Impressions Scholarcast

Two or three weeks ago I upgraded to Picasa 3 and am pleased with its improved, cleaner user interface. For the last couple of years I have used Picasa web albums to publish my photos for public viewing. It was only today while I was adding a web album for our 41st wedding anniversary  that I noticed the new movie making feature for the first time. Even though I had only a few photos I gave it a whirl and am impressed by the simplicity and ease with which a YouTube HD movie can be created and uploaded. Herewith the result:

With friends and colleagues becoming enamoured with Animoto recently it is interesting to compare the two services. I generated a meetup with some friends a week ago on Animoto. Uploading the slides to the Animoto site is more painful, although adding music from the built-in collection is easier. There is little to choose between them. Animoto certainly wins though with its creative animations of the slides:

In common I suspect with many iPhone owners I am continually surprised by the ingenious apps, many free, that appear in increasing numbers. Yesterday I downloaded the MotionX-GPS Lite app and gave it a whirl during our walk at Burleigh. At the start of the walk I just pressed Start and carried the iPhone in my usual bum bag. With the hot day and a somewhat later than usual start time we kept under the occasional shade of the Norfolk pines – the tide was high so no beach to walk on this time. On the way I used the same app to geotag a photo or two. It seemed to work flawlessly and at the end of the walk, with a short rest on Nobbys lookout, it produced the following:

I simply chose one of the geotagged photos to represent the track and changed its name. With a click of the Email button a couple of track files and the photo were sent to my chosen email address. The message contains a temporary link to show the track on Google Maps which expires on 5 Jan 2009 (ie 7 days).

From the Google Maps page the user is offered a link to Google Earth if it is installed. I became fully enamoured with Google Earth during the 2008 Sydney-Hobart yacht race. This year for the first time a link to a Google Earth .kml file was provided which updated every 10 minutes. [However I suspect this was hacked at one stage to make it appear the incorrect yacht was leading the race – see tweet – it was too good to be true.]

I uploaded the .kmz file provided by MotionX-GPS to my SkyDrive public area here. This will trigger Google Earth to zoom to the track of the walk. Clicking on the Play Tour button shows a pleasant flyover effect along the track. I made a somewhat blurry YouTube video using Camtasia 6 to show the effect:

I think this is a pretty impressive outcome from a free iPhone app.

A few weeks ago I set an assignment called TwitterLicious as part of my new subject INFT345 Middleware. The idea of the TwitterLicious web application written in ASP.NET was to scan all the tweets if a given Twitter account name, identify all the tweets in that account containing URLs, and then create a Delicious link entry for each URL. This entry inserted special tags of choice and used the tweet text as the Delicious link entry description. Several excellent versions of TwitterLicious were submitted but CJ’s version was the best.

Given this background I was intrigued today to find via Read/WriteWeb the Web 2.0 TwitchBoard site which for its initial service appears to mirror TwitterLicious in its ‘save tweet links to Delicious’ feature:

TwitchBoard listens to your twitter account, and forwards messages on to other internet services based on what it hears. Our first service will automatically save any links you tweet to the del.icio.us bookmarking service.

TwitchBoard is very neatly linked to Twitter in that to sign up you simply follow @TwitchBoard from your own Twitter account. A direct message returns from TwitchBoard when you tweet links start to be processed. At the time of writing though the surge of interest in TwitchBoard has caused a waiting list to develop. I have still to receive my inclusion message and wait with bated breath. Having envisioned this very service myself I am obviously keen to participate.

For years almost I have in the back of my mind the directive ‘I must get more deeply into the semantic web’. However, the thought of linkbases and metabases, the mysterious RDF triples that are displayed 5 different ways, and vocabularies and ontologies in weird formats has always put me off.

You can imagine my excitement when listening to an ITConversations podcast entitled ‘Adding Semantics to HTML with RDFa’. Dubbed Semantic Annotation for (X)HTML, RDFa involves adding XHTML attributes, hence the ‘a’, containing simple values from which the normal content of RDF triples can be generated easily. No XHTML or XML elements are used so the usual web page publishing software and CSS styles sheets are not affected in any way. Imagine the simplicity of just adding attributes for the machine-readable semantic data to XHTML pages created as per normal.

The RDFa Primer which is a W3C Working Group Note envisages the following semantic transformation:

A cleverly-designed minimal set of attributes are introduced using existing attributes where possible:

• about – metadata resource (current page by default)
• rel and rev – relationship or reverse-relationship
• href, src and resource – partner resource
• property for element content
• content – where element content not accurate
• datatype – force data type
• typeof – for  RDF type(s)

There are several benefits but the main one are publisher independence in that each site can use its own standards, data is not duplicated (DRY, do not repeat yourself), and XHTML and RDF values appear in the same document but are easily separated with existing tools.

Of course you are encouraged to use existing vocabularies where they exist. An example using Dublin Core taken from the Wikipedia entry is:

Of course it is one thing to mark up the content, but display tools are needed to augment browsers and the like to make use of the semantic data in useful ways. The Semantic Radar Firefox extension alerts the user in the Firefox status bar to the presence of RDFa information in a page and giving access to the generated triples and RDF data:

It is to be expected that Creative Commons has already adopted RDFa so when you generate a licence and copy the resulting XHTML to your web site or blog it will contain RDFa attributes built in:

Digg is also using RDFa as can be seen by inspecting the XHTML of a Digg page but for some reason Semantic Radar does not find it.

Discovering RDFa has begun to change my attitude to the semantic web and I will now follow progress with anticipation.

Some fun via Peta:

Not sure about the prehistoric life, plants and animals though.

Here are a couple of examples of a tagcloud ‘abstract’ (see my earlier post) of the paper entitled ‘Towards the Integration of Social Media with Traditional Information Systems’ presented by Peta Hopkins and myself at ICCMSN2008. Commenting on the earlier blog post Natasha Baker liked the tagcloud abstract idea and pointed me to TagCrowd which allows you to upload a text file of a document. I reduced our paper to text and TagCrowd generated:

Note that only the top 50 of the 962 different words are shown.

Of course I couldn’t resist running the same words through my favourite Wordle site, although here you have to copy and paste the text into a web form rather than nominating a text file.

Note how the Wordle tagcloud abstract is more detailed and picturesque. I must say that as an abstract I prefer the TagCrowd version.