Blink
Some people call it intuition. Some people call it making a snap judgement. Whatever it's called, it seems clear that the human mind has the capacity to reach correct decisions quickly on the basis of very little information. Well - decision, at any rate. Not always correct; it depends on the circumstances. More...
The Semantic Web, Digital Identity, and Internet Governance
Some observations on digital identity. I agree with this bit: "having spent more hours than I care to admit poring over specs and architecture diagrams from the Passport, Shibboleth, Liberty, and WS-Federation projects, I suspect (as does Doc Searls) that some other identity standard will prevail." But what? SxIP? Identity Commons? That we would have to choose one of these indicates a flaw. More...
A Typology of Virtual Communities: A Multi-Disciplinary Foundation for Future Research
I'm not really a big fan of taxonomies - their main use seems to be to give professors something to name after themselves. A taxonomy - being an organization of entities by keying on particular properties - is always relative to a use (and one would hope - but not always find - the properties relevant to the use). The only use identified for this particular taxonomy is that it is "useful to researchers who seek to pursue programmatic research and theoretical advancement from a variety of disciplinary areas," and is is so by virtue of being simple and universally applicable (or so says the author). It would help researchers form research questions. But (in my mind) not very good ones - we could ask, 'Does a member initiated or commercially sponsored community better foster collaboration?' And maybe even get an answer. More...
Creative Commons Licensed Library Launches - Delivering Mobile Editions Of Books To Phones
This item showed up in the Creative Commons feed today and was worth a look. The reference is to a site called WINK, which (as the headline promised) is launching a Creative Commons library of books for mobile phones. Following the site to the home page, however, I found something even more interesting - a service that will convert your RSS feed to mobile phone content. More...
Making the Most of the Blogosphere
I felt like I was flipping through my morning reads as I flipped through this slide show - the point of the presentation is to highlight not blogs per se but the many aggregator sites and filters that are beginning to spring up. More...
Online University That Gave Cat Diploma Sued for Fraud
Well, this one is all over the blogosphere and I can't resist passing it along. An online 'university' has been sued by the State of Pennsylvania after granting an MBA to a cat. Nobody has thought to test the cat. More...
Shibboleth Update a.k.a. shibble-ware
This is a great presentation, the clearest dscription of Shibboleth - a system that shares user authentication between participating universities - that I've seen. Especially useful is Slide 7 (be sure to view this in presentation mode) which shows step by step how the parts of Shibboleth interact. More...
The Tangled Internet: Is It Time For a New One?
"The soul of the Internet is up for grabs," says the author, and I have to agree. The wide open free internet has become a haven for spam artists and other low-life. But blocking the spam may result in a closed, proprietary 'secure' and 'trusted' internet that stifles free expression and open content as much as it does spam and viruses. More...
Batch Identifier Infrastructure
An open source tool for generating unique persistent digital object names and other identifiers has been released. Called "noid" (nice opaque identifier), it can be used as an identifier strategy no matter which naming scheme you choose (for example, ARK, DOI, Handle, LSID, PURL, or URN). More...
Google Scholar and OpenURL Firefox Extension
I have mixed feelings about this one. What we have is a nifty Firefox extension that works hand in hand with Google Scholar by checking to see whether your institution has a subscription to the Jorunal in question and giving you immediate access to the article. Neat. But do we really want to be helping entrench the subscription based model of publishing like this. More...
/https%3A%2F%2Fprofilepics.canalblog.com%2Fprofilepics%2F1%2F0%2F1076071.jpg)
