By Stephen Downes
May 8, 2003
RSS Feeds via JavaScript
PHP
sourcer code release of a simple script that makes it
possible to plac any RSS feed onto any web page, without
special programming. Nice use of style sheets to do it
properly. By Alan Levine, Maricopa, May, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
Social Climbers
Is social software
the next big thing or just so much hype? The answer is, of
course, "both." In a certain sense, there's nothing really
that new about social software. "Shirky concedes that
software for group interaction has been around for decades.
These include mailing lists, bulletin boards and multi-user
games such as Mud (Multi-User Dungeon)." What's new, I
think, is the capacity for these small, nimble platforms to
begin to interact. So what does that have to do with the
story's suggestion that online community will begin to
parallel offline community? Well, nothing. Because the
story misses the point. By Jack Schofield, The Guardian,
May 8, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
Flexible E-Paper on Its
Way
Everybody is covering, and I may as well
too, since the widespread distribution of ultra-thin
screens that can be bent, twisted and rolled will spell the
end of paper as a useful medium for anything other than
archival storage. By Associated Press, Wired News, May 7,
2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
The Quest For Quality
Interesting
discussion of the difficulties inherent in ensuring quality
in e-learning. It's a daunting task. "He points to a simple
program containing 20 lines of code, including a loop and
three IF statements. He calculated that there were 100
trillion execution paths, which would take a billion years
to test!" Integration poses even greater diffoculties.
"Now, it is impossible to really see how a product performs
until it goes live, when it is running within the learner
support environment and additional services, such as
synchronous and asynchronous tutor support, are being
provided." By Clive Shepherd, Fastrak Consulting, May, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
Passport Flaw Leaves User Info Up For
Grabs
The danger of a centralized authentication
and/or payment system is clearly revealed in this headline.
By Scarlet Pruitt, Security World, May 8, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
Service Offers Extensive Online Music
Library
Heh. What's the one thing that will
prevent people from offering music over P2P networks for
free? Fines? Nope. Prison terms? No. Billion dollar
lawsuits? No way. The chance to make a few cents for each
download? You've got it! "There is no cost for consumers to
join File-Cash. They install an easy-to-use, cross-platform
application provided by File-Cash to help them quickly find
and download their favorite files. Additionally, consumers
will get a percentage of the file price every time another
consumer downloads the file from their shared drive." It
could work - I can't wait to see how this one, um, cashes
out. By Press Release, Business Wire, April 30, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
A Review of Blogging APIs
You
probably won't get into this one unless you are a weblog
systems developer. But if you are such a beast - or if you
are merely interested in the likely future direction of
weblogging - then this review of blogging software
application program interfaces (APIs) will give you a good
indication. For the rest of us: what this means is that
blogging tools are acquiring the capacity to interact. So?
Well suppose you are using an RSS feed reader and you want
to make a comment on a post you've read. An API will let
your feed reader send the comment to the software that
manages the original weblog. This is a space to watch as
there is talk of a meta weblog API that will work for a wide
variety of applications. By Diego Doval, d2r, May 3, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
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