Fortnightly Mailing

The future of the Web - a 2 hour web-cast from/with Tim Berners Lee

Tim Berners Lee gave an 80 minute lecture, followed by about 30 minutes of discussion, in Oxford on 14/3/2006. Definitely worth listening to it, and possibly watching, particularly if you want to get a better understanding of the Semantic Web and the direction  that Berners Lee sees it as taking.

Abstract. The development of Web technology has been an exciting ride, a series of socially motivated technical innovations some languishing, others catching on in a viral way. As each development has suggested many new ones, and much of the original vision is still unfulfilled, there is a lot to do. This talk will discuss new challenges and hopes for weblike systems on the net.

Slides for the talk. 

Links to media files from the talk, hosted by the Oxford Internet Institute:

• Streaming RealPlayer video of the talk which will launch in your external player
• MP4 File [685 MB]
• MP4-LOW File [204 MB]
• MP3 File [70 MB]

Rollyo - DIY cross-domain searching

Some readers will know that if you put "site:XYZwebsite" into Google or Yahoo prior to your search terms, your will get results that are restricted to XYZwebsite. This is useful when the site you want to search has a poor search tool of its own.

With Rollyo you can quickly construct and share a search window for one or more web sites, which when used will provide a Yahoo-based search of those web sites. You can make your search windows public on the Rollyo web site, and you can also generate the code to include a "hand rolled" search window on your own web site.  Here, for example, is a search window which you can use to search:

• all the UK Research Councils' web sites, or
• the web sites of the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, the Joseph Rountree Foundation, and the Department of Constitutional Affairs.

Select Search Engine...ODPM/DCA/JRFUK Research Councils

Powered by Rollyo

Good stuff from Clive Shepherd in "Clive on Learning"

Clive Shepherd is a consultant specialising in the application of technology to education, who co-founded Epic plc with Donald Clark. I reviewed Clive's book - the Learning Object Design Assistant in Fortnightly Mailing Number 30. Shepherd's blog - Clive on Learning - contains regular insights into e-learning, and is worth keeping an eye on.

TechNews from Becta - deserves wider circulation

Thanks to Andy Black for sending me details of the British Educational Communication Technology Agency's seriously underpromoted roughly bi-monthly TechNews, a technology news and analysis service aimed at anyone in the education sector keen to stay informed about technology developments, trends and issues. It cries out for an RSS feed.  March 2006 issue [250 kB PDF].   Sign up page.  Archive.

Open Source mind mapping software - SourceForge's project of the month

On the few occasions I've tried it, I've not got on with mind mapping software like MindManager; but several people I know and trust swear by it.  I would be interested to hear from readers who have used FreeMind, which is said to be an equivalent product to MindManager, and which was the Sourceforge Project of the Month in February 2006.

Elegant browser-based calculator via Marco Barulli

Calcoolate is browser-based calculator, with some clever features, including a particularly useful "history", which keeps a running record of the steps you have taken. Thanks to Marco Barulli for this.

Wordcount - tracking the way we use (the English) language

Try Wordcount ranks nearly 90,000 words in the British National Corpus in order of commonness, in an extremely spare interface. The terms which preoccupy users of Wordcount, based on the number of times each word has been queried by WordCount, can be checked - I would not bother, since the results are sadly predictable - using Wordcount's sister "Querycount". 

Dwelling, a strangely absorbing animation by Hiraki Sawa

Hiraki Sawa is a Japanese sculptor. I watched his short and strangely absorbing short video "Dwelling", in which large numbers of planes fly around Sawa's flat, in the foyer of my local cinema last week. The stills from the video on Sawa's web site (example on the left) only give you a flavour for the work. You can get a better sense of the piece from this review by Gregory Volk. [24/4/2006 - see also this later post about a Sawa exhibition in Colchester Essex.

How to tie your shoes

Australian Ian Fieggen's Shoelace Site is a labour of love, with clear and pleasing diagrams of sixteen different shoelace knots. On the left, a surgeon's knot, and on the right, a fast shoelace knot.