I was working with Stephen Heppell today and he told me about something he had seen in a PC World store. When I expressed disbelief, he produced a photograph and settled the matter there and then!
En passant… 99p seems a lot to pay for Brittanica 2003. That’s — let me see (counts on fingers) — four whole years ago.
There’s a lot of blogobuzz about Yahoo Pipes.
Yahoo describes it as:
a hosted service that lets you remix feeds and create new data mashups in a visual programming environment. The name of the service pays tribute to Unix pipes, which let programmers do astonishingly clever things by making it easy to chain simple utilities together on the command line.
Tim O’Reilly has a typically thoughtful piece about it. He calls it
a milestone in the history of the internet. It’s a service that generalizes the idea of the mashup, providing a drag and drop editor that allows you to connect internet data sources, process them, and redirect the output. Yahoo! describes it as “an interactive feed aggregator and manipulator” that allows you to “create feeds that are more powerful, useful and relevant.” While it’s still a bit rough around the edges, it has enormous promise in turning the web into a programmable environment for everyone…
Brady Forrest has created a terrific exposition of the modules for building pipes.
One of the most intriguing things about Pipes is that it has enabled Yahoo to recapture some of the high technical ground it had ceded to Google. The company — which is having its problems with Wall Street recently — has just raised the threshold for Web 2.0 innovation.
Yippee!
… is the headline on GMSV’s report of the forthcoming digital version of Playboy
Playboy magazine, which for more than 50 years has celebrated the pleasures of the analog world in its own special way, is now planning to enshrine that history in digital form. The Wall Street Journal reports that beginning in the fall, Playboy will release what will eventually be a six-DVD set of archives, into which all 115,880 pages from 636 editions will be scanned and text-searchable. Each disc will retail for $100, including a 200-page book. While scanned pages may seem a crude sort of way to present content digitally, magazine founder Hugh Hefner wanted to preserve the zeitgeist of the decades. “Part of the great charm of revisiting the magazine,” said Hefner, “is the combination of the words, the pictures and the advertising, the entire sense of the pop culture of any particular era. People remember these issues at a particular point in time; it’s like a part of coming of age.” Oh, and if the magazine is reproduced in original form, Playboy believes, no additional payments are due the writers and artists. This interpretation, as you might imagine, is subject to some disagreement. Images from the discs will be printable but not transferable, at least for those few days before a hack appears. Playboy hopes the set becomes a collector’s item and adds to what Hefner insists is the brand’s return to hipness. “Something remarkable has happened to the Playboy brand in the past few years,” said Hefner. “It is hot again. We have a hit TV show; we just opened up the Playboy Club casino in Vegas; and the brand is very hot in clothing. … It all connects to the future and the retro-cool phenomenon.”
Er, sure. There’s nothing like old print ads to get one going.
Thoughtful post by Lorcan Dempsey…
I was looking at an announcement on the University of Edinburgh’s site about The British Academy Warton Lecture on Poetry, to be given this year on Yeats by his biographer Roy Foster. A distinguished event! I was interested looking to the bottom of the page to see links to the Wikipedia pages for both Yeats and Warton.
This seemed to me to show Wikipedia’s growing role as an addressable knowledge base. It makes further information about a topic available at the end of a URL. It relieves people of having to create their own context and background. As in this case, context, or condensed background, about Warton and Yeats is available for linking, relieving the developers of having to provide it themselves.
Condensed background is a phrase used by Timothy Burke, history professor at Swarthmore, and author of the Burn the catalog piece of some years back. I was rereading Burn the catalog earlier and was interested to come across his blog discussion of Wikipedia.
“I’m using Wikipedia this semester where it seems appropriate: to provide quick, condensed background on a historical subject as preparation for a more general discussion. Next week, for example, the students are having a quick look at the Malthus entry as part of a broader discussion of critiques of progress in the Enlightenment.”
And he goes on to comment on the Middlebury decision which is discussed in my post of the other day.
“Big deal. The folks at Middlebury are perfectly correct to say that students shouldn’t be using Wikipedia as an evidentiary source in research papers. That’s got nothing to do with Wikipedia’s “unreliability”, or the fact that it’s on the web, or anything else of that sort. It’s because you don’t cite an encyclopedia article as a source when you’re writing an undergraduate paper in a history course at a selective liberal-arts college. Any encyclopedia is just a starting place, a locator, a navigational beacon. I’d be just as distressed at reading a long research paper in my course that used the Encylopedia Britannica extensively. As a starting place, Wikipedia has an advantage over Brittanica, though: it covers more topics, is easier to access and use, and frankly often has a fairly good set of suggestions about where to look next.”
He uses Wikitedium in the title of the post, and I thought how apt an expression this was to characterize the periodic library discussions about Wikipedia which pitch authority against editorial permissiveness.
Wikipedia is a collection. Some entries are excellent, some less so. One cannot summarily judge its value in the way that one might have done when deciding whether or not to buy or recommend a reference book. Judgements about ‘authority’ and utility have to be made at the article level, and who has the time and expertise to flag individual articles in this way? Rather than continuing a tedious Wikipedia good/Wikipedia bad conversation, we should recognize the attraction it has as an addressable knowledge base, understand the variety of uses to which it is put, and remind folks of the judgments they need to make depending on those uses.
Well, here’s what the Huffington Post claims.
According to multiple sources blabbing to the Harvard Crimson and the Boston Globe, Harvard is expected to appoint its first female president this weekend: Drew Gilpin Faust, current dean of Radcliffe. Faust, 59, a top Civil War historian, would succeed former president Lawrence Summers, who resigned in June after much conflict with the faculty, not to mention his controversial and widely decried comments speculating that innate intellectual disparities between men and women accounted for the dearth of women in high-ranking positions in science, based in part on how his twin daughters played with trucks. Following the outcry sparked by those comments, Faust, who does not have a degree from Harvard, was appointed by Summers to oversee two faculty task forces that examined gender diversity at Harvard…