Backfile gets a new meaning in Twitter

"[described as "epochal" by media commentators, will see all Guardian content tailored to fit the format of Twitter's brief text messages, known as "tweets", which are limited to 140 characters each."


"A mammoth project is also under way to rewrite the whole of the newspaper's archive, stretching back to 1821, in the form of tweets. Major stories already completed include "1832 Reform Act gives voting rights to one in five adult males yay!!!"; "OMG Hitler invades Poland, allies declare war see tinyurl.com/b5x6e for more" Via Guardian

Reference Manager Overview

Reference Manager Overview
Originally uploaded by mfenner

New York Times, APIs and SOA

A good example of how Times is using their APi's internally





Note: updates, thanks to Richard Akerman reminding me the missing links

Talis gets "web of data"

Talis which has been doing a lot of innovative stuff just launched "Talis Connected Commons"

MIT follows Harvard to Open

"To assist the Institute in distributing the scholarly articles, as of the date of publication, each Faculty member will make available an electronic copy of his or her final version of the article at no charge to a designated representative of the Provost's Office in appropriate formats (such as PDF) specified by the Provost's Office." via Peter Suber

Ideals and Business Models

"Forget business models. Focus on ideals. Reconceiving value creation depends on new ideals. Ideals shape what we wish to achieve in the first place: freedom, peace, fairness, justice - all are ideals vastly more powerful than mere business models. That's because they are what ensure the value we are creating is authentic, deep, meaningful value - not just the shabby, threadbare illusion of value." Umair Haque

Ontology add-on for scientists in Microsoft Word

Congratulations John Wilbanks and neurocommons team.

Microsoft Corp. and Creative Commons announced, "the release of the Ontology Add-in for Microsoft Office Word 2007 that will enable authors to easily add scientific hyperlinks as semantic annotations, drawn from ontologies, to their documents and research papers."

Alon's first Purim

Alon and Penny enjoying the music and Ilan dancing at the Purim party.

Semantic Web and illumin8 and 60s

illumin8 does not have any "hippieness" and still it's kick-ass product for any research organization.

Paul Miller summarized nicely semantic web for 2008: “Semantic web has a lot of academic baggage but 2008 has seen a lot of things come together.” via Living Semantic Dream


60's Poster
Originally uploaded by Morpheus Down

Olé for NovoSeek

Spanish biomedical search engine NovoSeek has the right concept in providing insightful information within the context of the users. Currently their content include MedLine and US Grants.






I like the team picture too

Do you care?

If Mark Zuckerberg is using Twitter when the global economy is going down the tube, and millions are loosing their jobs and homes












Image from New York Times

Intelligent Search from Wolfram

The company who brought us Mathematica is readying to launch a new search service which might be similar to Netbase, Powerset and illumin8.

"A Computational Knowledge Engine for the Web

In a nutshell, Wolfram and his team have built what he calls a "computational knowledge engine" for the Web. OK, so what does that really mean? Basically it means that you can ask it factual questions and it computes answers for you.

It doesn't simply return documents that (might) contain the answers, like Google does, and it isn't just a giant database of knowledge, like the Wikipedia. It doesn't simply parse natural language and then use that to retrieve documents, like Powerset, for example.

Instead, Wolfram Alpha actually computes the answers to a wide range of questions -- like questions that have factual answers such as "What country is Timbuktu in?" or "How many protons are in a hydrogen atom?" or "What is the average rainfall in Seattle this month?," "What is the 300th digit of Pi?," "where is the ISS?" or "When was GOOG worth more than $300?"

Think about that for a minute. It computes the answers. Wolfram Alpha doesn't simply contain huge amounts of manually entered pairs of questions and answers, nor does it search for answers in a database of facts. Instead, it understands and then computes answers to certain kinds of questions." via Nova Spivack

"Generation Open"

"If we are Generation Open, then we are the optimistic generation. Ours only comes around every several generations with the resurgence of pure human spirit coupled with the resplendent realization of intent.

There are, however, still plenty who reject this attitude and approach, suffering from the combined malaise of “proprietariness”, “materialism”, and “consumerism”.

But — I shit you not — as the world turns, things are changing. Sharing and giving away all that you can are the best defenses against fear, obsolescence, growing old, and, even, wrinkles. It isn’t always easy, but it’s how we outlive the shackles of biology and transcend the physicality of gravity.

To transcend is to become transparent, clear, open." by Chris Massina

Openness and Education

David Wiley's presentation: "Openness is the cornerstone"

Openness and the Disaggregated Future of Higher Education

View more presentations from David Wiley. (tags: future policy)

"Open Source" Cinema coming to a theater near you

Next coming years will be very exciting and challenging for media and information industry
Can't wait to see all the mashups and creativity that will come from Open Source Cinema