Four quick links 19th May 2009
[Nat Torkington on the O'Reilly blog regularly posts 'Four Quick Links' - a format that I have always liked - particularly as it would allow me to post a bit more often and share the many things I add to my shared items in Google Reader. Hopefully Nat won't mind me pinching his format!]
Flickr CC Attribution Helper Greasemonkey Script
http://cogdogblog.com/2009/05/17/flickr-cc-attribution-helper/
Alan Levine works for the New Media Consortium in the US (publishers of the Horizon Report amongst other interesting stuff). He has built a hugely useful tool for those of us who use the combination of Flickr and Creative Commons to brighten up our blogs but have to fiddle with sorting out the attribution details. Equally useful (for me anyway) is that he has given me a format for my attributions! I wonder if I could make this work for using in my Keynote/Powerpoint presentations?
On Aardvark Research
http://blog.vark.com/?p=74
Here at Jiva we are pretty interested in the work Aardvark are doing and have enjoyed having a play with it since we got our invites. This blog post is a really interesting insight into the process they have been through as far as using different research techniques in the development of their app. I’m not sure we ever think of it in such a formal manner but our research work broadly falls into the same three categories.
On Semantic Web: What it is, and what it will never be
http://mashable.com/2009/05/14/semantic-web/
A post on Mashable from Stan Schroeder that actually has little to do with the wider semantic web but does nicely articulate some of the problems with Wolfram Alpha and why its much vaunted ability for users to ask natural language queries means very little when you can get better results with simple queries in Google.
Jump into the stream
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/05/17/jump-into-the-stream/
Post from Eric Schonfeld on Techcruch (for what its worth I only really read Schonfeld now on Techcrunch, well apart from when Arrington kicks up some kind of furore!) This post is essentially a justification for the investment and hype around the concept of realtime streams. Its interesting stuff and their does certainly seem to have been a shift towards this concept in recent months. More and more sites seem to resemble a Twitter/Friendfeed/Facebook hybrid and it’ll be interesting to see if this continues.