Puzzlepieces – January, 2007

Tories and Liberals trade barbs over environment - it’s funny how things change. When I was in grade 4 (’93-’94), we had some group work on determining political party issues and campaign platforms, or something like that. I vaguely recall that I didn’t really know what issues were big, but I figured stuff like the environment, maybe education. Then I found that it was actually things like healthcare, which I would have never guessed.

Fast forward to 2006, and the Conservative government reduces environmental spending, and pretends that global change doesn’t exist. Now it’s 2007, and all the major parties are trying to out-green each other, or at least pretend that they are. While I’d rather have a non-Conservative party handling things, this will (and is) certainly improve matters.

Toronto Transit Camp - extremely cool idea. I’m not sure if I can attend (nor do I have a lot to contribute at the moment), but I am looking forward to the results.

Quizlet › The End of Flashcards - so this is interesting. I’ve been working a bit on a new project of mine called Quizify, and I was hoping to blog about it for the first time when I get a couple of crucial features done. So today, via del.icio.us, I find out about Quizlet, which has both a similar name (well, fair enough), and to some extent, a similar purpose and methodology.

I definitely think Quizify is and will be sufficiently different from Quizlet, but one thing in particular is that they’ve built out a whole bunch of infrastructure pieces that I haven’t done yet, but have planned or at least thought of, such as a system for sharing these quizes. So I think that having discovered this website, I will probably very slightly alter my course, but overall I’m still committed to the same basic plan. The question is, can I get the quizes built with Quizlet to work with Quizify? It will certainly work the other way ’round.

Wow. Upon closer inspection they have an import mechanism identical to plans that I had and rejected. Their export mechanism is to save it as a file, so that means import into Quizify will be available but not seemless. Very interesting… especially, I’m sure, for those of you who I haven’t spoken to about Quizify and wonder what the heck I’m talking about…

Doing some blog maintenance..

I’ve fixed some .htaccess problems affecting my old (old) blog. I got rid of my outdated and static blogroll, replacing it with one that pulls from Bloglines.

I’m also finally trying out MyBlogLog, so we’ll see how that goes. It seems to be slowing down page loads, but this may only be on the first load? Let me know if you notice slowness of the sidebar. I was prompted to finally do this by hearing more and more about MyBlogLog in the last two months or so, and after registering but not using it yet, noticing my face on a blog I was reading. How cool is that? … so now I’ve put it in. The company (now part of Yahoo!) happens to be headed by Scott Rafer, who I worked with back in ye old 2005 at Feedster.

I’m watching the State of the Union now. After rambling on about how America is great for a minute or so, his very first words were “on september 11…”. omg is about all I can say to that. one of his first sentences: “dictatorships harbour terrorists” - is that generally true?

I also likes how he points fingers at countries. “these guys are bad”, basically. argh, why do I even watch these anymore…

Map sources/GeoHack
- very cool, provides links to mapping sites at specified coordinates; this is a much more comprehensive version of my similar service.

Internet Archive Forums: View Post

In other words: “you have to put a (c) on a document and send it into the Library of Congress” (copyright of Thomas Jefferson from the founding) to a “you get copyright on every scribble and spew whether you want it or not, and, oh, it usually lasts over 100 years” (copyright sponsored by Disney circa 1976) has been ruled not a “change in the contours of copyright” according to Jerome Farris of the 9th Circuit.

NextPath - 13 Things I Wish I Learned in College - yes, I realize that I’m still in “college” (in Canada we call it University ), but there are a few good points in this…

1. Getting to the Point

This is a very, very important skill. I can’t emphasize this enough. It’s not just that it is important, it also seems to be something that few people can do well, when in fact everyone needs to learn how to do this well. The director of my program at university is a great and intelligent guy, but I recently heard him speak, starting with a five-minute disclaimer that he was going to have to be brief on that occasion. Essays and papers for school that give wordcounts (or worse, pagecounts) are hardly improving our ability to get to the point.

2. Making Proper Presentations

This is also very important. Many of my courses involve giving presentations, and this is good. However the assumption is clearly that practice makes perfect… and this is true, once you’ve learned how to do something. The problem is that how to give good and effective presentations is never taught at all, so people give a poor presentation, and then the next time, give another poor presentation. I consider myself a pretty good presenter these days (I definitely wasn’t always), but I’m still learning and know that I always will be.

9. Taking the Initiative

This one is very tricky. University is a set of required courses, which have set durations, set textbooks, and set assignments with set questions at set lengths. There is almost never any room to initiate anything, so the only people who ever do so are the ones who don’t sleep because they’re volunteering for student societies or other volunteer activities.

Via del.icio.us.

Facebook | Home - looks like they’ve added iCalendar exports of individual events and all of your events. Nice. This is new, unless I’m mistaken. Naturally, there’s no mention on the Facebook blog.

Once upon a time (okay, 1995), Ward Cunningham invented WikiWikiWebs. They spread all over, even slowly creeping into the commercial world. In 2001 it was thought that using one would help speed up article-writing for Nupedia. Today they are known as wikis, and that particular one has grown so popular that it is not only known by virtually every internet user, its popularity relative to other specific wikis is so much greater that to almost everyone, Wikipedia = Wiki = Wikipedia.

Wikis are a very useful type of website for many applications. Not all, of course, but many. When thinking up a name for a website using a wiki, a convenient name is “Wiki”+”topic”, e.g. Wikitravel. Of course, doing so presumably makes your website the definitive wiki for that topic, despite the reality of others e.g. World66. [hmn, upon writing this I find that these two examples have now decided to work together… cool]. You can see their relative popularity on Alexa; how much of the greater popularity of Wikitravel do you think can be attributed to its name online?

The strategy these days seems to be (1) pick a topic, make a wiki for it and (2) call it Wiki[topic]. The difference, I think, is that now the naming is very deliberate, rather than convenient. I think it is working very well, too.

Open[Topic] is the other name I wanted to mention. While there are many open sourceish projects around, it seems that people are getting better at marketing and are calling just about everything Open Something. I’m personally a strong advocate of OpenSearch, and I do think that some of its success can be attributed to the name.

Identity systems have been proposed and built for years. Marc Canter will tell you how great things would be today if we’d been supporting the Sxip technology years ago. Today it seems like the momentum behind OpenID is really going forward, and that it may indeed be poised to succeed more than any previous system of its kind. How much of its success do you think can be attributed to the name?

This post was provoked by the mention of Wikileaks as I listen to the radio.

Puzzlepieces - so I think I’ve successfully moved this blog over to it’s new home… everything should look the same. I believe the post IDs have not changed, which is what should happen… except that it’s not because I’ve done it on purpose, it’s because for some reason I seem to have previously hardcoded them, before I learned the best way to make unique IDs for items in Atom feeds. ah well

Geeking with Greg: Findory rides into the sunset Greg and Peter Caputa are the two blogs I read by people who’ve taken the startup route and are very open about everything, which is truly great. Few people are ready to admit when it is time to move on. Congratulations to Greg, I say. While I was never a user of Findory myself, it did have some great ideas and very much influenced the bigger players. I’m sure we’ll see some cool things from Greg in the future.

Image Search Engines || Fagan Finder - virtually all of Fagan Finder has stagnated since 2005 (if not 2002/2003), and I definitely do not have the time to give it the upgrade it deserves. Anyhow, so I decided to update the image search page… taking out all the dead links, etc., and putting in some newer stuff. You’d be surprised how long that takes, even though I didn’t bother adding descriptions for the new additions like I used to.

The image search page has been among the most popular pages on Fagan Finder since it was created in May 2003, and I often get requests for people who want to advertise on the page. So now I have updated it (first time since June 2003), added an ad spot (right now it shows Google Adsense 50% of the time and Adbrite 50% of the time, but I’m still playing with that. For the latter, I have it set that I must approve all ads.

Somehow, despite removing dead and crummy websites, it has gone from 42 search tools and 42 external links to 65 search tools and 42 external links. The page is seriously getting crowded. Anyhow, let me know if you find any bugs or if I’m missing anything.

Dabble DB - continuing with my catching up on things, I just watched Jon Udell’s October screencast of Dabble DB, and it definitely looksl like something I can see myself using. Of course, I went to the website and was surprised to see that it wasn’t free, which goes to show what the default expectations are these days. Of course, these guys have created a great product, and charging for it is entirely appropriate (although the single-user price seems a little high).

One neat thing I noticed, as I will soon(ish) be trying to build the same thing, is the ability to import tables from web pages.