[KML: like HTML for geospatial data]
Why is this map layer so cool? Partly because i can look and see who near me is presenting. I wish the JCDL papers had been presented similarly. Maybe i’ll make a retrospective KML for the papers i attended.
Note, it’s better to open this particular
There are some of us still carrying paper around. I like
What i would like is a way to pull together my favorite fact sheets into a little pocket reference book or set of 3×5 cards. I want maps of the world, a detailed periodic table, physical constants, maybe planetary info, maybe something about runes, maybe Norse, Greek, and Roman mythology, maybe the Hebrew and Greek alphabets, maybe a diagram of an idealized bird showing the names of the places for field markings, maybe a yarn size reference. Knots! Yoga! This is unlike these inch thick pocket guides that go deeply into one subject. You can’t easily carry a pocket science guide plus a pocket field guide plus a pocket atlas plus … in your pocket!
So it’s hard to buy something like this because what i would find inessential, you would find cool.
So i was thinking i would go to
If i were in an entrepreneurial frame, i’d create a library of open/commons facts and diagrams scaled to go on one or several 3×5 cards. I’d create an ajax interface where someone could drag and drop these reference cards in their order pages, automatically create a table of contents and perhaps an optional index, and sell perfect bound booklets of several fixed page numbers or any number of cards. Oh, the metadata — the index information, the title, the source credits!
It could be a very cool project, with different organizations contributing cards — O’Reilly might offer simple minimal code cards, Make magazine might offer adhesives or material references, Crochet Me might offer a set of simple and complex stitches. Different science associations could offer their fact sheets. These could be premium collections, priced higher in collaboration with the copyright holder. Maybe there were similar cards offered from the wikipedia, open commons area, but maybe one wants the editorial rigor of a trusted agency.
And just think — small Gutenberg texts might fit in a pocket book — or maybe authors would release their prose or poems in this pocket model.
What i love about this idea is how it could meld the commons with IP owners, how it could let people assemble the content they want or need.
The technological challenge is in the printing. Pocket guides are printed on much thinner paper than much of the
I picked this up from the book trade table in my work place. I’ve enjoyed reading the stories and slowly they worked their magic on me. Perhaps it’s the very last tale in conjunction with the afterward and the notes about specific children dying in the tsunami, or surviving, and looking at the statistics. (and, now that i think of it, the Brian Herbert Dune tale also echoes something about children and the sea.)
Maybe it’s because tomorrow is the second anniversary of the tsunami.
If you’re lucky enough to read this collection from a library or from a used book store, consider also making a donation to Save the Children’s Emergency Children Fund, and honor the spirit that brought such a collection together.
* Updated my Grey Cat bio to reflect OCLC.
* Received a nudge about Yahoo! 360° from a friend, so i tweaked http://360.yahoo.com/judielaine.
* A couple days ago I heard about HiveLive, so I created a HiveLive profile and a geosystems hive. I don’t find the system as interestingly intertwingled as Yahoo! 360° attempts to be.
* This reminds me i have a MySpace page at http://www.myspace.com/judielaine. Just like my for-comments-only blogger profile, my hope is to link my identity to this site so i only have to change one place when, say, my employer changes. Ha. (Oh,
* I suppose i should update my FOAF.
* Meanwhile, in other ways web identities get out of hand, i now have a *second* Google account, so i can access the weed mapping calendar. Why? Because unlike Yahoo, Google doesn’t let you add other email addresses to your account. I do not look forward to the day when i have a Google calendar account for every email address.
* I have an invite for Vox. Maybe that’s one too many….
A while back i imagined making an animated map, showing points on a road trip that could be inter-cut with film and photos from a road trip.
And then i played with Google Earth. And while the swooping around isn’t exactly what i imagined, and nor is there the variety of different map backgrounds — it’s still cool.
And then i read about Snapz Pro, a $70 program that will so video screen capture of a section of screen. There are instructions for importing into iMovie (as well as Final Cut Pro, for Christine). There’s apparently a trial period. Maybe i’ll give it a go.
See the plan at Yosemite Escape. (Now if it could just integrate with 43 places somehow!)
We’d planned this trip because i’d planned the next three Saturdays to be Solaris 9 patching and SAN array microcode & driver upgrades. This weekend was the 34th Annual ARLIS Conference, and RLG was exhibiting. No touching the hardware! After the midweek news an escape is just what we needed.
Yosemite was beautiful: the first view of the valley from the southern tunnel did more than bring tears to my eyes. I was surprised with how much power that view had.
Christine has spent the afternoon capturing and editing her video from the Mariposa Grove, and i updated and published the Yahoo Trip description. What i wish for is an web application that would make a quicktime animation of a
Isn’t it such an easy thing to imagine? Collect your stops (like i’ve done with the trip planner) so they can be marked on a map. Give them an order a little more sensitive than the Yahoo Trip Planner. Have a selection of three to five map “styles:” usual internet style map, “paper map,” comic/western/antique/50’s map, and the satellite view. Maybe state how many seconds between stops. Press enter, and maybe an animated gif is generated. A line marks the roads (perhaps rather abstracted, not at the city street level), at each stop a map marker is formed displaying the name of the point, and then the line moves on. I’d probably pay a silly amount to have that then exported to a high quality quicktime.
Someone ought to make that. If you can whip it up this week, let me know.
It’s nice to have the bsuite and search stats. I continue to feel pity for the users who want to find critter prints in the paw prints blog, but i’m unlikely to fix that.
I am installing a statcounter on the obsolete contact.html page and the new contact page. The stats for Thirdmonth make me believe that only crawlers find the page, but i need some granularity for that. On the new contact page i can only install an image, no javascript.
Also, i clearly need to do something about the tunabreath index.html page. It gets far too many hits for the stale content that it is. 3004 hits, 1587 visits? I’ve “claimed†it at Technorati, hoping that that might help me understand the activity, but shrug.
I’m thinking creating an autorefresh to the blog page and creating a table with categories on that page.
Maybe there’s an rss feed page i should yank? (That the default installation of webalyzer doesn’t display separately from the index page?) Well, there’s an index.xml and a rsd.xml. Changed both to have prefix OBSOLETE. And the anal file manager interface forced index.rfd to become OBSOLETEindexrfd.txt.
First, some of my curiosity would be sated if (1) i had access to mod_rewrite to reconfigure permalinks or (2) if the local version of webalyzer didn’t truncate on the question mark. But, since i can’t change either of those things, i’ve tried some WordPress plugins — and they will do wonderfully.
The problem with testing them on this blog is that this blog isn’t really written for anyone but me. Yet, in the past week or so where i’ve done little with my on-line life I can now get past the one meaningful line in the statslog that notes there have been 1k plus hits to this blog since the beginning of the month.
Search Meter suffers the most from this minimal use because all the searches are mine. The report is sufficient and straight forward.
bSuite’s reports are even better than i’d hoped because they reveal the
I’m not entirely sure what i’m looking at with bSuite’s “Top Stories,” broken into “Most Reads Per Day” (MRPD) and “Most Total Reads” (MTR). My belief is that this should show the difference between a popular piece that gets quickly taken up and spreads like wildfire, represented by the area under a sharp peak in a distribution, and story that is widely referenced and gets steady traffic, represented by the area under a long plateau. Here’s my results, story titles hidden to protect the pathetic:
Most Reads Per Day (MRPD)
A: Tot: 17, Avg: 2, Max: 3
B: Tot: 21, Avg: 2, Max: 5
C: Tot: 23, Avg: 2, Max: 4
Most Total Reads (MTR)
C: Tot: 23, Avg: 2, Max: 4
B: Tot: 21, Avg: 2, Max: 5
A: Tot: 17, Avg: 2, Max: 3
The MTR certainly is sorted in order of “Tot” — which i’ll assume is “total reads in reporting period.” I’d then expect Max to mean “maximum reads during a calendar day in the reporting period” — this would capture the peak. So MRPD should be sorted by Max — in order BCA — but it isn’t.
That’s curious. Still, i think i’m ready to distribute these plug-ins to the other blogs. Maybe i should experiment just a little with the simpletag syntax in preparation of playing with bsuggestive. The preview view is not encouraging…. And i do have “Suggest related entries in post (enables tag support)” selected in the Settings panel.
