Category — General

Ecology of Tools. How a dozen companies work together on a ten-minute task that makes the Web a slightly nicer place. [Mark Bernstein]

tools are important for the itnernet, but standards are the fundamental undergirding of tools

Take this tech job and shove it. Sure, there are plenty of opportunities out there — if you have 10 years of experience and are willing to work for free. [Salon.com] [[ t e c h n o \ c u l t u r e ]]

yup, and to think Johnny Paycheck is dead.

More Social-Network Mapping Tools.

I wrote yesterday a column named “New Social-Network Mapping Tools Are Emerging.”

Slashdot mentioned it, and their readers sent me many comments and e-mails about other visualization tools.

First, I need to make some corrections about Valdis Krebs, the developer of InFlow, a software tool I talked about in this previous column. He wrote me to tell he never worked at IBM. On the contrary, IBM was his first big customer. And, while this Discover article stated that “Krebs has spent most of the last 15 years honing his mapping software,” he told me “the first working version [w/o visuals] was written in 2 weekends… on a 512K Macintosh… using Prolog.” Finally, InFlow is designed to analyze not an individual e-mail box, but groups of them.

And now, let's browse through the excellent suggestions in no particular order. [Please note that I intentionally removed all e-mail addresses.]

• Raffi Krikorian urged me to take a look at a quick hack he put together a year ago called email constellations. “This project aims to be a free, flexible, and easily modifiable visualization tool that allows a user to intuitively understand their online social group structure.”
• Stefano Mazzocchi sent me a pointer to his Apache Agora visualizing social networks. There, you can see a data cloud “generated by processing three months of e-mail traffic on three Apache development mail lists.” [A bit of caution: you might have to stop and restart your browser after using it.]
• Jonathon N. Cummings alerted me about the NetVis Module which allows a dynamic visualization of social networks. “The NetVis Module is a free open source web-based tool designed to simulate, analyze, and visualize social networks using data from csv files, online surveys, and geographically dispersed work teams.”
• Rev. wRy mentioned EtherApe, a graphical network monitor for Unix.
• J. Maxwell Legg wrote about his freeware inGridX tool. “inGridX started life as a repertory grid creative free software offer to Kellian decision support consultants who make inferences about meanings by looking at the spin derived from a grid of elements and constructs. inGridX uses Principle Component Analysis as the basis to materially implicate a grid's digital effects.
• The NameBase people pointed me to their Proximity Search tool which “generates social network diagrams of the ruling class.”
• Steve Wolff asked me to check his Surf3D Pro tool. This is a freeware program which promises to reduce “search time by over 80% in comparison to what it normally takes you to click through and evaluate search engine results.” It has specific agents for Google Usenet groups, eBay auctions, Yahoo! Boards and others.
• Arthur Embleton and Gustavo Muslera both recommended KartOO visual meta search engine. It is similar to the TouchGraph GoogleBrowser, but it doesn't require Java and uses FlashPlayer to draw interactive maps. Dazzling!
• Finally, a reader named xynopsis talked about another kind of tools, the Visual Thesaurus. This web tool is not about social mapping, but it shows graphical connections between words. In this previous column, “The Visual Thesaurus: What Does it Show About Thanksgiving?,” I already explored this very funny tool.

As I already said, if you know about other similar new tools, please tell me and I'll gather your comments in a future story.

Sources: Roland Piquepaille, with Slashdot readers' help, March 16, 2003

[Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends]

more handy tools here…

Queen of Engines. Last night I had the good fortune to attend a screening of To Dream Tomorrow, a new documentary of Ada Byron Lovelace directed by John Fuegi and Jo Francis. The film is an extraordinary piece of work and a must… [Matthew G. Kirschenbaum]

sounds like a great flick….

How to write a book in 10 days. Dedicated to aspiring writers, the author of 12 books and several hundred articles shares his technique for writing an entire book size manuscript in 10 days. [Jinn of Quality and Risk]

I'll have to try this. [A Man with a Ph.D. - Richard Gayle's Weblog]

this looks really handy…

Steve Lawrence's paper online or invisible has bee …. Steve Lawrence's paper online or invisible has been referred to before in this blog. But its conclusion is so important that the paper is worth highlighting again:

“Articles freely available online are more highly cited. For greater impact and faster scientific progress, authors and publishers should aim to make research easy to access.”

His paper concludes:

“Free online availability facilitates access in multiple ways, including online archives, direct connections between scientists or research groups, hassle-free links from email, discussion groups, and other services, indexing by web search engines, and the creation of third-party search services. Free online availability of scientific literature offers substantial benefits to science and society. To maximize impact, minimize redundancy, and speed scientific progress, author and publishers should aim to make research easy to access.”

[FOS News]

In the March issue of Information Today, Dick Kase …. In the March issue of Information Today, Dick Kaser interviews Pieter Bolman about open-access initiatives. Bolman is vice-president and Director of STM Relations at Elsevier and former CEO of Pergamon and Academic Press. Kaser lobs some softballs, and Bolman hits them. A valuable window into what commercial publishers are thinking about the prospects of open access and how publishers have been misunderstood by researchers and librarians. [FOS News]

Two views – one from a 'proprietary' publisher and one who promotes open access. Which one will win? My view – The day of the $8000 yearly subscription business model is over and publishers will have to readjust to compete. [A Man with a Ph.D. - Richard Gayle's Weblog]

I agree, subscription is dead, but given the fiscal support of universities and publishing through those universities, I don't think there is any other model out there that is sufficient. cost recovery is all there is or close things down.

Neil Gaiman. has advice for Americans: I have very mixed feelings about Americans disliking the French. I'm English, after all. We have… [Electrolite]

Very funny rebuttal by an Englishman. They've disliked the French a lot longer than we have an know a lot more about dissing them. [A Man with a Ph.D. - Richard Gayle's Weblog]

I think the whole anti-french bit is just a way for people to ignore other problems…. namely our own leadership

Secrets of the XML gods.

text, code, data

It's the season for confession. First Tim Bray reveals a dirty secret: “a lot of input data these days is XML…in most cases, I use the perl regexp engine to read and process it.” Then Sean McGrath fesses up to his Python habit: “I know I should be invoking a WF [well-formed] parser on the content.xml string but gee Ma, I've got work to do.”
… [Jon's Radio]

tools are tools they are not the end all bee all….

Querying XML in databases. Tom Dyson points out that XPath support for PostgreSQL is in the works. Here's the example he gives:
… [Jon's Radio]

handy

Ross is on a roll!!.

Azeem digs up an essay by Paul Saffo on information overload and new organisational structures, written 14 years ago, to make a case for generalists.

We are in a pickle today because we are trying to manage 21st century information overload with 19th century intellectual skills. For example, we still prize the ability to recall specific information over the skill of making connections among seemingly unrelated information. We have become a society of specialists, each knowing more and more about less and less.  

[Ross Mayfield's Weblog]

Ross keeps the hits coming. Read this. He is right on target. We need tools that support generalists, the people with a wide range of interests. They are usually the ones who love to push information around. I have met some full-on geniuses in my life (i.e.. Richard Feynman, Murray Gell-Mann, and Sydney Brenner) and ALL of them were generalists. That is they knew a lot about a specific area but they had the ability to learn a lot rapidly about almost ANYTHING. I sat in with a small informal group and Gell-Mann just talked about trying to decipher Linear B, an ancient language. Sydney Brenner has been at almost every single major biological discovery in the last 40 years (with Crick he demonstrated the existence of mRNA and the genetic code, he developed a novel method to visualize viruses, and provided science with not 1 but 2 major animal models – C. elegans and fugu). The polymath talents of true geniuses can be daunting but there are a tremendous number of people who have similar talents (maybe not as prodigious) that useful tools can amplify. We need more of these. [A Man with a Ph.D. - Richard Gayle's Weblog]

interesting to follow.