Peter Morville, author of Ambient Findability and Information Architecture, has made his presentation from the IA Summit 2008 available to listen to.
It is fascinating to listen to him speak about search from a developer’s perspective, but what really catches my interest is the collection of Search Patterns on Flickr he has made available. There is so much information within the sets. There are also great little tidbits in his references to different search engines and methods in his presentation.
Cory Ondrejka was the CTO at LindenLab for quite some time (and if I’m not mistaken manifested as the Flying Spaghetti Monster on occasion). You can follow his current activities on his blog.
I’m sure he has given more presentations than he cares to count on the future of virtual worlds, but this little presentation he did at a USC faculty seminar is an interesting summation of the highlights of what we might expect in the near future with virtual worlds. Nothing earth-shattering here, just clear and concise and easy to absorb (note this is episode 7).
(hmm, the system doesn’t want to embed the slides)
After asking our iTeach participants to blog about the FireFox extensions they are trying, I thought I should take my own advice and do the same. Below are the extensions I’m currently using in some capacity:
Advanced Dork: Gives quick access to Google’s Advanced Operators from the context menu
Aging Tabs: Colors tabs based on the last time the page was actively viewed
All-in-One Sidebar: Quickly switch between sidebar panels, view dialog windows such as downloads, extensions, and more in the sidebar, or view source or websites in the sidebar.
Attention Recorder: Record yor browser activity
Better GReader: Enhances Google Reader with Greasemonkey scripts. I use this to add an “add to del.icio.us” script to Google Reader.
Clear Cache Button: Clears your web cache with just one click
Colorzilla: Advanced eyedropper, color picker, and page zoomer
Colour Contrast Analyzer: examines the foreground and background colours of text nodes, and provides a report to see if they are correct according to AERT and WCAG’s luminosity colour contrast algorithm
CSS Viewer: Adds a flyout that displays CSS properties for different objects and elements on a page. Very handy.
del.icio.us Bookmarks: The Official Delicious Add-on seamlessly integrates your browser with del.icio.us, the leading social bookmarking service on the Web
deliGoo: deliGoo searches on the sites, indicated in your del.icio.us bookmarks. With its help you can find the necessary page according to any phrase or word, which it contains
Digg This: Adds Digg This! to the right-click menu, Tools menu, and optionally the toolbar
Diigo Toolbar for Firefox: Social Annotation – a superset of social bookmarking and more
Evernote Web Clipper: provides a toolbar button and context menus to easily add a selection or an entire page to the EverNote Application as a new note. I’m not quite convinced that I like Evernote yet
Firebug: edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page
Foxmarks Bookmark Synchronizer: Synchornize your bookmarks across multiple computers
Gmail Space: Use Gmail as online storage
Google Send to Phone: send text messages to your phone
Greasemonkey: Allows you to customize the way a webpage displays using small bits of JavaScript. Hundreds of scripts, for a wide variety of popular sites, are already available at http://userscripts.org. You can write your own scripts, too. Check out http://wiki.greasespot.net/ to get started.
JavaScript Debugger: a powerful JavaScript debugging environment for Mozilla based browsers
MySocial24×7 Bar: A companion to FriendFeed that allows yout to explore Everyone’s, Your Friend’s, and Your Feed
Operator:leverages microformats and other semantic data that are already available on many web pages to provide new ways to interact with web services
Palette Grabber: Creates a color palette for Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, GIMP, Flash, Fireworks, or OS X based on the current page
PDF Download: lets you know before trying to open it, and then offers you choices such as downloading, opening, or converting it straight to HTML
Poster: for interacting with web services and other web resources that lets you make HTTP requests, set the entity body, and content type. This allows you to interact with web services and inspect the results
powertwitter: allows you to add photos from Flickr and your YouTube videos directly in your tweets. It also unwinds the tiny URL’s
Professor X:let’s you see inside a page’s head without viewing the sourcecode
Resizeable Form Fields: Allows you to resize text areas
ScribeFire: a full-featured blog editor that integrates with your browser and lets you easily post to your blog
Stylish: Customize the look of the application and of websites with Stylish, a user styles manager
Super DragAndGo: Drag a link or anything like a uri (e.g. “abc.com” ), and throw it to anywhere blank on the webpage to open the it in a new tab
Tab Mix Plus: includes such features as duplicating tabs, controlling tab focus, tab clicking options, undo closed tabs and windows, plus much more. It also includes a full-featured session manager
The Coop: keep track of what your friends are doing online and share new and interesting content with them
ViewSourceWith: Extends view source fuctionality
Web Developer: Adds a menu and a toolbar with various web developer tools
WideFox: MOve tabs to the side of the browser for vertical display. Great for browsers that keep may tabs open
Zotero: helps you collect, manage, and cite your research sources
[The full story] Noted without comment.
This afternoon was the “soft opening” of the Rasmuson Gallery on Rhetorica in Second Life. The gallery features work by Alaskan artists who are grantees of the Rasmuson Foundation. [slurl]
Cybergrrl Oh, aka: Aliza Sherman, promoted this event with huge success and grace. I was amazed at the turnout and the interest the event generated. The Rasmuson Foundation released a press release for the event earlier this morning.
The grand opening of the gallery is scheduled for 12 May and will include more artwork and additional information about the artists.
After a serendipitous precession of followed links this afternoon I stumbled across Autodesk’s scanning project on Easter Island. The premise for the project is that officials of Rapa Nui are using the detailed scans of the island to preserve the cultural history of the island while at the same time using the data to understand the how future development of the tourism industry on the island will impact its historical treasures. There is a diary of the project here.
After our exploration into the prospect of scanning mines, and experiencing the actual size of an underground mine during the tour of the Pogo Mine, I have a new appreciation for the scale and effort involved in the Easter Island project.
Behind every university web site is a team (or, heaven forbid, one lone person) striving to make that site the most attractive, accessible, usable resource for the population they serve. Too much? Ok, well we at least want to do the best that we can with the time, inspiration, and administrative feedback we have. This can sometimes lead to a love/hate relationship between the developers and their site(s). Love for the creativity and satisfaction that comes from building a site and the inevitable frustration from the barrage of diverse feedback. Developing for a university can be different in some many ways than working for other clients, most notably because there seem to be many more people who feel they have a stake in what the site looks like, how it works, you get the idea…
Well edu developers, you’re not alone. Take a look at what you’re peers are doing at eduStyle, a gallery or university web sites – leave a comment, vote designs up or down, or just browse.
Better yet, join a community like the University Web Developers network on ning.
Stixy is a handy online space that fills a niche for non-linear, visual thinkers as a place to collaborate on and share ideas.
After signing up for an account you are able to create a new board to which you can post images, notes, and documents – arrange and rearrange things on your board by clicking and dragging them around. It is also possible to invite people to participate on your board. All they need is an email address to receive your invitation.
At work I’ve been using a board to collect thoughts, links, and images for the next time I have to talk about Second Life. You can view the board here.
As a space, Stixy seems well suited for storytelling, group work, or process writing. I’m curious to hear if anyone has ever used it in their class.
As I was searching for supplementary material for the Mongolian language class we are working on, I came across some videos on YouTube of Mongolian throat singing. I had heard the sound before, but never realized it was made by singing. I had always assumed it was an instrument similar to a flute. Simply amazing!
For your cultural edification:
This link is a better example of the singing than the video below, but doesn’t allow embedding: http://youtube.com/watch?v=DY1pcEtHI_w
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