Fortnightly Mailing

Educause software patents resource centre

Educause has a US-oriented Patent Resource Centre which I came across via Michael Feldstein's e-Literate. The Resource Centre links to a wide range of mostly US-oriented resources, including the regularly amended wikipedia page on software patents, which has helpful links that differentiate nicely between US and UK patent law.

Ecolanguage - combining ideas from economics and from ecology in the same animated diagrams

Lee Arnold sent me a link to 13 YouTube videos of presentations made using "Ecolanguage", an  animated graphic language that provides a standard way of combining economics and ecology in the same image, using 25 symbols, organised into 6 categories. Below is a video that explains the language:

OpenID: Decentralised Single Sign-on for the Web' - Ariadne article by Andy Powell and David Recordon

This reasonably un-technical overview of OpenID from the April issue of Ariadne, by Andy Powell (Head of Development at the Eduserv Foundation) and David Recordon (Advanced Products and Research Group at VeriSign), is worth reading in full. It includes screen-shots of an OpenID authentication, and plenty of references, and it also touches on the "phishing" security issue I mentioned a couple of weeks ago.

Firebug - a useful add-on for Firefox

Firebug is an add-on for the Firefox browser. It takes a few seconds to install and once installed you can easily switch it on an off. When switched on, Firebug puts several tools at your disposal. You can, for example, look at the HTML of the page you are viewing, or check what files a particular page consists of, and how long each took to download. You can use it to examine the structure of a web page, understand how its tables are organised, and look in detail at any cascading style sheet the page might use; and by pointing to a particular part of a web page you can review the code that makes the page function.

Thanks to Dick Moore for sending me details.

The externalisation of meaning. "Google TechTalk" by David Weinberger about "Everything in miscellaneous".

Below is the starting point for a 50 minute talk, followed by 10 minutes of questions, given at Google on 10/5/2007 by David Weinberger. I'll know in while if the talk is a précis of Weinberger's  just-published book Everything is Miscellaneous. The central point of the talk is that there is now no one right way of ordering the world; furthermore, that whereas physical things (books, stuffed animals, tools, CDs, journal articles) have to be put somewhere logical - both in space and in a physical catalogue - so that you can find either them or the record associated with them, this is not the case for digital things, which can be anywhere, and whose classification is much less relevant, provided you can search for and find them.  The talk is an exploration of the changes that flow from this: to cut a long story short and to cruelly oversimplify, Weinberger's thesis is that the fundamental change that is taking place is the "externalisation of meaning", by which he means that:

1. it is now simpler for citizens to organise or search digital things as they themselves decide, rather than for them to be classified for them;
2. the links between digital things, and the tags and other attributes that people give them create a rich layer of meaning that can be drawn upon by others;
3. the difference between data and meta-data is disappearing (except the the extent that meta-data is "what you know", and data is "what you are looking for";
4. through Wikipedia and blogs and similar there is an increasingly public negotiation of knowledge, in which experts are decreasingly the arbiters of authority.

See also Nothing is miscellaneous, about the Hawley Collection of tools in Sheffield.

The Ghost In The Browser - Analysis of Web-based Malware

Scary, recently published, dense, 9 page paper [0.5 MB PDF] by Niels Provos, Dean McNamee, Panayiotis Mavrommatis, Ke Wang, and Nagendra Modadugu of Google. BBC report. Abstract:

"As more users are connected to the Internet and conduct their daily activities electronically, computer users have become the target of an underground economy that infects hosts with malware or adware for financial gain. Unfortunately, even a single visit to an infected web site enables the attacker to detect vulnerabilities in the user’s applications and force the download a multitude of malware binaries. Frequently, this malware allows the adversary to gain full control of the compromised systems leading to the ex-filtration of sensitive information or installation of utilities that facilitate remote control of the host. We believe that such behavior is similar to our traditional understanding of botnets. However, the main difference is that web-based malware infections are pull-based and that the resulting command feedback loop is looser. To characterize the nature of this rising thread, we identify the four prevalent mechanisms used to inject malicious content on popular web sites: web server security, user contributed content, advertising and third-party widgets. For each of these areas, we present examples of abuse found on the Internet. Our aim is to present the state of malware on the Web and emphasize the importance of this rising threat."

WizIQ: brokering contact between learners who want to pay for on-line tuition and teachers who want to be paid to provide it

WizIQ caught my eye via Clive Shepherd's web log. It is a North Carolina based service for brokering contact between learners who want to pay for on-line tuition and teachers who want to be paid to  provide it, with, in addition, a web-based collaboration environment for each to use. WizIQ appears to be a spin-off from, or part of a business called Sikhya Solutions LLC, based in Raleigh in the US, and Chandigarh in India. (Sikhya is also the business behind Authorgen, the Flash-based simultaneous collaboration environment used by WizIQ.) The business model behind WizIQ is obscure.

Web-based learning communities - a "Lite Paper" from Epic plc

Diagram originally from the ADL Initiative

Brighton-based elearning company Epic has published a pleasing-on-the-eye 8 page overview [650 kB PDF], aimed at business readers, summarising different approaches for setting up Web-based learning communities, and commenting on options. It was good to be reminded of that Heath-Robinson transmission diagram (above) originally published by the US Department of Defence's Advanced Distributed Learning Initiative.  (Reference via that the ever-informative Marchmont Observatory's Web Flash.)

espida - helping you make a business case when there are no immediate financial benefits

Today I heard a brief and fairly convincing overview about "espida" by James Currall of Glasgow University about the espida Project, a recently completed JISC project. According to James, and the espida web site, espida provides a method to "make business cases for proposals that may not necessarily offer immediate financial benefit to an organisation, but rather bring benefit in more intangible spheres". Originally espida was developed to be used within the area of digital resource management; but it has potential for far wider application (decision making, performance measurement, change management), to such an extent that JISC is now requiring the use of espida by bidders in some of its current project calls.

David Weinberger interview with Cory Doctorow

Cory Doctorow's acidly written 2001 Metacrap: Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia, is worth revisiting. The seven straw men being:

1. People lie
2. People are lazy
3. People are stupid
4. Mission: Impossible - know thyself
5. Schemas aren't neutral
6. Metrics influence results
7. There's more than one way to describe something

For an update I came across this 1/5/2007 interview with Corry Doctorow by David Weinberger, whose newly published book Everything is Miscellaneous I am reading. There is a full transcript of the interview available from the URL. The section in the interview on implicit metadata is interesting. Here is an excerpt:

"I think that the big difference between Google's implicit inspection of the Internet structure and a folksonomy is that Google only works well when you are implicit.  As soon as you get explicit with Google, it starts to break.  So, search engine optimizers, or link spammers, link farmers, Google bombers, and so on, they all seek to subvert Google by explicitly creating links for Google to find and index.  It's really only the people who naively create links between pages without thinking whether or not Google will index them that produce useful material for Google.  Google goes to some lengths to try and figure out who's making links for its benefit and throw those links away so that it's only examining those accidental links."