Impressions Scholarcast

Well Flashie B has excelled himself this time. Take any photo and have it gradually emerge as an impressionist painting. Looks great. Now I can’t wait for the online web version. Upload your photo and download the Flash movie or better still the final impressionist image. How about it?

InfoWOE Post Collection

The Asus Eee PC and the XO are two examples of ultralight, low-cost laptops that in their initial versions use one of the many variants of the Linux operating system. The price of the Eee PC 701 with a 4 GB SSD made a purchase for me inescapable. From the outset I have been very impressed despite the 7 inch screen (the first machine I bought in 1981, the Osbourne 1, had a 5 inch screen) and tiny keys. I have embarked on an experiment to determine whether I could carry out all or most of my day-to-day work using the Eee and its standard software complement. Primarily for my own benefit I call this my Information Work Online Experiment (InfoWOE). With only about 1.5 GB of space available for user data on the 4 GB SSD it seemed to me that by necessity the Eee must access my document corpus online. Thus an Internet connection, either wireless or wired, for the Eee is assumed.

I have been a Unix user for 20 years from 1980, a Mac fanatic for 10 years from its introduction in 1984, and a dedicated Windows proponent from 1995. Using Linux brings me back to the beginning after almost 30 years. However I have no intention of taking time to learn the more than adequate document manipulation software available on the Eee for file management, word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, audio and video media, and so on. This software will be necessary for reading certain documents formats with the occasional minor edit.

Instead I will focus my efforts totally towards online data manipulation and collaboration. This essentially means living and working in the Firefox browser and its extensive add-on ecosystem. The bulk of the information processing should occur on a whole collection of web sites providing a wide range of services. InfoWOE essentially involves working ‘in the cloud’ and using the Eee as a thin Internet client device. Of course any regular laptop or desktop connected to the Internet running Windows, Mac OS or Linux can also be used in the same way. Thus it will be possible to interact with InfoWOE from my several other machines.

For the moment, rather than having a dedicated InfoWOE web site I will publish my experience and findings via this blog. As I did for reporting from the BlogOz conference I will publish InfoWOE postings as a blogknot, ie a linked series of blog entries. The blogknot links appear at the head of each related post. [Update 13 April 2008: As all programmers know updating a doubly-linked list is tedious and error-prone. I have now settled for a WordPress feature link that dynamically generates a reverse list of all blog posts in this category. A link to this post collection will appear at the head of all related blog posts.]

Alex Iskold suggests ways to have fun with Twitter. He suggests the personalities are:

• Listener. Only occasionally tweet but have lots of followers.
• Talker. Tweet a lot but have few followers.
• Hub. Lots of tweets and followers.

Well Enterprise 2.0 is getting almost long in the tooth in Internet years. So a change in terminology is overdue. Sarah Perez from Mashable has put forward socialprise with the simple formula:

social tools + enterprise = socialprise

No doubt this is easily memorable but pronouncing the word is a struggle.

With a new term comes the need for new social media tools. Read Sarah’s post to find out.

In his inimitable way Jerry O is carrying forward the wave of groundswell. Jerry defines this:

A Groundswell [is] a social trend in which people use technologies to get the things they need from each other, rather than from traditional institutions.

Jerry goes on to give us cogent examples of groundswell in action that include readers becoming editors by rating news/blog items, students rating teachers, citizens rating cops, groups opposing extreme church teaching, rating music and restaurants, and audiences taking control at unconferences. This list is ever expanding and organisations will need to be aware of groundswell and provide mechanisms to leverage its effects for their own benefit.

I mentioned the definitive text in a previous post. This book is becoming a must-read.

Ever wanted to change an odd character or word in the URL in the address bar of your browser? You end up clicking 2 or 3 times, yes? Well thank goodness that IE8 will revert to a more standard model of text editing in an improved click behaviour:

• Single-click within a URL to insert the caret. This allows the user to make an in-line edit easily.
• Double-click within a URL to select the word (words are delimited by common characters like slashes).
• Triple-click to select the entire URL.
• A subsequent click (a fourth click) will cycle back to the single-click behavior.

Alt-D still works as always to select the whole of the address bar URL. However, it’s a pity the new click behaviour does not work yet in IE8 beta 1. Fortunately the cool new domain highlighting does work well.