I look forward to the starting up of the Buckland/Larson/Lynch seminar next week.

I’m pleased to see the word “mash-up” used in an article about a Berkeley website: 01.16.2008 - New life for the New Deal:

“I realized I couldn’t do it myself,” Brechin says. “It had to be people all over California working collaboratively,” in an echo of the New Deal itself. He turned to the campus’s Institute for Research on Labor and Employment and the California Studies Center, which teamed up to take over the project’s website. Designed and managed by volunteers, the site had been built around a “mash-up” - a database-driven system that could display research on New Deal sites on a dynamically created map — created by Jay McCauley, a retired Silicon Valley software-engineering director.

Time to check out the mashup in question: Living New Deal Project

I’m excited that Aaron Schwarz has set up (theinfo):

This is a site for large data sets and the people who love them: the scrapers and crawlers who collect them, the academics and geeks who process them, the designers and artists who visualize them. It’s a place where they can exchange tips and tricks, develop and share tools together, and begin to integrate their particular projects.

I’m going to work in materials from Flickr: The Commons when I come back to building the ScholarsBox. Such good news — having photos from the Library of Congress hosted at Flickr makes them much more reusable than when the photos sat at LC alone. Steve

Check out smARThistory.org — the multimedia art history book: Europe:

This web-booksite is being developed by Beth Harris and Steven Zucker as a dynamic enhancement (or even substitute) for the static traditional art history textbook. By using the strengths of podcasting, video, and other web 2.o technologies, we think we can better meet the needs of students, faculty, and the interested public. Once this site is better established, we intend to invite the user community to add and edit content.

Commercial Gigapan is a fancy add-on to a digital camera that allows take a series of photos that can be stitched into a high-resolution panorama. I applied to be part of the beta program, bu haven’t heard yet whether I’ve been accepted into it. Will I have the privilege of paying $279 for a prototype?

Update: I just got an email stating that the program had received an overwhelming number of applications and that everyone who had applied will hear of his status in the next few weeks.

Experimenting with picnik

Originally uploaded by Raymond Yee

Picnik, the web-based photo editor, encourages me to experiment with my Flickr photos by its tight integration with Flickr. I can view my Flickr photos, edit any given one, and then send it back to Flickr — all within Picnik. (Compare this photo to the original.)

I’m giving a talk on Wednesday at the School of Information Sciences, University of Pittsburgh: SWeb Mashups, Recombinatory Data and the Academy:

Yee will examine how, with relatively little effort, individuals are recombining digital content from the Web to create sophisticated mashups. The mashups often provide entirely new understandings of that content. This talk will survey the world of mashups, how they are created, how people learn to make them — and specifically, the implications of recombinatory data and services for the university.

There’s a growing body of academic research around tagging. I’ll think more deeply about this research when I sit down to design software that makes use of tagging for discovery, etc.) For example, The Social Structure of Tagging Internet Video on del.icio.us:

Since the system:media:video tag is automatically attached to bookmarks, we are able to access a stream of content whose characteristics are relatively independent from the users’ tagging behavior. Otherwise it is very difficult to obtain a data sample that is not biased in some way toward particular users, tags or content. Consequently, we our focus is not on the behaviors of specific users. However, since we are interested describing large-scale effects we will not worry about this issue here.

When I get seriously into studying machine learning, I’ll consult the following resources:

• Computer Science 294: Practical Machine Learning

• UC Berkeley Webcasts Video and Podcasts: Machine Learning Workshop (2 days)

As I write my book, I find the article ONLamp.com: Why Do People Write Free Documentation? Results of a Survey quite interesting. The book isn’t exactly “free documentation” although I’m putting my book online for free downloading.

Besides reading a book, I find it helpful to hear the author talk about his or her book. Hence I recommend IT Conversations: Leonard Richardson, Sam Ruby to those reading Richardson and Ruby’s Restful Web Services.

Details on using easy_install on Python: Python Cheese Shop : Browse is a list of the high level categories in the repository of Python packages. See also Python Cheese Shop : Home: “The Python Cheese Shop is a repository of software for the Python programming language. There are currently 2455 packages here.”

‘omg my mom joined facebook!!’ - New York Times captures some of my own experiences on Facebook and might make a good piece for my Building Next Generation Web Applications course:

So last week I joined Facebook, the social network for students that opened its doors last fall to anyone with an e-mail address. The decision not only doubled its active membership to 24 million (more than 50 percent of whom are not students), but it also made it possible for parents like me to peek at our children in their online lair.

I’m glad to hear that the current Youtube API will evolve on top the Google GData API: YouTube API Blog: The Future

I didn’t know about the Ruby-based API to Sketchup: SketchUp Ruby - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

I follow EveryBlock with great interest. (See also Knight Foundation grant Holovaty.com — and Poynter Online - E-Media Tidbits, which has more preliminary details about EveryBlock.)

It is important to remember that JavaScript code is case sensitive. I couldn’t get an event handler to fire because I wrote alink.onClick and not the correct alink.onclick

With too many things on my plate right now, I decided not to attend next week’s Google Developer Day 2007 - Mountain View. One can, however, follow the sessions as they are broadcast: Google Developer Day 2007 - Mountain View - Sessions . Given what I just read in the Times about Google’s intense recruiting efforts, I wouldn’t doubt that many (Google employees and would-be employees) will show up in hopes of a bright future for Google.

Over the summer, I hope to take a closer look at all the wonderful work contained in the collection of Master’s Final Projects: 2007.

I don’t think that there is an official API for Google Reader although Niall Kennedy documened an unofficial Google Reader API a while back.

Shaking up tech publishing (Loud Thinking) is an interesting thread on the economics and incentive structures behind writing a computer book (such as what I’m doing right now!)

My Dreamhost-hosted sites are down again: DreamHost Status » Blog Archive » Spacey filer issues. Time to move? But where to go?

If I want to add SSL access to any of the domains I host on dreamhost.com, I will need a unique IP address, which costs an extra $4/month . Some threads on this topic: Re: Unique ip?

Since I use Wordpress to display code, I’d dearly like to get the bug #3066 (backslash disappears in <pre>) fixed.

I’m glad to see the emergence of APIs in the scholarly/library realm: OpenDOAR - About OpenDOAR - Directory of Open Access Repositories and the corresponding OpenDOAR - Application Programmers’ Interface (API)

I’d like to learn how to write a FireFox toolbar. Born Geek » Firefox Toolbar Tutorial is a tutorial that might help:

This tutorial explains how to create a toolbar extension for the Firefox web browser (specifically for version 1.5 and later). It provides an overview of how extensions are developed, the tools required to create an extension, and details on how toolbars are created. Please note that this tutorial is lengthy; I recommend spending time with it over the course of a few days (it makes for a good weekend read).

The online Barnes and Noble stor (barnesandnoble.com) uses ISBN-13 in the links to books. (e.g., RESTful Web Services) Amazon.com uses ISBN-10. Something to keep in mind to et LibraryLookup to work for Barnes and Noble.

Because I really dig Python, I perk up with any mention of free (?) Plone hosting, such as Objectis - Objectis Community

I’m adding Digital History Hacks to my list of weblogs to follow on the strength the author (William J. Turkel) ’s being a historian working in “digital history” and writing about web spidering and scraping. To wit, Digital History Hacks: Teaching Young Historians to Search, Spider and Scrape:

To get the most out of the web, however, it is crucial that we begin to teach history students the rudiments of web programming. Spidering, for example, is the (automated) process of visiting a webpage, creating an index and a list of links to further pages, and then following each of those in turn and doing the same thing. Whenever we follow the citations in a footnote to another source, and then begin to read its footnotes, we are doing a kind of spidering. By teaching students how to implement this process on the computer we will not only teach them a crucial skill, we will make them more aware of the technologies that have long underlain the historian’s craft. Scraping refers to the process of mechanically extracting information from sources (like webpages) that are intended to be read by people rather than machines. Because computers don’t understand text in the way that people do, scraping has to rely on the form of the text to extract information, rather than the meaning. As a result, scrapers are ‘brittle’: if the form changes, the scraper breaks. For this reason, it is important for historians to be able to create their own tools, rather than using the tools created by others, and this, again, means that it is necessary to learn some rudimentary web programming.