Group items tagged

The Stream replaces the homepage you see when you sign in, and shows what's happening in your circle of groups and individuals: new bookmarks, groups joined, and new people followed will be the first actions shown. You'll also see Thanks given to you from other members. More actions will be added, as will aggregate views to avoid telling you over and over that the same page was bookmarked or the same group joined.

Panda, an open source project, will let any site owner willing to do a little coding and integration work to allow user video uploads and playback. Think YouTube in a box. The software itself is free and will run on Amazon Web Services EC2, S3 and SimpleDB. You'll have to pay for the Amazon services, but this is a nice step forward from a variety of existing paid services out there like Zencoder, SesameVault and Hey!Watch. Panda handles all aspects of uploading, transcoding and streaming, handing things off to a Flash player like JW FLV Player by default.

Sensemaking systems don't only help people find stuff faster. That's just the information retrieval part. The bigger story is about augmenting and amplifying our abilities to make sense. Sensemaking adds things like skimming, power reading, organizing, spotting patterns, tracing social networks, taking notes, summarizing, drilling for details, and flagging biases. Reading an article is different from reading a book, and that's different from reading from a collection or stream. Radically new forms of human-information interaction are being enabled by these new technologies. Sensemaking systems not only have front ends (visualization), but also back ends (content analytics and reasoning).

Protocol buffers are a flexible, efficient, automated mechanism for serializing structured data - think XML, but smaller, faster, and simpler. You define how you want your data to be structured once, then you can use special generated source code to easily write and read your structured data to and from a variety of data streams and using a variety of languages. You can even update your data structure without breaking deployed programs that are compiled against the "old" format.

Inspired by Yahoo's Pipes, DERI Web Data Pipes implement a generalization which can also deal with formats such as RDF (RDFa), Microformats and generic XML. DERI Pipes are Open Source Software, ad as such they can be easily extended and applyed in use cases where a local deployment is needed. DERI Pipes provides a rich web GUI where pipes can be graphically edited, debugged and invoked. The execution engine is also available as a standalone JAR, which is ideal for embedded use. DERI Pipes, in general, produce as an output streams of data (e.g. XML, RDF,JSON) that can be used by applications. However, when invoked by a normal browser, they will provide a end user GUI for the user to enter parameter values and browse the results

The Web is ephemeral. Pages change frequently, and it is nearly impossible to find data or follow a link after the underlying page evolves. We present Zoetrope, a system that enables interaction with the historical Web (pages, links, and embedded data) that would otherwise be lost to time. Using a number of novel interactions, the temporal Web can be manipulated, queried, and analyzed from the context of familar pages. Zoetrope is based on a set of operators for manipulating content streams. We describe these primitives and the associated indexing strategies for handling temporal Web data. They form the basis of Zoetrope and enable our construction of new temporal interactions and visualizations.

This article posits a definition and theory for "Library 2.0". It suggests that recent thinking describing the changing Web as "Web 2.0" will have substantial implications for libraries, and recognizes that while these implications keep very close to the history and mission of libraries, they still necessitate a new paradigm for librarianship. The paper applies the theory and definition to the practice of librarianship, specifically addressing how Web 2.0 technologies such as synchronous messaging and streaming media, blogs, wikis, social networks, tagging, RSS feeds, and mashups might intimate changes in how libraries provide access to their collections and user support for that access.

While news from Iran streams to the world, Clay Shirky shows how Facebook, Twitter and TXTs help citizens in repressive regimes to report on real news, bypassing censors (however briefly). The end of top-down control of news is changing the nature of politics.