AdWords is Google's own advertising program which allows any company to start advertising through the... From Robin Good's Latest News on September 12, 2004 at 5:49 p.m..

Three Years Since
I left work on September 10th at 9:00 PM. An hour before, my coworker was getting nervous. She was leaving on a trip to Italy on the 12th and wanted to meet me at 8:30 AM on the 11th to go over what projects of hers I needed to steer in her absence. I rolled my eyes and complained that no one schedules meetings at 8:30 in the morning, and convinced her to postpone the meeting to 10:00 AM. From kuro5hin.org on September 12, 2004 at 5:45 p.m..

Shared Spaces Briefing, Sep 3
Today's highlights: SharePoint SP1; Greif on Collaboration; Microsoft released Service Pack 1 for SharePoint Portal Server and Windows SharePoint Services (WSS). Improved features for WSS: support for larger files (up to 2 GB), and an easy way to install updates.... From Kolabora.com on September 12, 2004 at 4:57 p.m..

Thank You, Sep 3
This post is the most personal that has appeared on this site. For those who have read my Daily Briefing, you will know that I publish "mostly business" material. But this one is different. I want to publicly say thank... From Kolabora.com on September 12, 2004 at 4:57 p.m..

Shared Spaces Briefing, Sep 7
Today's highlights: IM in India; Five Across Plans; Engadget Interview with Danger; Pew on IM; FeedBurner for BlackBerry; On the use of IM in India: "Nearly 77 per cent [of respondants] use IM everyday and a further 12 per cent... From Kolabora.com on September 12, 2004 at 4:57 p.m..

Shared Spaces Briefing, Sep 8
Today's highlights: Macromedia Breeze Live Pricing; Interwoven TeamSite Linux Edition; BlackBerry for Series 80; CoCreate OneSpace.net 2005; Macromedia is introducing a pay-as-you-go pricing scheme for its Breeze Live web conferencing service. Its intention is to penetrate the small and medium... From Kolabora.com on September 12, 2004 at 4:57 p.m..

Shared Spaces Briefing, Sep 9
Today's highlights: RIM BlackBerry 7100t; Presence Applications; AOL AIM 5.9; Nokia 9300; Auersoft VisualVault 2004; RIM - We Need to Be Careful About ...; RIM announced the BlackBerry 7100t, its first foray into the mobile phone market with the form... From Kolabora.com on September 12, 2004 at 4:57 p.m..

Shared Spaces Briefing, Sep 10
Today's highlights: Convea Update; Intraspect Europe Rebrands; Avistar Patent; Wingra Notes Migrator for Exchange; Convea announced a new go-to-market strategy. Convea has developed a platform for Web-based collaboration applications, but its original forays into the open source movement resulted in... From Kolabora.com on September 12, 2004 at 4:57 p.m..

Shared Spaces Briefing, Sep 11
Today's highlights: dmail; Mantra Group Causerie Messenger; Trillian 0.74i Problem; Skype for Pocket PC; dmail is a new electronic mail service that provides a "closed-network" for email traffic. dmail users can only interact with other dmail users. helpisathand.gov.uk and dmail... From Kolabora.com on September 12, 2004 at 4:57 p.m..

Back to the Front
I've been moping a little bit this weekend because -- after a year's "release" from teaching the freshman composition course (my first "break" from teaching basic writing classes in twelve years of teaching) -- I'm back at "the front lines" of what many teachers would term a "service" course (i.e.,... From PEDABLOGUE on September 12, 2004 at 4:53 p.m..

Grouper: Groove meets WASTE... (Clay Shirky)
Grouper, a new entrant in the category of small-group P2P apps. (The N^2 problem is only a problem if N is large…) It’s the usual mix of “communications plus file sharing for small groups” that we know from Groove, Bad... From Corante: Social Software on September 12, 2004 at 4:50 p.m..

Yet Another Redesign
I didn't change weblog software again - just tweaked the layout of the site. I'm using Michael Heilemann's Kubrick v1.2.5 template for Wordpress. I've modified it a bit to pull header, footer, and sidebar into separate files to be included, and tweaked a couple of things, but it's basically a stock ... From D'Arcy Norman's Learning Commons Weblog on September 12, 2004 at 4:45 p.m..

If learning objects didn't exist you'd have to invent them
I still find it puzzling why some people are still hung up about learning objects. Maybe it's the name, maybe it's the technology, regardless of what the difficulties are the term itself often gets in the way of discussing the applications that use these pieces of reusable e-learning content. I was at a meeting this last week where some smart people were talking about innovative applications in e-learning that reuse content. I thought we were getting into a good discussion when someone pipes up 'so what is a learning object anyway?'. The whole session effectively broke down From David Davies: Edtech on September 12, 2004 at 3:46 p.m..

David Davies on Learning Objects
David Davies just posted an entry on learning objects that has a reasonable description of what a learning object is (to him). He's also got a nice, clear diagram showing the reusability paradox, and how assets, learning objects, and content packages fit along the spectra of organization and reusability. From D'Arcy Norman's Learning Commons Weblog on September 12, 2004 at 3:45 p.m..

Global to Local
In Global to Local: The Social Future as seen by six SF Writers, Cory Doctorow, Pat Murphy, Kim Stanley Robinson, Norman Spinrad, Bruce Sterling and Ken Wharton weigh in with their perspectives. No surprise that Doctorow highlights the importance of intellectual property in shaping what is to come: oeAs you'd expect, I think the social future is tied up intimately with copyright, since copyright is the body of law that most closely regulates technology (copying, distributing, and producing From Kairosnews - A Weblog for Discussing Rhetoric, Technology and Pedagogy on September 12, 2004 at 1:56 p.m..

Copenhagen Bloggers' Dinner
Thomas Madsen-Mygdal has put one together on Wednesday evening in Copenhagen, where I'm speaking tomorrow and Tuesday at several gatherings. Details here. From Dan Gillmor's eJournal on September 12, 2004 at 1:46 p.m..

KM for Educational Information Systems
Just a bookmark for later EPAA Vol. 9 No. 47 Thorn.: Knowledge Management for Educational Information Systems Abstract This article explores the application of Knowledge Management (KM) techniques to educational information systems -- particularly in support of systemic reform efforts. The first section defines knowledge and its relationship to information and data. There ... From ed tech brainery on September 12, 2004 at 1:02 p.m..

Personal KM model: new version drafted
I had a growing dissatisfaction with the way my 3 circle personal KM model (one of drafts, final version is here) represent my ideas, so the discussion on it during my PhD presentation last week was the last drop... One of the problems with current representation seems to be the fact that this is a V From Mathemagenic on September 12, 2004 at 12:52 p.m..

Intel's Problems Have Positive Side
(This is also my Sunday column in the San Jose Mercury News.) The king of microprocessors, Intel, has been in something of a funk lately. On balance, this is not such bad news. Manufacturing problems delayed its launch of some new chips, and some projects have been derailed. Meanwhile, Silicon Valley rival Advanced Micro Devices has taken a lead in several areas, challenging Intel's once-absolute primacy. Intel's problems are surely upsetting to shareholders, bu From Dan Gillmor's eJournal on September 12, 2004 at 12:47 p.m..

SAKAI - Open Source LMS or Developer Framework?
Stuart Sim over at Java.net has a blog post clarifying the current state of SAKAI’s development. The SAKAI team could do itself a huge favor by issuing this kind of an update summary itself on a regular basis rather than relying on the small handful of informed outsiders who are… From e-Literate on September 12, 2004 at 12:00 p.m..

Using European science policy and funds to help developing countries
Non-EU scientists offer their opinions on the future of the European science policy, CORDIS News, August 31, 2004 (unsigned). Excerpt: "The EU must identify obstacles to global collaboration and address them, urged non-European scientists at ESOF 2004....Presenting the view of the developing world, Khotso Mokhele from South Africa explained that the reality in developing countries is political indifference or at best ambiguity towards science. 'We are counting a lot on the EU t From Open Access News on September 12, 2004 at 11:51 a.m..

The case of the fonts
In 1948, the young Richard Nixon made his bones by questioning Alger Hiss . And it all depended on a discussion of fonts. Alger Hiss was an aristocratic lawyer who worked for the State Department, and was prominent enough to have served as Secretary General at the founding meeting of the UN. Whittaker Chambers was a grubby-looking ex-Communist who claimed before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in August 1948 that Hiss was a close friend and a member of the Party. Hiss — at the time, the president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace — demanded to addr From Joho the Blog on September 12, 2004 at 11:48 a.m..

Week ahead: Spain, Norway or Switzerland?
Plenty of scenic destinations for the week's tech conferences. Don't forget to bring chocolate back for your co-workers. From CNET News.com on September 12, 2004 at 10:45 a.m..

CoLRiC Professional Development Award is an annual award that aims to provide an opportunity to prom ...
CoLRiC Professional Development Award is an annual award that aims to provide an opportunity to promote innovation and excellence within learning resources services of UK and Irish Further Education colleges and encourage a person working within or for the sector to disseminate good practice to other colleges. The award is to be conferred annually. The award winner will receive a certificate and 1000 towards their study. Deadline February 1, 2005 From Peter Scott's Library Blog on September 12, 2004 at 9:49 a.m..

Intel keeps Moore's law on track - Associated Press
Contradicting fears that the semiconductor industry's pace of development is slowing, Intel Corporation has announced it has achieved a milestone in shrinking the size of transistors that will power its next-generation chips. The Santa Clara, Californi From Techno-News Blog on September 12, 2004 at 8:50 a.m..

Free voice mail helps the homeless - Associated Press
After 18 months sleeping on sidewalks and in shelters, Mel Cornelison has a job, and soon might have a place of his own. And he owes it all to voice mail. Cornelison landed his job through free voice mail that is being offered to homeless people and ot From Techno-News Blog on September 12, 2004 at 8:50 a.m..

Longhorn to put squeeze on gadgets - Ina Fried, CNET News.com
Windows makes it easy to quickly download files to iPods and other portable storage devices--a little too easy in the minds of many IT managers. In the next version of Windows, Microsoft will give big companies an easy way to block use of such devices From Techno-News Blog on September 12, 2004 at 8:50 a.m..

Acadient Partners With Thomson Learning to Provide Online Business Courses for Higher Education
Acadient, a leading developer and distributor of online learning for the higher education and financial services industries, today announced it has signed an agreement to license content from Thomson Learning, a leading provider of learning content. Wi From Online Learning Update on September 12, 2004 at 8:50 a.m..

Much ado about Bard's texts online - Will Sturgeon, CNET News.com
William Shakespeare, the Warwickshire wordsmith, was paid a posthumous compliment this week, when the British Library made available 21 of his works on the Internet. High-resolution images of 21 original texts, in 93 different versions, are available From Online Learning Update on September 12, 2004 at 8:50 a.m..

Growing Virtual Communities - Debbie Garber, IRRODL
Abstract: As online collaborative technologies become easier to use, an increasing range of oevirtual communities are being established, often for educational purposes. This report stresses that an efficient technology is only part of the process under From Online Learning Update on September 12, 2004 at 8:50 a.m..

8 more e-learning conferences in 2005
8 more e-learning conferences added to our Events listings ifor 2005: ITEC 2005 Dates: 25-28 Venue: Amsterdam RAI International Exhibition and Conference Centre, The Netherlands Online Educa Madrid Dates: 11-13 May Venue: Centro de Congresos Principe Felipe, Hotel Auditorium, Madrid, Spain eLearnExpo Moscow 2005 Dates: 26-27 May 2005 Venue: World Trade Center, Moscow, Russia EDEN 2005 Annual Conference Dates: 20-23 June 2005 Venue: Espoo, Finland Creativity matters: where passion meets need ... Dates: 20-25 June 2005 Venue: St Paul, Minnesota, USA NECC 2005 (National Educational Computing Conf From What's New at the e-Learning Centre on September 12, 2004 at 6:01 a.m..

Bekir's Problems with my Problems
In his most recent posting, Bekir rightly points out that in my sleep deprivation I chose my words poorly in describing the problems with my attempt at modeling the OSOSS. Of course the kinds of theories dealt with by everyone but Matlock cannot be "proven". The problem with the OSOSS model is that it could not be invalidated or falsified. The weakness with the current model is that th From autounfocus on September 12, 2004 at 5:45 a.m..

Organization Analysts Tapped for Strategic Alliance with Mark Eight
Leading Business Process Engineering firm approached by international project management company for global alliance. [PRWEB Sep 12, 2004] From PR Web on September 12, 2004 at 4:45 a.m..

Ragen-Pease Promoted to Resource Manager
Iverson Language Associates, Inc. is pleased to announce the promotion of Kelly Ragen-Pease to Resource Manager. [PRWEB Sep 12, 2004] From PR Web on September 12, 2004 at 4:45 a.m..

Wimmerlin Promoted to Director of Client Services
Iverson Language Associates, Inc. is pleased to announce the promotion of Hélène Wimmerlin to Director of Client Services. Iverson Language Associates, Inc. is pleased to announce the promotion of Hélène Wimmerlin to Director of Client Services. [PRWEB Sep 12, 2004] From PR Web on September 12, 2004 at 4:45 a.m..

Governing the Learning Organization in an Era of Strategic Human Capital Development and Management
Ich weiss gar nicht mehr, wie ich zu diesem White Paper gekommen bin: Jedenfalls gibt hier auch Saba eine Argumentationshilfe für alle, die Lernen als Baustein eines unternehmensweiten Human Capital-Ansatzes sehen - und auch so behandeln möchten. "For many organizations,... From www.weiterbildungsblog.de on September 12, 2004 at 2:52 a.m..

[FlickrBugs] Flickr Slideshows don't support groups?!?
This is great but Flickr slideshows don't appear to be supported by groups (please correct me if I missed it!). This is a curious omission given the orthogonality of the system (i.e. most anything you can do with sets you can do with groups so it doesn't make any sense to me that groups don't have slideshows but sets do). From Introducing Slideshows - FlickrBlog: QUOTE You can now view slideshows of just about any group of photos that you c From Roland Tanglao's Weblog on September 12, 2004 at 1:54 a.m..

Kanoodle Serves RSS Ads
Kanoodle said yesterday that it struck a distribution deal with news aggregator Feedster to sprinkle paid listings in Feedster's feeds of search results. The deal expands the reach of Kanoodle's content listings program, called ContextTarget. Kanoodle also distributes its content listings to partners such as CBS MarketWatch and MSNBC.com. Feedster, San Francisco, which indexes more than 8,000 news sources, lets users have their searches sent to them through the Really Simple Syndication feed. Feedster already displays paid search listings on its Web site through Yahoo's Over From RSS Blog on September 12, 2004 at 1:03 a.m..

Add Images to RSS
Add images to your RSS Feeds. I found a great snippet of XML that allows you to add an image to the top of your RSS feed. The format of the tags is as follows: From RSS Blog on September 12, 2004 at 1:02 a.m..

Statistical Tracking of RSS
According to the statistical mapping on Syndic8 that represents the growth of RSS popularity overtime, shows a recent surge in the adoption of the RSS technology. The total number of RSS feeds available overtime shows a marked increase over the last few months. It appears that RSS is becoming main stream. From RSS Blog on September 12, 2004 at 1:02 a.m..

War Blogging Under Fire
US Military officials are cracking down on marines and members of the military who have been blogging in Iraq. Critics warned of censorship while the military stressed security concerns and that blogs could easily reveal sensitive information that could jeopardize the fragile security situation in Iraq. While some blogs have been removed all together others need to be reviewed prior to posting. From RSS Blog on September 12, 2004 at 1:02 a.m..

Google to Pay Bloggers
Looking to lure new users to its Blogger publishing platform, Google plans to give up a slice of its own advertising pie. The search technology darling announced plans to share the profits from its AdSense self-service program that helps publishers serve up contextual advertising. The move is a significant departure from Google's previous policy of keeping all its revenues earned from AdSense. From RSS Blog on September 12, 2004 at 1:02 a.m..

NetFlix RSS Feeds - Movie Queue in RSS
Brian over at Stupid Simple Blog wrote his own NetFlix RSS queue maker. It uses wget and his mozilla cookies file to grab the HTML for his queue, then parses it with a simple perl script and writes the output to an RSS file! Get your movie queue in RSS! From RSS Blog on September 12, 2004 at 1:02 a.m..

Google Indexing XML?
Yesterday in my google quest for information I stumbled upon, to my surprise an indexed RSS feed! That ranked quite well for the search phrase I was looking for. It was clear the site and feed were popular, and I'm not quite sure how it was indexed but could this be a new era for Google? From RSS Blog on September 12, 2004 at 1:02 a.m..

Terrar RSS Search Engine
Terrar, one of the oldest RSS search engines on the net, is in the process of being dramatically updated. We've been adding a LOT more feeds. It's at the stage where it's very usable but please consider it as an alpha version right now From RSS Blog on September 12, 2004 at 1:02 a.m..

RSS Calendar
This is a great idea. Add calendar events you want to share with friends, family, or co-workers and publish them in a custom RSS feed. RSS Calendar lets users quickly setup online calendars that can be syndicated as RSS feeds. From RSS Blog on September 12, 2004 at 1:02 a.m..

What Are RSS Feeds?
RSS also known as rich site summary or real simply syndication, arrived on the scene a number of years ago, but was only recently embraced by webmasters as a means to effectively syndicate content. RSS Feeds provide webmasters and content providers an avenue to provide concise summaries to prospective readers. Thousands of commercial web sites and blogs now publish content summaries in an RSS feed. Each item in the feed typically contains a headline; article summary and link back to the online article. From RSS Blog on September 12, 2004 at 1:02 a.m..

Friendster Fires Bloggers
Friendster, known for breaking new ground in online social networking and promoting self-expression among peers, fired one of its employees Monday for her personal Web log, or online diary. Joyce Park, a Web developer living in Sunnyvale, Calif., said her managers told her Monday that she stepped over the line with her blog, Troutgirl. They declined to elaborate, except to say that it was CEO Scott Sassa's ultimate decision, Park said. From RSS Blog on September 12, 2004 at 1:02 a.m..

Blabble Releases Beta Of Blog-Tracking Service
Blabble has released the beta version of its research and analysis blog-tracking service for monitoring the viewpoints of blog postings. The service can track, aggregate, and evaluate opinions from more than two million blogs. From RSS Blog on September 12, 2004 at 1:02 a.m..

Feedster v2
It took awhile but Feedster v2 is finally here. The new interface is clean and now includes keyword-targeted text ads courtesy of Overture. Keep an eye on Feedster, they are making huge strides for both general-interest web searchers and web publishers alike. From RSS Blog on September 12, 2004 at 1:02 a.m..

NOAA RSS Feed
Track hurricanes and storms with an rss feed from the National Weather Service. The NOAA The uses rss to quickly update users the latest news and updates from a site in a headline or news digest format. This in turn helps during high-traffic periods by reducing the load on the servers. From RSS Blog on September 12, 2004 at 1:02 a.m..

Make RSS Feeds!
We've tracked down a new website that talks about RSS feed creation! RSS feeds are the latest Internet craze. If you have information and content that needs distribution consider making and rss feed to increase your reach. From RSS Blog on September 12, 2004 at 1:02 a.m..

Corporate America & Blogging Employees
Corporate America weighs in on concerns related to employees and blogging. Sun created a blogging policy to remind employees to put a disclaimer and to think about the consequences related to any posts. The policy is gentle but outlines things that all employers might want to discuss with employees. From RSS Blog on September 12, 2004 at 1:02 a.m..

Google Renews Interest in RSS
Google is considering renewing support for the popular RSS Web publishing format in some of its services, CNET News.com has learned, marking the latest twist in a burgeoning standards war over technology that could change how people read the news. From RSS Blog on September 12, 2004 at 1:02 a.m..

Instant Messaging & RSS
rss2jabber is a new application that gathers RDF/RSS/Atom newsfeeds and sends them to an IM client. rss2jabber is completely free and can be used by any platform version of Jabber. The new service is another indicator of a strong convergence taking place between real-time communication, collaboration, news gathering and social networking tools. From RSS Blog on September 12, 2004 at 1:02 a.m..

/. ‘ed
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/11/13/2024249&mode=thread&tid=155&tid=185&tid=99 It was Thursday night. We were looking at the server log file running (you know tail –f .. we wanted to check something) and then we saw it: 207.42.???.??? - - [13/Nov/2003:20:35:28 +0000] "GET /default.php?international=0&screen=0 HTTP/1.1" 200 14584 "http://slashdot.org/" "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686) Gecko/20030807 Galeon/1.3.5" Us in slashdot? Us? Naa couldn’t be. Maybe someone wrote a comment about us, we hope it's a nice comment about us… And then we saw it again. And again. A comment get From A day in the life of the Huminity Team on September 12, 2004 at 1:02 a.m..

Why we decided not to include a competitive “scoring system”
One of the key sentences that Friendsters keep repeating is “I’m connected to xxxx thousands of people”. When we built Huminity, we thought of having a “counter” so that people can know to how many people they are connected in 6-degrees, but eventually decided to drop the idea. Below, we share some of our thoughts for this, and we are sure that this debate has more than a few views… and we would love to hear them. Whenever a scoring system is introduced, some people who are more competitive by nature see it as a game in which they obsessively try to reach the ultimate peak score. From A day in the life of the Huminity Team on September 12, 2004 at 1:02 a.m..

Social networking with a desktop software versus a website, and the reasons that drove us to choose the first…
Why do most people prefer a desktop e-mail client rather than web-mail? Why do they prefer a desktop chat / Instant Messaging software rather than web-chat? Why do they prefer desktop file sharing software rather than warez websites from which they can download any digital file? On the other hand… Why do the same people prefer a web-based search engine rather than a desktop multi-search engine? Why do they prefer web-based comparison shopping rather than desktop tools? It seems that nowadays, we have everything both web-based and desktop based… but where do applications succeed as we From A day in the life of the Huminity Team on September 12, 2004 at 1:02 a.m..

Top 50
We had a feeling this might happen this week. After all slashdot.org did bring some users and their friends, and their friends and... you know how it works ;) To be on Cnet’s download.com top-50 most downloaded software is quite an achievement :) after all it’s the Internet’s #1 download site and a barometer to the most popular software on the Internet! From A day in the life of the Huminity Team on September 12, 2004 at 1:02 a.m..

Picked by Yahoo!
This story is a bit similar to the /. story. We noticed a sudden increase in hits from my.yahoo.com and it’s sub domains. Going to my.yahoo.com did not show any link to us. The educated guess was that users writing about us caused the hits. Blogs write about us, livejurnal has a lot of links to Huminity.... but this traffic was different – its frequency and mass was, lets say, higher ;) Using Michal's my.yahoo.com account and selecting possible content types came up with the following discovery: Yahoo software editors have chosen Huminity to be featured in their daily pick :) From A day in the life of the Huminity Team on September 12, 2004 at 1:02 a.m..

/. all mighty :D
This was even funnier than the last time. We went out for a walk (Oren and Nir) to breath some air and clear our thoughts. When we came back, the daily user registration looked as if it was connected to a fire engine :) we looked at the log file and it reminded us of a former incident looking at the referrals we came up with this: The globes article was great. Bootstrapping Huminity was more than a challenge… it was an adventure… and fun… and still is :) From A day in the life of the Huminity Team on September 12, 2004 at 1:02 a.m..

The strength of the weakest link
Common sense is a very deceptive instrument because it imparts characteristics from one field to another – just as most people have a very hard time believing that a heavier stone will not fall faster than a lighter stone. But what about connections? The intuitive judgment based on common-sense and basic laws of physics/ mechanics will imply that “a chain is as strong as it’s weakest link” as suggested in this recent article about VisiblePath’s concept… intuitively, it makes sense, but, as said earlier – common sense is a very deceptive instrument… Why not “a chain is as str From A day in the life of the Huminity Team on September 12, 2004 at 1:02 a.m..

Evolving
The new Huminity “zoom out” maps are finally on the web! We like it so much it now replaces our home page :) As can best be described as the first “Google of people & social networking”, users can see a wider view of their social network by entering their email to the catchy URL www.huminity.com/map=email@domain.xxx (an example… there isn’t such a user ;) ) The visualization engine used is touchgraph (open source Java applet). We first saw its implementation in the google browser. The way the maps were drawn was amazing and we knew that the visualization engine would be great w From A day in the life of the Huminity Team on September 12, 2004 at 1:02 a.m..