OLDaily
By Stephen Downes
May 18, 2004

Welcome from Embrun
NRC is taking most of its web services offline in just a few minutes (so my web site may be unavailable this evening until tomorrow morning), so I have to rush. I'm still in Embrun on vacation, visting my family. If you are wondering about my high school reunion, well, it was disappointing - people from every year from the last 50 years attended, with relatively few from any given class (and in my case, one other person from my class). And it was funny - looking through the memorabilia, my footprint at the high school is effectively zero. Not that I wasn't active - I was on the debating team, Reach for the Top, model parliament, soccer team, and more - heck, I won public speaking three years in a row - but none of this seems to have made its way into the records. Nope, just football, cheering, and 'head boy / head girl'. Oh well. By Stephen Downes, Stephen's Web, May 18, 2004 [Refer][Research][Reflect]

inDiscover RSS
Sometimes when you ask, you receive. inDiscover, covered here a few days ago, now has 4 different types of RSS feeds: newest artists, newest songs, songs for a artist and favorites. There will also be a feed for the top 10 in all genres against all attributes. Nice addition. Several other people have written to me about various recommender systems; I will be covering these and related matters next week. By Sean McGrath, inDiscover, May 18, 2004 [Refer][Research][Reflect]

Paypal No Friend of FreeNet
On the one hand you could say that a private company like PayPal should be free to conduct business with whomever it chooses, and you would be right. But on the other hand, when control of the financial infrastructure is used for political purposes, that's another thing. How would you react if the banking system refused to clear your cheques because you were a member of Greenpeace? Some troubling issues are raised here with PayPal's actions. By blacklily8, Kairosnews, May 18, 2004 [Refer][Research][Reflect]

ALOHA 2
Scott Leslie writes, "New site for the release of Aloha II, the reworked metadata editor/content packager from the University of Calgary, which is now based on the RELOAD tool from the U.K. The version available right now is an alpha release - no news on their news page (and no RSS feed!) about when to expect beta or gold releases, but hopefully things are moving along swimmingly." By Various Authors, Netera, May 18, 2004 [Refer][Research][Reflect]

Writing for Google
This is an interesting item because it captures the flavour of writing content for an unknown audience. Typically, articles are written in the context of a certain journal - or in our field, for a certain course. But when harvested by Google, it is not clear who will read the article or how it will be used. So the article must be written with this in mind - it must be reusable. Sound familiar? By John Gruber, Daring Fireball, May 5, 2004 [Refer][Research][Reflect]

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Copyright © 2003 Stephen Downes
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