I attended a wildly animated, wonderfully amusing and thought provoking keynote talk by David Weinberger entitled ’The Business of the Miscellaneous’ at the Annual General Meeting of the CIRA this afternoon. Weinberger claims that society has solved the threat posed…
Today I had a wonderful discussion with Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg of IBM’s Visual Communications Lab. These are the fine folks behind the Many Eyes website that I blogged about a few months ago. Since launching their site, they…
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…
Having just returned from one of my favourite cities in the world, I was fascinated to find a Paris Metro Virtual Experience. This media-rich site offers wonderful history of the Paris Metro and the opportunity to take a virtual tour…
I don’t normally blog about Firefox extensions. I have far too many installed, but this latest one is something that should have been a part of Firefox on install. If you are running Firefox, you owe yourself to test this…
I attended a great talk by Steven Bednarski of St. Jerome’s University today. His CV lists UQAM, York, Toronto as places of experience. His framing question today: How does a social historian make use of a research database? Bednarski explains…
Those clever folks at the IATH at the University of Virginia are receiving much deserved accolades for their truly breathtaking digital model of ancient Rome. Rome Reborn 1.0 (and accompanying website) are visually stunning and the mainstream media are covering…
So, another Steve Jobs/Apple keynote over and the hype of the advance pundits leaves one feeling a might let down. This is the first keynote that I can recall that sparked mainstream news coverage in advance. I was watching my…
The Blackberry was cool because it brought us push versus pull email…realistically RIM was doing the pulling for you and pushing it to you. As an email notification popped up as I was trolling through my RSS feeds, it suddenly…
A year ago I wrote a recipe for the TAPoR project to demonstrate a way for historians to utilize text analysis tools to plumb historical data from Google. In the recipe a user aggregated search results from Google and used…
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…
Kudos to Nokia for adding the smarts to their cell phones to let a user know to unplug the charger from the wall socket. Apparently this simple operation (presuming people actually do unplug the phones – as opposed to leaving…