Category — General

The missing Web.

Allen has mounted a passionate argument on behalf of the inspired idea behind GlobeAlive: That we have fine search engines for documents, but not for people.

When he first told me about it, and tossed off the line World Live Web, my mind was blown. In a World of Ends, we should all be able to find each other and talk, or corresond, live. (And not just on computers.)

He explains:

What I'm talking about is something entirely different. What I'm talking about is using the Qeb to find actual people in the world at large that you can talk to right now, about whatever youÕre specifically searching for. There's nothing like that yet. Nothing. People aren't searchable. TheyÕre the most important resource in the world, and theyÕre not searchable, theyÕre scattered to the wind. ThereÕs no “people” tab at Google (and “groups” isnÕt the idea at all). That person you want to talk to right now (and that wants to hear from you right now) that needle in the haystack of 6 billion, is out there, I promise, but youÕll never find them, because the magnet you need to do so doesnÕt exist. I want to build it.

To a significant degree, he has. With GlobeAlive, Allen is prototyping the idea very nicely. The hundreds who have joined in, and are also passionate about it, bear witness to something.

Allen has bootstrapped this thing on a shoestring. Somebody needs to come in with some money and take it to the next level. If I had it, I would (even if he wasn't my son). But maybe one of ya'll do. If so, jump ahead to Allen's closing paragraph:

The bottom line is that when we restrict our interactions to people we already know or the people that happen to be in the chat room or community we join, it's like restricting our information-gathering to the books in our personal libraries at home, it's a mathematical certainty that weÕre selling ourselves utterly short. The island mentality is the root of this problem. ThereÕs an infinitely better way of going about our interpersonal interactions. It would change the web by making it live; it would change the economy by making it personal; it would change the world by making it smaller; and it would change you and I… by helping us meet.

[ href="http://doc.weblogs.com/">The Doc Searls Weblog]

hmm, this is a good idea, as more and more people are hooked in minute by minute into their information technology, things could be enlivened…. the secret will be decentralization.

Don't read my blog!. I suggest that you consider reading this blog, or perhaps this one.  You know there are lots of great blogs out there.  Scout around. [Ernie the Attorney]

but I like yours, in part because of the mnemonics of the name, but also because it provides such interesting pointers to others, plus you were one of the first to link to my blog.

Put the “public” back in the public domain
Lawrence Lessig is looking for a few good congressmen:

It seems that there was one member of congress willing to introduce this bill, but the lobbyists got to him/her. So Prof. Lessig is calling on people to write their representatives and ask them to do something relatively small and achievable to redress the copyright imbalance that prevails today.

This, it seems to me, is a good fight, worth giving some long-haul energy. [Scott Rosenberg's Links & Comment]

I think this is a great idea, and I want to know about that stanford library 1000 page an hour thing, cause i know that i have books that are out of copyright that could be scanned, and then i could use material from those books much more easily in my courses.

2nd IEEE Intl Workshop on Wireless and Mobile Technologies in Education (WMTE 2003)
JungLi, Taiwan December 8-10, 2003
http://lttf.ieee.org/wmte2003/

Theme: “Mobile Support for Learning Communities”

** Important dates:

Submissions due: June 16, 2003
Notification of acceptance: August 1, 2003
Final articles due: September 1, 2003
Author registration deadline: September 1, 2003
Workshop: December 8-10, 2003

** Proceedings

The WMTE 2003 proceedings will be published by IEEE Computer Society Press.

** Topics of Interest

We invite full papers, works-in-progress, and posters. The program committee will seek to
achieve a balance of empirical investigations and design studies, including relevant
methodologies from computer science and engineering research as well as cognitive science
and educational research. All submitted papers should address mobile and/or wireless
technologies and provide new insights relating to their use in teaching and learning.

Topics include (but are not limited to):

- Innovative designs and uses of tools to overcome barriers of learning
- Principles and patterns for learner-centered design
- Design of learning activities supported by mobile devices
- Advances in teaching conceptually difficult topics in school
- Interface designs optimized for small screens or other modes of interaction that
fit on mobile devices
- Architectures that support rapid prototyping, reuse, or large-scale test beds
- Techniques of instrumentation devices and networks for research data gathering
- Case studies of teaching and learning
- Surveys of learners that reveal important trends and opportunities
- Analysis of the topology of learning communities
- Evaluation of effectiveness
- Comparisons of alternative designs
- Issues of scaling up to reach large numbers of learners
- Mobile agents for learning

** Paper submission:

- Full papers (maximum 8 pages)
- Works-in-progress (maximum 5 pages)
- Posters (maximum 2 pages)

Details of submission procedure are available at the conference website:
http://lttf.ieee.org/wmte2003/

Alarmist? You bet! Ding ding ding ding!. “First they came for the Greens…” Texas' proposed “Animal and Ecological Terrorism Act,” which its backers are hoping to extend nationally, is the next step after Patriot Acts I and II. The president of the Center for Constitutional Rights says the legislation criminalizes “basically every environmental and animal-rights organization in the country,” which means that if you don't even march with, but send money to any of them, you may be tacitly waiving your 4th-amendment rights. [More inside] [MetaFilter]

i am consistently amazed at what people think they should let their representatives do….

http://kmi.open.ac.uk/projects/akt/MnM

MnM is an annotation tool which provides both automated and semi-automated
support for annotating web pages with semantic contents. MnM integrates a web
browser with an ontology editor and provides open APIs to link MnM to ontology
servers and for integrating MnM with information extraction tools. MnM works with a number of representation languages, including RDF, DAML+OIL and OCML. The annotated documents can be used to populate ontologies or as a training corpus for information extraction (IE) engines. The MnM IE plug-in is generic and documented and therefore developers can add new IE mechanisms to the system.

The version of MnM available for download has been integrated with Amilcare Version 2.1, a tool for Adaptive Information Extraction from Texts. Amilcare has been developed by Fabio Ciravegna, University of Sheffield, F.Ciravegna@dcs.shef.ac.uk, http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/~fabio. This version of Amilcare has been released as demo as part of the MnM tool and CAN BE USED ONLY AS PLUG-IN FOR THE MnM tool. It cannot be used in stand alone or as plugin for any other annotation tool.
Please contact Fabio Ciravegna if you want to use Amilcare in commercial applications, distribute it to other colleagues or integrate it in other tools.

MnM is provided “as is” and it is free of charge for non commercial
use (see http://kmi.open.ac.uk/projects/akt/MnM/license.html for more details).

For more information about MnM you can have a look at the published papers
(http://kmi.open.ac.uk/projects/akt/MnM/publications.html), and at the user
manual and developer guide (http://kmi.open.ac.uk/projects/akt/MnM/documents.html).

SID2003 CALL FOR PARTICIPATION

Social Intelligence Design International Conference
Royal Holloway, University of London 6-8 July 2003

Conference website:
http://www.rhul.ac.uk/Management/News-and-Events/conferences/SID2003/

This is the second workshop on the subject of social intelligence design
focused on the significance of information technology in our lives, work,
home, and on the move. In this workshop we consider Social Intelligence
(SI) as the ability for people to relate to, understand and interact
effectively with others. Our particular concern is how SI is mediated
through the use of new technologies.

The workshop is organised around four main themes:

1. INTERACTIONS – with presentations covering theory, modelling and
analytical frameworks that have been developed with Social Intelligence
Design in mind.

2. COMMUNITIES covering topics community media, communication patterns in
online communities, knowledge-creating, network and anonymous communities.

3. COLLABORATION TECHNOLOGIES and tools – presenting innovations to support
interactions within communities, covering a range from knowledge sharing
systems, multi-agent systems, interactive systems, Embodied Conversational
Agents.

4. APPLICATION DOMAINS – including architecture, education, policy and
business.

Intended Participants:
This workshop is intended for all who are concerned with the impact of
advanced information and communication technologies on social intelligence,
in particular, researchers, developers and designers of new ways of
communicating enabled and supported by such technologies. The contributions
will be published in the workshop proceedings.

Please visit the conference website for further information and
registration details

WORKSHOP ORGANISERS:
Prof. Duska Rosenberg, School of Management, Royal Holloway, University of
London, Egham, Surrey, UK.
Prof. Toyoaki Nishida, Department of Information and Communication
Engineering, The University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan.
Dr. Renate Fruchter, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering,
Director of Project Based Learning Laboratory, Stanford University,
Stanford, USA.

Wag the dog?. The alleged truth about how Private Jessica Lynch was saved.
This is a pretty amazing story, coming originally from the BBC and now a front page story on the Guardian. There's a program on it on BBC on Sunday.

Story courtesy of Karlin Lillington, where I picked it up. [MetaFilter]

oh yes, this is nothing new, the social construction of facts and their provision to a certain audience for certain effects, which in this case actually seemed to work, i wonder how far this story will be distributed though?

The Personality Forge. The Personality Forge. Create an AI bot, and set it loose. [MetaFilter]

this somewhat follows the model that i and probably millions by now have thought could work, which is intelligence through simulation.

Is that a FireHose in your pocket, or are you glad to store me?.

It looks like a public mailbox, but Marc says Gizmodo says it's a 2,000 GB (two terrabyte, no?) FireWire drive. The challenge: try to find out anything about it, or to buy it.

While we're off the subject, this looks cool too.

[The Doc Searls Weblog]

hmmm, i need one…