TableWiki - this is an idea I had that I e-mailed to
Sunir Shah. I would have blogged it first, but
Blogger was in the process of moving all blogs to their new system. Anyhow, I love the idea of wikis. I find, however, that
I often want to work with large tables, which is by no means easy using a wiki. In the example I just linked to, on
Wiktionary, I wrote the table in HTML. Something more
WYSIWYG-like is needed so people who do not know HTML can participate. Even for those who do, navigating through the code of large tables is tedious and annoying. The comments (well, one) so far seem promising.
Popular Science | Microcrystalline in 30 Seconds - during my time off the Internet, I read the new issue of Popular Science. I thought the article on using liquid nitrogen to make ice cream in 30 seconds was neat, and mentioned it to a couple of people. Back online, should I be surprised to find it on
Blogdex?
Anonymous Source on MSNBot - it is no secret that Microsoft wants their search engine to be tops; (
many, many articles recently around May. It looked like they could make it or buy it. As to buying it, the choices were really
Yahoo!,
Google,
Overture,
LookSmart (and WiseNut) and
Ask Jeeves (and Teoma). Yahoo is huge, so I doubted that, and also that Google would sell out. This link confirms the latter. It has been known more recently that Microsoft opted for the “make” route, which I remarked on
on May 28. Naturally if Microsoft is making their own search engine, they will need to test out a crawler; hence the MSNBot which seems to be a
hot topic now.
I’m back, sortof. I probably won’t be on the net much for the next few days, but I’m not not using it any more. Tons of e-mail to read, sites to visit, etc. And I haven’t even opened up my newsreader. I doubt I will ever get around to reading everything I missed; that would partially defeat the point of an Internt holiday anyway. For those reading this in RSS form, I plan on eventually fixing the bug on entries that don’t begin with a link.
The University of Waterloo - that’s where I decided I’m going next year, into the Science and Business (co-op) program; details are
somewhere on this page. It is very relieving to have made the choice.
Anyhow, the purpose of this blog post is to say that I’m going offline, until I finish my first two exams around the middle/end of next week. So no e-mail, news reader, nothing other than during computer class. See y’all then.
Quest of the GypsyBlogger - I tried to post a comment on this blog entry, but I just got an error. So I decided to post it here instead; here’s what I would have commented:
I am commenting on your blog post to bring your attention to this blog post, and also my commenting on that post where I reference my comments on two other blog posts on different blogs, one of which is a meta blog, and also the fact that I record my commenting.
I'll also blog this post on my regular (non-comment) blog.
The style I wrote in above I will attribute to Marc Canter, who commented on a blog post of mine about me commenting about Mikel Maron's comments about my blog and the fact that I record my commenting.
As the interest in this concept seems to be growing I am tempted to start a Topic Exchange channel and/or Social Software Alliance wiki page about this. We'll see.
Oh, and I posted this to the
Social Software channel of the Topic Exchange.
I know there are
skipHours and skipDays elements for RSS, but I would like to see more effort client-side. Rather than try to set all my different RSS feeds to update rougly as frequently as they do, it would be nice if my aggregator would look at a feed’s past update frequency and times, and figure that out itself. Search engines try to do that.
In fairly related news, I am so sick of the debate between RDF and non-RDF RSS. Why can’t everyone just support everything, and let individuals choose which version(s) to produce and/or consume? This message is directed at lots of people, not just
Dave.
Dave’s Quick Search Taskbar Toolbar Deskbar - I have known about this toolbar for a long time, but admittedly never used it. What I
didn’t know was that it is open source, and being
developed on SourceForge. I found out about it because someone
mentioned Fagan Finder on the mailing list. I haven’t really used SourceForge before, but it looks like I will be delving into it a bit. There must be ways for Fagan Finder and the toolbar to help each other out.
The Buzz Goes ... Relative -
Waypath has the neat ability to graph mentions of words (or any queries), by days or by weeks. Upon my suggestion, there are now both relative and absolute versions, the former being the default. If you’re looking for more graphs,
Syndic8 does keyword graphs too, and
Blogosphere.us graphs new links to a page. If you know of other tools like these, let me know.
InfoFlow - nice graphic showing the five big American media companies and what they own. Via
Blogdex.
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