This is going to be interesting. Flock is a new sort of browser that is blogger friendly, among other things. This post is created with Flock. You can find Flock here. And I just added this, so you can edit too. Categories would be nice.
10 Fun Things To Do With RSS
Well, in case you were wondering how the heck to have even more fun with RSS feeds, Micro Persuasion has this list of things to rev up your need 2 feed.
The Top Ten Design Mistakes in Weblogs
Great article, and the design short comings are pretty easy to overcome. Via RSS4Lib
Weblog Usability: The Top Ten Design Mistakes (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox)
Weblogs are often too internally focused and ignore key usability issues, making it hard for new readers to understand the site and trust the author.
Students, Laptops, Lots of Fun
This is an oft discussed topic on teknoids, so it is interesting to see that are larger issues here than whether or not a CivPro lecture is interesting enough to keep students from bidding on eBay during class.
Laptops in classrooms not working out as hoped
Some professors have responded to the prevalence of networked computers in class by changing their teaching styles. The University of Houston’s Prof. Adams, for instance, now peppers his lectures with enough questions to reduce students’ Web surfing. When he is discussing a particularly complex subject, he says, he tells students to close their laptops.
Flash MP3 Player Used in ‘Play it now’
XSPF Web Music Player (Flash) – Plays MP3 on your website
XSPF Web Music Player is a flash-based web application that uses xspf playlist format to play mp3 songs. XSPF is the XML Shareable Playlist Format. The software is written in Actionscript 2.
RoundCube: AJAX Webmail
Slashdot | Open Source AJAX Webmail
“It seems AJAX webmail is all the craze. Right on the heels of both Microsoft and Yahoo launching beta versions of their new AJAX webmail clients, an Open Source startup RoundCube has released an alpha of a GPLed AJAX webmail client. While there are still many features missing (like search!), the demo they have is completely cross-browser compliant and overall very impressive.”
Blackboard, WebCT Merge; Unwired Campuses; One Stop Copyright Clearnace
The Chronicle’s Wired Campus Blog posted these stories of interest yesterday and today:
Microsoft, Yahoo Feel The IM Love
Microsoft, Yahoo Reach Instant Messaging Deal – Yahoo! News
A Yahoo-Microsoft partnership, allowing users of the competing services to exchange messages seamlessly, would give the two companies nearly as many users combined as AOL has in total.
Vertical Search Engines Making Comeback
Vertical Search Engines Rising Again?
Healthline specializes in helping people get access to sophisticated medical information. It uses cutting-edge semantic search techniques to let someone with limited medical knowledge mine sophisticated medical data from a Web site. By way of example, the company says searching for “Blackberry thumb” yields useful results.