Archive for December, 2003
December 29, 2003
Klogging Event
I’ll be presenting, along with Glen Engel-Cox, an ASAE Knowledge Network titled “Blogging for Associations” on January 8, 2004. The session will cover how associations can set up a weblog network on their intranet as a low-cost knowledge sharing tool.
To support this session and some other stuff I’m working on, I’ve set up a wiki. You can see the page for the blogging session here and the main wiki home page here. I’ve restricted pages that I want to maintain control over but most of the site is editable. Feel free to add links to the resources pages if you would like to add information for the session attendees to see.
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December 20, 2003
IAWiki - ThesaurusDesignTools
IAWiki has a page listing thesaurus design tools.
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December 12, 2003
FeedDemon Gold
FeedDemon, an RSS newsfeed aggregation tool, has gone gold and should be available for sale next week. I’ve been using the various beta releases over the past few months and like it quite a bit. If you read lots of RSS feeds, this software gives you a lot of features for organizing and managing your subscriptions.
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December 12, 2003
Mozilla Partially Vulnerable to URL Spoofing
Looks like Mozilla is somewhat vulnerable to the same URL spoofing attack as IE is. Wonder who will have a patch our first?
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December 10, 2003
Semantic Blogging Research
HP has been conducting research into fusing structured metadata into weblogs. They also have a demonstration blog set up to see their ideas in action. (Found via Open Access News.)
Semantic blogging exploits this same personal publishing, syndication, aggregation and subscription model but applies it to structured items with richer metadata data. The metadata would include classification of the items into one or more topic ontologies, semantic links between items (”supports”, “refutes”, “extends” etc.) as well as less formal annotations and ratings. There are several ways this more structured data could extend the power of blogging:
Discovery. At present is it not easy to discover either a channel of interest (e.g. “I would like to find blog channels about the semantic web”) or a collection of specific items of interest (e.g. “Are there any more blog entries describing this application idea?”).
Cross-linking. Current blogs support a single link between the channel record and the blogged item. By extending this mechanism to support linking between items (using a property hierarchy) we can create a network of topic interconnections that supports more flexible navigation. These links can themselves form part of the disseminated content - for example to represent the structure or scholarly discourse.
Flexible aggregation and selection. The current blog subscription mechanisms are in some ways both too fine (being bounded by the individual blogger’s channel of posts) and too coarse (e.g. I might like Ian’s technology channel but am only interested in the semantic web bits). The richer categorization and structure of semantic blog channels would make it easier for users to create virtual blog channels which aggregate across multiple bloggers but select from that aggregate according to other criteria such as topic (or community rating).
Integration with other sources and applications. The structured nature of semantic blog channels makes it possible to develop automated blog robots that can process and enhance the blogged items. For example, in the bibliography domain transducers would enable import and export via existing bibliography schemas like BibTex and automatic linking to large repositories such as CiteSeer.
There are lots of differing opinions as to whether the semantic web can actually be achieved. It’s good to see some actual research being done to shed some more light on this issue. As I’ve said before, I think metadata can still be useful in discrete communities and/or collections where there is some control and incentive to code accurately. I don’t think it will likely work for the web as whole given the web community’s tendency to game systems. A semantic blog network could be quite interesting for a community of researchers.
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December 8, 2003
RSS Parser for PHP
Magpie RSS - PHP RSS Parser looks like a nice set of code to use when you need to pull RSS feeds into a PHP application. I came across this via a feeling lucky search on Google using ‘php rss’.
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December 3, 2003
Batch vs. Dynamic Publishing
James Robertson has published a concise review of the pros and cons of dynamic vs. batch publishing in web content management systems. He also covers the hybrid of the two, which is what we now have in place with our systems at work.
The major con under the dynamic system that I have experienced directly is the server load issue. Dynamic systems cannot scale up for additional traffic as efficiently as batch or hybrid systems. Authoring activities are very processor and database intensive operations. Mix a few active editors along with heavy end user traffic and your server may quickly succumb.
About 18 months ago, we were in the unenviable situation of limiting editing activities to a small number of staff during low-traffic time periods. Without those restrictions our site constantly crashed and/or timed-out due to the unmanageable load of end users and editors hitting a single server. Not a popular measure with staff, to say the least. The dynamic CMS we were using at the time eventually came out with an update that allowed us to move to the hybrid approach and lift our editing restrictions. Moving authoring to a separate server dramatically improved the stability of our production web site.
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December 3, 2003
Mono and ASP.NET
The latest release of Mono now fully supports ASP.NET which means it should be feasible to run ASP.NET code under the Apache web server. Mono is an open source implementation of the .NET framework.
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