This book is just chock full of goodness. Not only does the Book of CSS3 by Peter Gasston provide a thoughtful introduction to the latest and greatest power of CSS3 (the history and background of which is covered superbly), it offers clear, thorough and well illustrated examples built on tips, tricks and real world experience.

This book is aimed at those with some experience with CSS in general but does not demand an in-depth knowledge. It jumps in and demonstrates by doing and provides a logical path through the various facets of CSS3.

The material covered in the book is extensive and thorough and moves with a logical progression allowing this (unlike some more reference oriented pieces) to be passed through linearly. It also contains an elabourative table of contents retaining its use as a solid reference source.

The section on the Future of CSS is of particular note, wherein the author explores some of the emerging directions and areas of interest for the next go around of CSS even including a short discussion of how haptics may well be integrated into CSS. Quite fascinating and certainly new to me.

Gasston provides a useful browser compatibility cart with extensive granularity detailing where CSS3 currently works and where web developers may run into cross-browser issues. This is a great reference tool. Additionally extensive links are provided to online resources that will provide the most current information about compatibility and experience with CSS3.

I would highly recommend this volume for those working beyond off the shelf web tools and desiring to harnessing the new abilities present in CSS3.

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I was intrigued by an offhand reference to a ‘neat new service’ and consequently poked into infostripe. It’s a consolidated touchpoint for sharing your social media participation and identities in a compact and dynamic manner. Similar to some extent to about.me, it draws upon a certain amount of your digital narcissism. The biggest difference between about.me and infostripe appears to be in the flavour: about.me takes a very aesthetic-centred approach, where infostripe is deeply rich in content and concise presentation. About.me demands more manual creation of the information used to describe you, where infostripe attempts to automate this process by building a profile based on what you are contributing to the social mediashpere.

One of things that immediately strikes is that much in the way that RSS and RSS readers distanced readers from the author’s blog, infostripe is extracting a wider collection of your digital breadcrumbs and flowing them into a uniform presentation that allows the browser to avoid having to trawl the net for your activity. All of this pushes the bounds of privacy and the boundary between our private and public worlds, but at least in this, the service is rather transparent in this.

The lead developer is in Ottawa and I am of course pleased to see more solid Canadian vision and product deployment. Intriguing and worthy of some more investigation.

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Check out AideRSS — an exciting new tool to help manage information overload. It takes your existing RSS feeds, ranks posts and returns a list weighted by perceived quality.
Wonderful paradigm shifting technologies are supposed to streamline our lives and allow us to rise to new creative heights. The promise of the paperless office was to provide electronic communications to free us from distractions and the minutiae of the deskbound cubicled-existence. Mobile technologies were to unchain us from the physical offices to let us quickly complete necessary tasks while simultaneously participating in those pasttimes that we want to. You could ‘seal the deal’ while watching your son’s soccer game for example. But, for all the promise, we now deal with more information and have to find ways to cope with greater engagement in more tasks than we have ever faced.
Humans are compulsive animals and where there is time freed, we seem to fill it ever more completely than before. We now struggle, more confused and overloaded by information fed from a greater number of sources. RSS feeds were to be the panacea for having to go to multiple websites to find current information. They would consolidate disparate sources in a single viewer and strip out extraneous components into a simple concise stream. Yet, those who have embraced RSS have had to develop techniques to quickly scan and separate the chaff from the wheat. RSS generate a lot of noise and if you are using a reader to consolidate your feeds, you know how addictive they can become. They can suck us into reading all the latest posts hoping for the find, but also in adding (oh so conveniently) a feed from an author that posts a single intriguing article. Thus far, most of the techniques that have developed have been manual. But there is hope on the horizon.
Ron Neumann pointed me to <a href=“http://www.aiderss.com” target=“_blank””>AideRSS the other day and having poked around the service a bit, colour me impressed. The premise behind AideRSS is that their proprietary PageRank engine grades post value relative to previous posts on that blog. A numeric value is applied to all the posts from the feeds you wish to track and a ranked RSS feed is made available to you. Thus you can subscribe to the single feed from AideRSS (I so want to shorten this to ARSS — that can’t be good) and it will subscribe to all the feeds for you. You decide how many and of what quality (good, better best) posts you want to read and AideRSS complies.
The service is currently free and despite apologies for their slow speed, I found the service quite fact. The dashboard at the site is usable as an RSS reader itself and has thoughtfully employed sparkiines to visualize how the current post’s PageRank compares to historical performance of the blog…thus returning a ‘blogtrend’.
The next step for such a service has to be in developing greater personalization. There is a talk of a recommendation engine that may actually push feeds. But, the PageRank value is currently a perceived model value as opposed to a value weighted to your interests, needs or wants in particular.
However, this is one huge step in conquering what is becoming an avalanche of information, a haystack in which we may find that little nuggets we seek, but increasingly weighted towards missing out posts that we might truly value.

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Web2.0 seems to be a lot about invite-only betas. We hear about them through a variety of media and we patiently wait and often salivate. We sign up to receive invites or even just sign up to be notified when a service becomes more mature. Invites create a buzz and certainly the whole GMail launch strategy made an art out of this marketing strategy. I will admit to being a victim of much marketing. I like my toys. There’s a new service that I stumbled across the other day that allows you to ask for, receive and then share invites to these sacred sites: Mashable Invites.
I have been using the service for a couple days and have been amazed at how fast others share thier invites with you. Its a cool concept. I like getting and I like sharing. This thing actually works. What is particularly important about this process is that it works. Its built on community and sharing and people do just that. Its one more quick response to changes being made in cyberspace.
Its simple to use. You create an account. You can browse through the list of sites that that are being tracked. if one interests you, you simply ask for an invite. Your email is added to a list of people requesting invites. Shortly you will discover that someone has sent you an invite. You can join the beta site. The idea now is that you should return the favour and and go back and send invitations to the top emails on the list. If you send invites and people confirm receiving them, you will discover that your name is raised up the list next time you request an invite. You are rewarded for returning favours. That’s what the site is all about.
So if you are hankering for an invite to that hot new site…check it out.
Oh, and one more thing…(yeah it was a Steve Jobs keynote day) it’s really handy to be able to subscribe via RSS to a feed of the site and you’ll be informed when new sites are added to the invite list.

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I am a big fan of wikis for note-taking, research material collation and organization. There are a wide variety of easy to use, free wiki services online and an increasing number of small footprint, simple standalone wikis. I probably should have blogged about this earlier and shared some of my experiences, but an excellent article by Dustin Wax at lifehack.org does a superb job of explaining the rationale and gives some great how to tips.
I have been using a wiki for most of my research notes for the past two years. At the entry stage, it forces me to think logically and structurally when entering information, but without forcing me to lose my research train of thought. I can focus on the research and the content and quickly and efficiently add material to a secure repository. At the stage of interpretation and working with a large body of notes of all types, and a mixture of media, the wiki automatically provides data views from overview, drilling down to detail by virtue of its own structure. When it comes to actually having to appreciate/measure your own progress, or document the state of your research, the wiki allows for very flexible re-purposing of content.
I pointed above at Geoffrey Rockwell’s blog entry for a talk given by John Bradley this week at McMaster about his Pliny Project. What has stuck with me from John’s talk is the thought he has put into the deliberative interpretation of humanities research. The point at which we consider what we have read, what we have made notes on and compiled. How do we go from note taking to presentation of our own thoughts? Pliny is a valuable tool for managing the interpretative process — one which seems to be largely unaddressed by many of our hi-tech tools. However, wikis are another tool like Pliny that can aid in the interpretative process.
Although wikis are clearly not for everyone, finding the tools that suit your way of thinking or make up for your own idiosyncrasies (I point the finger at my own here) involve experimentation and investigation. I commend wikis to your kitbag if you haven’t played with using your own yet.

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Tangler offers an innovative approach to open testing of online products. A combination of instant messaging and real-time forums, Tangler provides a repository of joinable discussions and archives discussions for reference. The site seems geared towards testing of new products in an interactive environment, but nothing precludes discussion around any topic from the esoteric to the deeply philosophical. The interface allows for convenient mix-media embedding of objects and a pop-up widget to allow for you to be notified of activity in the groups you participate in.
From what I can see this is an intriguing hybrid of on-line forum and real-time messaging application. The opportunity for developers to conduct pre-release public testing of web-based products is tantalizing, taking a hug step beyond a simple bug tracking interface. The biggest challenge is always to find people to commit time and engage in a testing process. However, this tool can make the process more effective allowing for the potential of immediate feedback and discussion of bugs and interface queries as they are encountered. This can allow for real-time attention to elimination of confusion over interface peculiarities. Additionally, by communicating directly with a developer when the problem is fresh in the testers mind a more rich discussion can aid product refinement. lastly, this tool allows for the extension of the testing process to the widest possible audience of individuals simply looking for the opportunity to see new things, express their opinions and put new products through their paces. Intriguing.

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This is one thoughtful piece of webart…if we are considering beautiful evidence…this short video by Michael Wesch gets it very right. Its absolutely brilliant. I am sure its going to start to get some attention over the next few days. It is perhaps best paired with this wonderfully creative , but a little more fanciful, web2.0 video that won a First Post Award Competition a few months back. Wesch’s video gives you a brilliantly logical progression through the latest buzzwords actually using technologies themselves to demonstrate themselves. What better place to throw it up for comment than YouTube?

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A few weeks ago I blogged about Swivel, a cool place for kids to play with data and comment on others datasets and visualisations. Today Geoffrey blogged about an IBM Alphaworks site that takes this concept in a different direction.

At Many Eyes, the emphasis is on exploring visualisations and the ease with which you can take a dataset and try on a few different ways of presenting the data. You upload a dataset simply by copying the data from Excel and pasting it into a dialogue on their site. The page then gives you a view of your data to confirm that the engine has chosen the appropriate data types for your data columns and you are good to go. You can quickly and painlessly click on a type of chart and your results are almost instantly visible. Popup menus let you tweak with the display and when you are comfortable with the results you provide a title and description and others can then witness your handiwork. Of note is that there are transition effects when you alter aspects of your visualization. The charts do not simply redraw…they ‘magically’ evolve to your requests. This is superb attention to detail.

You can now even embed the result into your blog:

With datasets and visualisations uploaded and generated users are invited to comment on these much like Swivel. There doesn’t seem to be an enormous number of comments on the IBM site relative to Swivel. I sense that swivel is directed more towards those that have a specific problem they are wrestling with and are familiar with the swivel community. The IBM site is probably slicker technologically and offers a wider collection of the latest visualisation trends, more individually focussed towards giving you the opportunity to try out some new techniques to satisfy your own needs. Both sites are slick in general. I am going to have to play with this IBM one some more.

It raises a big question for me and that is: Do we actually live in a numerate society? I am not sure I consider myself numerate at times and wonder whether people think numerically in general. Moreover, do most people really care about the statistical nuances that we are trying to play with here? Well, sites like this will certainly begin to answer these questions.

If you like a good tutorial, try the video provided by Jonathan Feinberg. Well done.

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We had a short spate of conversation at the TAPoR meeting on forms of disaggregation (and I guess corollorarily demand aggregation) when looking at online swap/consolidation sites. I cam across a further swap site this morning that illustrated this concept…and is one more example of the way in which internet collectivization is changing normal modes of economic exchange through contractual intermediation and introducing another layer of rentier behaviour. CellSwapper, is a P2P exchange that connects people wanting to get out of long term cell phone plans with those looking to pick up a shorter term plan without the costs of activation of of cancellation. That is they are trading on that thin layer of administrative costs that carriers demand. The site is unfortunately for me only available to the US, but they are promising broader geographic coverage shorty. A further form of aggregation is demonstrated by the microlending sites such as the two that I mentioned in an earlier post, Zopa and Prosper.

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Another interesting list I came across during the season of listing. This one comes from a bit of a site of paranoia…but maybe we should be afraid :-0. On the upside, this is a list of 13 Easy Ways to Safeguard Your Privacy in 2007 which seem like some very prudent steps. Although I don’t advocate running screaming in the streets, these seem to be some concrete simple things one can be aware of or practise to safeguard one’s identity. Its real and after I had those 15 laptops shipped to my Quebec address a few years back, am certainly more on the watch. Things such as avoiding the use of your middle initial is something that I wouldn’t have thought of but you know…it makes some sense.

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