Stephen's Web

OLDaily

by Stephen Downes
August 21, 2007

Social Network Portability
My own contribution to some of the discussion of social network portability. I outline three major needs: first, social network portability itself, that is, a way to export lists of OpenIDs from social networks, to manipulate those lists, and then to import them into new social networks; second, a way to facilitate attribute exchange, that is, to describe myself and to describe other people; and third, network traversal functions. Stephen Downes, Half an Hour August 21, 2007 [Link] [Tags: Networks] [Comment]

Mugshot
This is a new site from red Hat that allows you to "Show updates from all your sites on one page, get live updates from friends [and to] share content from MySpace, YouTube, Facebook, Flickr, blogs and more." I think I made an account here a while back; I don't recall writing about it. Or maybe not; the YouTube account ('Downes') isn't mine. Maybe it made it for me? Anyhow, here's my Mugshot page. Related: code on openfriendformat.com that takes your contact data from networks like Digg and Del.icio.us and creates FOF files out of it. Example. Why isn't Facebook on the list? because Facebook doesn't share. See also Phillip Pearson on decentralized social networking. And on the idea of pulling together your different social networks under one OpenID, see ClaimID. "On your claimID page, you can create a profile of all the sites that comprise your identity... to 'claim' those pages - allowing you to easily prove ownership of things like your blog or Last.fm profile." Various Authors, Website August 21, 2007 [Link] [Tags: Video, YouTube, Flickr, Web Logs] [Comment]

The Pathetic Fallacy of RDF
"In the arts," argue the authors, "the pathetic fallacy is the act of ascribing human feelings to inanimate objects." The same sort of fallacy is informing internet data representations. "On the semantic web... researchers are (perhaps subconsciously) allowing the computer's internal representation of data to influence the way their tools present information to users." Specifically, the authors decrie the overuse of the "Big Fat Graph (BFG)." Note the terminology again: "By graph, we mean representations with nodes [ie., entities] and edges [ie., links] to model the relationships within the space represented." Anyhow, I don't think the authors' alternative visualizations are anything worth writing home about - but the point is well taken, that the BFG is over-used and not particularly useful. David Karger and mc schraefel, SWUI06 August 21, 2007 [Link] [Tags: Semantic Web, Research] [Comment]

eXe 1.0
eXe 1.0 has launched. eXe is "an Open Source authoring application to assist teachers and academics in the publishing of web content without the need to become proficient in HTML or XML markup. eXe can export content as self-contained web pages or as SCORM 1.2 or IMS Content Packages." See also the Pedagogy of the Compressed blog. Helena, eXe Blog August 21, 2007 [Link] [Tags: Online Learning, Books, IMS Project, SCORM, Academia, XML, Web Logs, Metadata] [Comment]

How Software Is Built - Open Source and Closed Source
"How is software built in the real world? How are open source and closed source development projects different? How are they the same? How do companies leverage different development styles and ecosystems?" Alfred Thompson suggests readers look at the How Software is Built blog at Microsoft containing mostly interviews with leading software developers. He also links to a number of sites "regarding Microsoft's ongoing dialoge with the open source community." Alfred Thompson, Computer Science Teacher August 21, 2007 [Link] [Tags: Open Source, Project Based Learning, Microsoft, Web Logs] [Comment]

Enterprise 2.0 - Social Networking Within the Firewall
Good slide show by Scott Gavin that I'm going to share with my own colleagues here at NRC (once my email is working again). I have depicted this shift in internal communications as the shift from 'document driven management' (relying on things like Word documents and Excel spreadshets) to 'data driven management' (where people use simple Web 2.0 interfaces to report progress and let the software take care of the reporting, etc.). See also this slide show in a similar vein. Rory Chalcraft, Learn-Learn-Learn August 21, 2007 [Link] [Tags: Web 2.0] [Comment]

 

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