Category: Closed Course

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Running an applicant tracking serivce?

CATS is an applicant tracking system (ATS). Built on the LAMP platform (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP), it can be installed and running in 5 minutes on a Unix or Windows platform. It features built-in applicant tracking, resume search, CRM, and a reporting dashboard for staffing agencies and corporate HR departments.

freshmeat.net: Project details for CATS

Idea: law schools develop lots of fun and interesting ways to track faculty canidates, mostly involving lots of 3 ring binders.  This sort of system would allow an appointments committe to gather all of that data and information into a single electronic archive.  Could be hosted or locally run.

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Amazon Connecting Authors to Audience

“The New York Times is reporting that Amazon is now providing the ability for authors to reach out to their fans via blogs in a program called Amazon Connect. So far, Amazon has recruited a group of about a dozen authors, including novelists, writers of child care manuals and experts on subjects as diverse as real estate investing, science, fishing and the lyrics of the Grateful Dead. Now the authors finally have the ability to respond back to comments!

Slashdot | Amazon Connect

Sounds like a great idea.  Plenty of potential for something like this in the CALIverse, blogs for authors, or at least someplace for students to provide feedback, etc.  Of course it’s a bit more complicated in the wolrd of educator-student, but in the proper context it would be a good thing.

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Some changes around here

Since I’ve been using Flock my blogging habits have changed. Thanks to Flock’s builtin blogging client I can connect to all of my various blog and blog-like sites to create and edit posts. So I can post to <CONTENT /> (WordPress), Teknoids (Drupal), and CALIopolis (LifeType) from a single consistant interface. This is cool. Flock makes it happen through the magic of XML-RPC and assorted blogging APIs. Bottomline: given the ease of posting I’ve shifted where stuff gets posted.

This blog, <CONTENT />, remains my primary personal blog. Anything may turn up here, but it is likely to be stuff that concerns my interests in technology and education. My occasional ramblings on whatever catches my brain will end up here.

Links to and posts about cool tech tools and some tech news are going to Teknoids. I’m still using the ‘cooltool’ category to mark these posts on Teknoids. My hope is that posting there will provide more information to my teknoid friends. The focus is mainly on stuff that Ifind useful and that is of use to legal academia in a broad sense.

Finally, educational and instructional technology oriented posts are going to CALIopolis, the official blog of CALI. Generally things that would be within the CALI mission will get blogged there.

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Typepad Problems, CALI Opportunity?

Problems persist at the popular blog hosting service TypePad, with numerous users reporting that they are unable to access their blog management system. In addition, a number of TypePad users report that posts from the past three days have disappeared from their blogs. While TypePad-hosted sites are visible, service operator Six Apart says the TypePad blogging application is currently unavailable and describes the status of TypePad sites as “degraded.” At one point blogs had to be restored from backup, which is why the most recent posts are missing from many blogs.

Netcraft: Performance Problems Persist for TypePad

A certain well regarded network of legal academia blogs is running on Typepad.  Suppose CALI offered the network a dedicated server and support.  Beats getting whacked by Typepad outages at potentially the most important time of the year.

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E-paper around the corner?

Siemens, the German-based electronics company, is readying a new e-paper technology that it claims will be inexpensive enough to appear on consumer packaging, such as breakfast cereal boxes.

E-paper: coming soon to a cereal box near you

Siemens expects to have products ready for 2007.  Seems to me that e-paper has been about 2 years out for the past 5-7 years.  Eventually we will see it and it will be revolutionary, but I’m not going to hold my breath.

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Amazon Fires Latest Shot in Search Wars

Amazon on Tuesday rolled out the Alexa Web Search Platform, which opens up 5 billion documents and 300 terabytes of data to anyone, along with offering computer and storage time for processing tasks. The idea is to enable the creation of new services that utilize Alexa’s vast Web archive and search technology.

BetaNews | Amazon Opens Up Alexa Search Index

This of course got lots of blog coverage.  The big take away: developers can reach into the what Alex has crawled and develop services on top of it for reasonable fees.  Look for some exciting search products to turn up shortly and I wouldn’t be surprised if the Google API opens up a bit more.

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Wherein Elmer Hunts for the Origin of Weblog

The first occurence of “weblog” on Scritping News: Dave searches for the first mention of the term weblog on his site and finds one from January 20, 1998. 

I thought, hey, sounds like a job for Google Groups.  An advanced search for weblog turns up this.  Early on weblog referred to those pesky streams of data written by http servers to some obscure spot on your hard drive. 

Then on March 24, 1997 this post from the Cyberspace Snow and Avalanche Center hit the rec.skiing and other outdoor newsgroups.  In the ‘Organizational’ section of the announcement it mentions “There is now a weblog available online so you can see what has been done lately. ”  Cool, an early weblog.  Next stop: the Way Back Machine.

The Way back Machine entry for CSAC is here.  Of interest is the Feb. 19, 1997 entry.
Near the bottom of the page under “Organizational Information” is this: “NEW:Check our web log to see what we’ve done on the site most recently.”  Alas, the web log is not included in the archive, but it certainly seems interesting.

The trail goes cold until Dec. 23, 1997 when Jorn Barger made this announcement to alt.society.neutopia:

After talking a lot about Frontier and Scripting News
(www.scripting.com), I decided to start my own webpage logging the best
stuff I find as I surf, on a daily basis:

<URL:http://www.mcs.net/~jorn/html/weblog.html>

This will cover any and everything that interests me, from net culture
to politics to literature etc.

j

And a couple of days later, Dec 25, 1997, on comp.infosystems.www.announce he posted this:

My latest webpage is a daily running log of the best webpages I visit:

<URL:http://www.mcs.net/~jorn/html/weblog.html>

If your interests seem to overlap mine, even partially, bookmark this
link and check back every day or so for new discoveries.

I suspect that in a year there’ll be hundreds of people maintaining
pages like this, and that this will allow good URLs to spread much more
quickly… so I recommend that all enthusiastic surfers take a shot at
maintaining such a “weblog” (using the Frontier scripting environment, if you need to, for efficiency).

j

After that the rest is, as they say history. 

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Why2.0?

BTW, don’t confuse When with Where 2.0, which was an O’Reilly conference in June in SF. Of course now we’re all waiting for What 2.0, and then we can roll around to the 3.0’s.

Scripting News: 12/6/2005

What we really need is Why2.0?, a non-conference that looks at just what the heck it is that we are doing anyway and makes us explain ourselves at the risk of losing funding.  Reminds me of a prof  my wife had years ago who was fond of saying ‘technology is the answer, what’s the question?’  So how about it? Why2.0? in Atlanta in the spring.  BTW, no google hits for why2.0 yet, so maybe I’m on to something:)

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