The Online Audio Interview Recorder: Skype Recorder vs. iVocalize
Robin Good sends along this article offering another way to record online conversations, the iVocalize Online Interview Recorder. This is the system he used to interview me a few weeks ago. More...

Tim Wang's Education Blog
Scott Leslie introduces us to a new education blog, Tim Wang's. wang's focus is on e-learning in China, as this item suggests, or this item about the China Japan Korean Open Source Software Initiatives. More...

Social Consequences of Social Tagging
Some of the doubts I've expressed about things like Technorati Tags surface here in thsi article questioning social tagging in general. For example: "It’s certain that some people will try to game the system, deliberately tagging their photos to misdirect people." One possible solution? "A system by which people can form epistomology gangs who decide to share tags, and declare a concensually [sic] decided-upon meaning." The author presents readers with the ESP game, covered in these pages last May. It turns out that social tagging, in this context, isn't all it was made out to be. More...

Memeorandum and Newsmap and...
Newsmap is of less interest to me, and it has been around for a while, though the use of graphical elements is creative. But I like Memeorandum a lot. Basically, the idea is to take a set of major news stories and to run the story with a headline and a short summary along with the posts of some leading bloggers about that story. More...

Image Annotator
This is a beautiful use of Javascript, RDF and XSLT to create a system that annotates images. Go to the image link to see the final result first. Take a look at the page source; you'll see that it is written in RDF, and specifically, a combination of three schemas: Dublin Core, FOAF and an Image schema. Now go to the image annotator itself to see how the RDF file was generated. Follow the instructions on the page and generate your own RDF. More...

Averages and Emergence
Some highly speculative thoughts about the creation of knowledge through synchronous recognition of natural patterns by a group of observers. By Stephen Downes, Learning Circuits Blog, January 18, 2005 [Refer][Research][Reflect]. More...

Yahoo to acquire Six Apart?
This is just speculation, nothing more. But it would seem to be a natural; Yahoo doesn't have a blogging tool (while both Microsoft and Google do). Six Apart now also brings into the mix the large LiveJournal community, which could be integrated into Yahoo's own family of communities. More...

Why P2P File Sharing Is Good: The P2P Manifesto
Robin Good links to and summarizes a pretty good manifesto on P2P (person-to-person) file sharing. The author's premise is that P2P is inevitable, that content owners cannot prevent people from sharing files on it, and that it is better for content owners in the long run (but they'll have to adapt their business plans). More...

WordPress Multi User (WMU)
A long-standing complaint about the use of WordPress, the free and open source blogging software, in an academic environment is that no multi-user version was available. With the launch of WordPress MU, this is no longer true. More...

The Music of Titan
To wrap up the day's links on a lighter note, this is the world's first piece of music recorded using sounds from Saturn's moon (it also holds the record for the piece of music with the most distantly separated sound sources). More...