Category: Closed Course

Posted on

IM Bots for CALI?

Ideally, these bots could use RSS and anyone with a feed could create their own bots that their visitors could add and use. Would you use a MAKE bot? You could ask it “how do i solder” and it he’d return text and links to our pages on this online and in the magazine

MAKE: Blog: Make AOL Instant Message bots?

Here’s an intriguing idea: we create bots that run on popular IM platforms (Yahoo, AIM, MSN, Jabber,etc) that fetch links to lessons or search the US Code.  I could see this as part of our study group idea, or for use in the classroom.  Put all that IM speak to good use.

technorati tags: , ,

Posted on

Google Base: Powered By RSS

What’s perhaps most interesting about the Google Base design is that it appears to have been designed from the ground up with RSS and XML at its center. One need look no further then the detailed XML Schema and extensive RSS 2.0 specification to realize that Google intends to build the world’s largest RSS “reader” which in turn will become the world’s largest XML database.

Burnham’s Beat: RSS and Google Base: Google Feeds Off The Web

Google extends RSS through the use of a namespace, adding attributes to the <item> level.  While this will certainly consume feeds, it seems that the feed’s author will need to be fairly clear about what the feed is providing.  I wonder how long it will be before we see extensions built for commerce apps that will generate these beefed up feeds?  In many ways it should be fairly straight forward if you are operating some sort of online inventory or catalog to generate these googlified RSS feeds. 

Of course there is still the problem of getting the feeds to Google.  It is not clear if Google will ‘aggregate’ feeds or merely parse the feed and create records.  For it to be really cool, it needs to regularly read the feed.  The focus on the bulk upload pages seems to be on FTP, but RSS is certainly lurking in the background. If I can give Google Base a URL for a catalog feed and have it chekc the URL for new items, then this makes a lot of sense.  I guess we shall see.

technorati tags: , , , ,

Posted on

More VOIP: YakForFree, PC2PC SIP and Video Conferencing

“In a crowded and competitive VoIP marketplace, yakForFree is distinguished by its free video capabilities and ease-of-use. By downloading the free Virtual VideoPhone, which takes less than a minute, users can make free calls over the Internet using a high-speed connection.”

Slashdot | Yak Launches Free Video and Voice Service

This has been in the making for most of the year with CounterPath (formerly XTen) providing the eyeBeam softphone that handles SIP and video.  The feature set offered in the various Yak products suggests an Asterisk backend.  There is at least one report of configuring Asterisk to use the Yak service.  I’m going to try this out, so if anyone wants to test, drop me a note.

technorati tags: , , , , , ,

Posted on

Urchin Customers Reactly Badly to Google Analytics

I don’t know how many other people like us there are – people who paid for hosted Urchin before today’s announcement. But I bet that all of them are pissed.

OnoTech – Google: Start acting like a real business or you’re doomed

There are other stories like this beginning to float to the surface about the change Google made shutting done the paid Urchin service and giving it away as Google Analytics.  Looks like another case of Google doing what Google wants without much input from customers.  Not much of a conversation I guess.

Posted on

XOAD: AJAX For PHP

XOAD, formerly known as NAJAX, is a AJAX/XAP object oriented framework for PHP that allows you to create richer Web applications. It uses JSON and native PHP serialized objects to communicate. Special attention has been paid to security. It supports server side events (observation) and client side events (XOAD Events). Server and client extensions allow features such as HTML manipulation and caching. It is extensively documented, and includes tutorials and examples.

freshmeat.net: Project details for XOAD

I really need to get ahandle on AJAX.  Take a look at this example from XOAD.  There is a lot of potential in education here.  Makes me think that the JS versions of CALI Lessons could be converted to AJAX to get a lot of the Flash features.

Posted on

Libraries, Patrons Clash Over Audiobooks

Yo, Libraries: say No to DRM – Excellent article by Doc Searls about the mess libraries are getting into trying to distribute audio books. In a nutshell, libraries are trying to offer audio books for download, but the major vendor in this area only offers the works in WMA format so patrons cannot use their iPods.  This leads to a lot of frustration.  

Providing a service that allows patrons to downlaod and listen to audiobooks is a very good idea.  Getting locked into a format battle between closed systems is not.  Librarians need to take a closer look ath the technology involved in these sorts of decisions before committing.  Audiobooks in a format that allows use by the greatest number of patrons while protecting the author’s rights would be ideal here.


Posted on

InfoTrac Gets Podcasts

Thomson Gale, part of The Thomson Corporation (NYSE: TOC; TSX: TOC), announces the addition of podcast feeds to InfoTrac on Thomson Gale PowerSearch and its Student Resource Center, Opposing Viewpoints Resource Center and History Resource Center databases. Weekly presidential radio addresses by George W. Bush from January 2005 to the present will be podcast beginning today. New presidential radio addresses will be added weekly.

Gale – Press Room – 2005 – 11 – Thomson Gale Adds Podcast Feeds To Database Resources – Home

Via Library Stuff.  So, will Thompson West pickup on this and include Classcaster stuff in Westlaw?

Posted on

Tracking Wex in the Wild

Since Wex is new and didn’t show up in Google’s blog and web searches before 11/10/05, I thought this would be a neat opportunity to track the spread of a new site across the blogosphere and the web.  What I’ve done is create a page at gada.be: browse on over to wex-lii.gada.be to watch it spread.  Of particular interest is that within 36 hours a couple of splogs are linking through to parts of Wex, and how the major search engines at MSN, Yahoo, and Google have already crawled the site.