mpasiewicz's blog

The folks at Opera have created a new search engine, the Metadata Analysis and Mining Application (MAMA). This tool has produced some interesting stats about the structure of the web and is somewhat akin to the pet project I've been working on ... not just akin to it, but might outright put it to shame. I'd encourage you take a peak at Brain Wilson's early findings ... and I LOVE the following note from his introduction.

What follows is not as informal and witty as a blog nor as dry and formal as a research paper - it lies somewhere in between. Those expecting rigorous academia will forgive the occasional humorous turns of phrase or moments where personal observations and experience intrude - I try to limit it to places where they seem useful or interesting. For blog junkies, this will grow into a long, multi-part saga (hopefully) worthy of a company from Scandinavia.

http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/mama/

I just ran across an interesting article about Abilene Christian University's iPhone Program. 650 freshmen with GPS devices. Interesting. See also this story about a university requiring GPS support of all students.

I was carousing around the site earlier today and ran across a really fun job posting. Check it out!
http://www.educause.edu/JobOpportunities/UniversityEthicalHackerPenetra/126930

We quitely relaunched a new version of our old Peer Directory Service earlier this year and exteneded it an a variety of different ways. Several weeks ago, we added another new feature ... the ability to browse by events you've attended. If you haven't stumbled across it recently, you might consider giving it a whirl. Just before I started this message, there were almost 3,000 people that opted to make their profile available in the new system. The annual conference is a big event, but hopefully this will prove an interesting way to get a jump start on the face-to-face networking you'll be doing in Orlando. Now, we just need to get more folks tagging themselves! Common now ... aren't there more people interested in open source?

http://www.educause.edu/Community/Browse/People/575

The Chronicle of Higher Education has a great, but a regrettably very short podcast about a new book from Hal Abelson and Harry Lewis. Highly recommended, but left me wanting for more.

http://chronicle.com/media/audio/v54/i49/abelson_lewis/

It seems the authors are also operating a blog about topics relevant to the book :)
http://www.bitsbook.com/blog/

No, this article isn't about SMS or cloud computing ... its about text, curiosity and tag clouds. On some level that seems a bit passé ... tag clouds again? Isn't that old news? Yes, sure, but Catherine Howell's recent commentary on my little home page experiment left me wondering what else might be gleaned from more experimentation on tag clouds as a means of visualizing bodies of text (as compared to tags about text). So, once again, I decided to invest some more time on a not so little side project. I'm not sure if its as interesting this time around, but I thought I'd go ahead and share my results (and highlight the process that went into creating them).

The university home page search I created over the weekend was interesting from a number of perspectives, but perhaps one of the most interesting insights to be gleaned from it involves the depth to with Google has entangled itself with higher education's use of the web. Almost 70% of those sites I captured data from mention Google somewhere in the source of their home page. Meanwhile, more than half of them appear to use Google Analytics. Of course, this is just home page data ... a whole range of sub sites exist within the context of a university's web presence and their authorship, governance and oversight are often highly distributed. One might imagine many more touchpoints interspersed throughout the vast spectrum of web pages hosted by a university. I'd love to get empirical data on this (and other use cases) from a broader, deeper sample ... and who knows, maybe I'll find the time.

Building on my work here, I was wondering what it might look like to create a tag cloud from the text of university home pages. Nothing especially interesting to report from it ... just the usual suspects. Nonetheless, I thought I'd go ahead and share it. 'Guess it might be interesting to compare to a future snapshot.

Ever wonder if any other universities are using jquery or or scriptaculous? Ever wanted to get a feel for how many universities mention blogs or podcasts on their home page? Ever wanted easy access the the home pages of 1,831 universities? I've been working on a pet project and wanted to share what I've worked up this far. Take a peak at the links above, carouse around, and let me know what you think.

I kicked off my morning with a ho-hum daily web surfing ritual and a stout cuppajoe, but before the caffeine kicked in, I perked up a bit when I noticed that All Things Digital had a big front and center notice about their use of cookies. They even provided information about opting out.

Very interesting. Is this a sign of things to come? In an era of where widgets, mashups, viral video and analytic services are invading the web, should more disclosure be occurring? Should we be doing more to educate and inform those who look to our sites for news and information?

Might we see library web sites that enrich their sites with data from services like Amazon or Syndetic Solutions include such notices?

EFF recently blogged about the way they're using embedded video and steps that they've taken to protect the privacy of users visiting their pages. They've created a script that prevents embeded sources from automatically downloading when you visit a page. In effect, they've created a system that offers the ability to opt-in to view the embedded media, rather that force feeding content from third parties (and associated usage tracking) into the attention stream of their audience. This seems like an important step towards elevating thought and providing protective measures aimed at third party sources (whether that mean viral video, widgets, maps, images or mashups of various web services).

They've implemented these protection measures using a Drupal module and they'll be contributing this back to the community!

I just discovered a series of interesting blog entries from Danny Weitzner, W3C Technology and Society Policy Director and co-director of MIT CSAIL. These aren't especially new links, but I thought they might be worth relaying ...

Reciprocal Privacy for the Social Web - provides an introduction for a proposal "to establish a reasonable privacy balance in social networking environment" using FOAF. Also of interest is a link from Shahan Khatchadourian describing the use of FOAF and OpenID to establish trust/prevent spam. Apparently the solution could be available from Ryan Lee as a Drupal module? In some ways, this sounds similar to the Social Network Portability concept mentioned by Stephen Downes.

Wow, this is an interesting move. Above and beyond the potential for unintended side-effects, I wonder what kind of interesting ways they'll be able to leverage this in the classroom and beyond.

http://www.engadgetmobile.com/2007/12/04/montclair-state-mandates-use-of-gps-enabled-phones/

I've been thinking a lot about comparisons these days and I've long hoped to write something interesting about the following concepts and technologies, but I've never carved out the time.

• OAI-PMH and RSS
• Semantic Web and Microformats
• Shibboleth and OpenID
• Cyberinfrastructure and Web 2.0

I've given up any aspirations of writing something meaningful before the start of 2008, but I thought some observations might be interesting to jot down and share with the community. I guess I'll start with Cyberinfrastructure and Web 2.0

I think the two share many similar properties. In each case, the terms were coined by influential players in the field, but the definitions seem to shrink or expand based on who you talk to. In both cases, the introduction of the terms have served as a catalyst of sorts that seemed to have sharpened interest and discussion in a range of activities. In both cases, the underlying technologies supporting the phenomena existed before the terms were coined.

NPR has a two part series about online education. The only thing that might be lost in the commentary is the motives behind the pursuit of online learning among schools that have begun offering it.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=16638700

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=16709807

An interesting supplement to these recordings might include an interview with Robert Mendenhall at this year's EDUCAUSE Annual Event.