Alt-metrics: Studying buzz around academic articles

I had a good old moan about citations a couple of weeks back, about how I found all citation software completely useless. Today I found a really interesting article on a new type of citation.

Alt-metrics is basically an idea to study citations of scholarly articles on social sites, scholarly blogs and bookmarking services. The idea is not to replace the system of peer review, but to measure the buzz around scholarly articles in a much faster and wide ranging way. By looking at links and discussion of articles on blog and on Twitter, we could determine the influence a particular article has. This would happen very quickly compared to current systems which count how many times an article has been cited. It could years before an article is cited. Alt-metrics however is not seeking to replace the old system, but simply to augment it by providing an extra measure of the impact an article has.

I would find this really interesting and useful, to determine what sort of impact a particular article has - it shows how influential it has been. I also think this sort of data could be mashed up to provide important meta data around a subject. The article describes a system wherein a researcher could subscribe to a feed of this week’s most significant work. A bloody fantastic idea, as far as I'm concerned - I would definitely use this. 

I'm going to keep a close eye on this, and there's some good links at the bottom of the article that I'm going to dive into.

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The Internet in 1993

I am a huge fan of Huffduffer - a service that lets you capture audio and download it as a podcast - and I follow the feed on Twitter, mainly because it allows me to see if there's some interesting bits of audio being huffduffed. The other day, I found this great podcast through this method. 

The Science Friday radio show did a podcast looking back at an episode from 1993, the first ever radio broadcast to be also put out on the internet. It's like a time capsule with amazing insights into how the early internet was viewed by the general public. It's from a time before the web really took off, when the entire internet community was vastly smaller. It's absolutely fascinating.

The topics brought up: internet communities (and how they could increase social interaction), international collaboration, connection issues, global warming, information overload (and how it's not actually that bad), democratisation of information, government 2.0, social gaming, verification issues, cutting out the middleman (i.e. the music and film industries), social curation, copyright infringement, syndication (to some extent), data filtration, and loads more. All of these are still issues today, and it's amazing to see how little it's actually changed. I think it gives hope that the internet has not negatively affected our lives, as some would have you believe. 

The presenter talks with obvious ignorance of how you "work the internet", describes how to get information on the internet and speaks about "electronic mail".

Absolutely fascinating bit of audio, that (for me) shows the importance of the internet.

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Google, DecorMyEyes, and social search

I just read this New York Times article on DecorMyEyes a really quite evil company that threatens it's customers when they want refunds on counterfeit goods. But that's not why I'm writing this - the way the Times reported this story really got on my nerves. Supposedly it's all Google's fault...

Now I'm all for Google improving their search algorithm - better for them, better for me - but they're not responsible for what is on the web. Nor should they be, as I certainly don't want a single company controlling everything on the web (that's my main fear about Facebook). Anyway, the article seems to totally ignore the fact that the credit card company the poor woman used treated her disgracefully, basically cleaning their hands of it. The article also totally ignores the fact that she was threatened - where were the police? There's thousands of bad companies out there, and people are abused by them every day. Just because it's on the internet doesn't make it any different! It feels very much like the Times is picking on Google, as new media company.

I suspect that one of the reasons that DecorMyEyes was so high up in search (it seems that they've been moved down now) was because few, if any had tried the tactic of using negative links to get to the top of search results. Unfortunately Google doesn't distinguish between a 'good' and a 'bad' link, rating them the same - something that I'm sure Google will work on now it's been tried.

Also interesting is some of the response I saw on Twitter (squee! I got retweeted by Jeff Jarvis!), including Robert Scoble's response: "Facebook will monetize better than Google: I trust my friends. I don't trust algorithms". Which I partially agree with - recommendations through friends for things like movies, music, restaurants, stuff that people like talking about are going to be very useful. But I'm not going to ask my friends about concrete, carpet or boring mundane stuff - that's where Google comes in. Let's not forget that Google is ultimately (partly) social too - the human power of the link. Instead of asking your friends you're asking the world.

So to try and unite these two themes: Google's search needs to improve (just like every other product out there), and it needs to be more social. That's where the rumoured Google Me comes in - which is supposedly the strategy of putting social everywhere, something I'm a bit dubious about as there needs to be a hub for the social to be aggregated. It seems like social could be included in search more - the Google Shopping results show masses of negativity around DecorMyEyes (to the Times' credit they suggest this in the article).

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Lanyrd

I finally got round to checking out Lanyrd today - I'd heard good things about it on the twitters - and I really like the service.

It basically is designed for conferences and meetups, that sort of thing. It allows you to add upcoming conferences, link to websites, Twitter accounts, hashtags etc. You can search by topic, location, attendees and speakers. It looks like a great way to organise buzz around upcoming conferences. You can also see what your friends on Twitter are attending and tracking, a really nice feature since I can see instantly the most interesting conferences coming up.

But the key for me is the coverage side of Lanyrd - after the conference everyone can add video, blog posts, slides, liveblogs, basically everything to the Lanyrd page. This is great because it allows crowdsourced organisation of discussion around the conference - not only what the organisers curate. 

I found what looks like a great conference coming up in January here in Portsmouth - the Heart & Sole conference - which I'm probably going to try and get to, which I wouldn't have found without Lanyrd. And if I do write it up or record any video, I'll be sure to link to it through Lanyrd.

I did have a small issue - there's a 'Subscribe to this calendar' link for places. For instance I want to subscribe to all upcoming conferences in Portsmouth, but the link is a webcal link - so when I clicked it did nothing. I think this is because I don't use Outlook or iCal, but Google Calendar instead. I tweeted about it and I got a great response pretty quickly, which sorted the issue (you have to copy the link and paste it into gCal). Really awesome that Lanyrd are looking after people like that. 

The one thing I would like to see is RSS feeds as well as calendar links - so I can see when new conferences are added in my area. Hopefully Lanyrd can implement this.

Overall I really like Lanyrd and look forward to using it more...

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Really cool concept video of object recognition and digital projection

via youtube.com

Great concept video - plus it shows a really good use case.

I've seen a previous hack where a guy has put an iPad in a kitchen cupboard, but this demo takes it a step further, by directly projecting onto the kitchen surface.

It's this kind of computer interaction that excites me - if you consider how hacked Kinects could be used to do this cheaply, and if you get this connected online, then the possibilities are endless.

I'd love to see this as a inventory of all the things in the kitchen, which you could then search for recipes, or you could check remotely to see what you have. Really interesting to see where this goes.

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The Freebees Challenge

via christianpayne.com

Massively impressed by this.... @documentally (one of the tweeters out there) hitch-hikes his way from Land's End to John O'Groats in just four days, with no money except for 5 Vodafone SIMs. He managed to get most of the way there using only his Twitter and Facebook. Really shows the power of networks.

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Volunteering check-in

A quick idea that was sparked from seeing some tweets coming out of the Not For Profit tweetup (#nfptweetup) - where apparently there was a presentation on geo-location apps.

(image thanks to julietteculver)

I think that location is very exciting field currently, and not just for discount coupons - go see Marshall Kirkpatrick on ReadWriteWeb for some great stuff on that. So I was thinking about how this could be applied to charities after seeing that over 300 British Red Cross shops are on Foursquare, so you can check in. I get thinking about how your phone could, based on where you are, point you to charity related things.

I was first thinking charity shops, but that might get annoying - if you're not looking to buy something and then you get messages telling you buy something, you might get a bit annoyed. So instead I think volunteering could be a viable option. I'm thinking that a database of small, short volunteering jobs could be built up which could be suggested to users nearby. Maybe it's helping an elderly person to get some shopping, or cleaning up a nearby street.

The users could then download an app, or (I don't know if this is possible) some sort of app within Foursquare could alert the user to volunteering nearby. That's why I think short jobs would work best - it could be something done during a lunch break or when you've some spare time on a weekend. Plus a volunteering badge/mayorship game could encourage more volunteering.

So what do you think? A terrible idea?

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Perfect counterpoint to my 'Web of Distrust' post - College Credit for Improving Wikipedia

The project also teaches students an important lesson in media literacy, helping them understand and appreciate how to assess the quality of articles found, not just on Wikipedia, but in all the publications and sources they come across.

via readwriteweb.com

A perfect (optimistic) counterpoint to my post about the levels of trust in media today.

The folks behind Wikipedia are reaching out to universities and encouraging them to get students editing Wikipedia for credit. I just simply love this, and I wish Portsmouth was doing this. Well done to all involved.

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Links for the week of 15-21 November 2010

My links for the week 15-21 November 2010

Funny Angry Birds (the very popular iPhone game) video...

https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/idkjdjficifbfjjkdkiimioljbloddpl

I tweeted that I thought it made my week and it still makes me laugh. A Chrome extension that puts the hilarious Jimmy Wales (creator of Wikipedia) banner on every webpage

http://gormano.blogspot.com/2010/11/beware-of-twitter-scams.html

Dave Gorman writes a great piece about fake Children in Need Twitter accounts, which partially inspired my post about levels of trust on the internet

Another awesome funny video... This song has been stuck in my head all week

http://gizmodo.com/5692614/antimatter-trapped-for-the-first-time

Get ready for that warp drive! Some pretty cool science though :-)

http://ladyada.net/learn/diykinect/#introduction

Very geeky article on how to start hacking your Kinect - be warned I understood about half of it, and I'm a Computing student. Really interesting stuff.

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Ranting about 'genetic discrimination'

A quick rant about one of my lectures today...

One module I am taking as part of my Computing course is "Social Aspects of Computing", a subject that I really think is important to cover as computer scientists have a huge effect on the modern world, through new technologies and interfaces that we use everyday. I think it's important to get context around society and societal issues as software we could be writing in the future may well affect many lives.

However I think that there's quite a few issues with the course - first of all it feels like the lecturer, who will remain nameless, is far too biased against modern technology (ironic isn't it) and regularly takes sides in debates. I call it our 'weekly dose of fear' about what the internet might do to us...

Secondly, and more importantly, there's quite a few things he's plain wrong about. I had a rant on Twitter earlier about his one of his latest lectures in which he talks about genetic discrimination. OK, fair enough, it *may* be an issue in the future, but the simple fact is that genetic analysis that could lead to discrimination is many, many years away from us. A quote from the lecture slides: "a drop of blood is easy to get and easier to analyse" in relation to future employers genetically discriminating against potential employees. Seriously, I can't think of a single instance of an employer getting hold of potential employee's blood, but I find the second part even more problematic. Blood DNA analysis is *not* easy to do. First the sample DNA is relatively small, so it needs to be duplicated using PCR. This is getting cheaper and easier, but it requires a large and expensive machine with specially trained scientists to operate it. Then the entire genome needs to be analysed, an enormous task - the human genome has over 3 billion base pairs (the simplest code level of DNA). This is vastly expensive and massively time-consuming. Think about it, if hospitals aren't taking samples of your DNA to analyse your genome, then businesses are definitely not screening people for certain genes. 

I'm pretty disappointed that such an important topic is so mishandled. It's not like there's not enough important issues to be discussed; I'm pretty sure we're not going to cover the Digital Economy Act or net neutrality. 

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The Web Of Distrust

A couple of things have gone into the inspiration behind this post: Dave Gorman's recent post on fake Children In Need Twitter accounts, and attitudes around Wikipedia that I've heard from academics.

Trust is a funny thing - it can be easily influenced and manipulated. I've found that people are oddly trusting of certain things, and equally strangely distrusting of others. In particular people's trust of Wikipedia is something that seems to be backwards.

The number of time's I've heard from my lecturers that Wikipedia can't be trusted (I'm sure I'd lose a hell of a lot of marks if it cited it), because of it's openness - anyone can edit it and so therefore the information on it can't be verified. Despite that fact that I've found many Wikipedia articles to be better sourced (and have actual links to peer-reviewed articles) than some of the learning resources and links we've been sent by lecturers. But my real issue is the expectation that we can really trust *any* article at all - the scientific method is based around the idea that no fact can be 100% provable. We're told that we should be critically analysing Wikipedia to think about how much we trust it. I see this as stunning arrogance - we should be critically analysing every article, paper and book that we come across, especially stuff that's held up to be absolute truth. 

And this is where my real point comes in - I think that somehow some forms of media have managed to get a false levels of trust. I've found that just because something's on the internet people trust it less and look for more sources, which is great but I just wish they'd apply this to newspaper, TV, books etc.

This was brought home to me, to some effect, by the Children In Need fake accounts that @DaveGorman tweeted about, and subsequently blogged about (see the link above) - it seems that again trust is the issue. People assuming that a Twitter account offering to donate 50p to CiN was legit, when in fact there's no link to information about the cause. It only takes one person who needs to dig a little to expose information that's plain wrong.

So I guess what I'm saying that we should treat all information with just a bit more scepticism, and think about the biases of the authors.

PS. You can donate to Children In Need here

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Net Neutrality? Nope say ConDems

Net Neutrality is a slightly technical matter, so I'll borrow from this excellent Guardian piece, comparing it to allowing broadcast news being allowed to ditch impartiality. It means that internet service providers would be able to put the brakes on certain content on the internet. For example, (to borrow again from the Guardian) if the News Corp-BSkyB merger goes through we could see the BBC's online video crawling along, while Sky's content speeding along. 

This is exactly what the Government should be looking to protect on the internet - and I'm usually against most regulation online - the impartiality that makes the internet so important. In fact, Ed Vaizey the communications minister has announced yesterday that he believes ISPs should be allowed to abandon net neutrality in the favour of big business.

To see who's been influencing Ed Vaizey I had a quick look on Who's Lobbying - an excellent site from the folks behind MySociety - and it turns out that he's met the British Phonographic Industry 4 times since July 2010, various ISPs 4 times and many other traditional old-media companies many times. He met with those supporting net neutrality - Google, the BBC and the Open Rights Group to name a few - exactly zero times. Not an exactly balanced view I'd say.

Vaizey has said that ISPs would have to "present information about their service, including the nature and extent of their traffic management policies and their impact on service quality in a clear, visible and easy to understand form for all their customers". This is total bollocks in an industry that rarely if ever has correct metrics - we supposedly get "up to" 10Mbps at home, a laughable suggestion.

While we're going backwards the US, where net neutrality is much more of an issue, is making noises about progress. Comcast, a US ISP, recently said that  a "consensus on net neutrality is on hand". I just wish that our ISPs were forward looking enough to protect their customers in such a way. 

PS Sorry for being a bit late for my NaBloPoMo post - I was exhaused yesterday

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Short but sweet

OK two short posts today: Google Voice begging and Freecycle

Google Voice is an amazing service that's only available in the US (and maybe Canada) at the moment. Basically it bundles up all your phone and SMS into one nice interface. They've helpfully made a nice video to explain it:

And I'm begging Google to bring it out over here! Please! I'd love to use it and I'd sign up instantly...

The other quick post is about Freecycle a cool service I've signed up to back at home, and here at uni - it allows people in your area to offer stuff that they want to get rid of for free. I have it set to bundle up the posts into, usually several, emails per day. I've seen loads of old TVs given away for free, bikes and lots of other stuff. The sign up process is a bit of a pain, but it's fairly well explained when you join the email group.

Short but sweet (I hope) today :-)

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The Week's Links for 8 - 14th November

Here's the links that I found interesting enough to post on Twitter in the last week. I think this is going to turn into a more regular feature, probably every Sunday - I'm thinking a quick recap on the week. By the way, this is enabled by the awesome technology of packrati.us which automatically captures all the links I post on Twitter and saves them in delicious.

http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/11/facebook-gmail-titan/

Techcrunch starts off the tidal wave of rumours about Facebook launching a web-based email client, supposedly on Monday. The interesting question for me is whether it'll allow people to sign up without an email address - something that (I think) will really attract young users, who are currently signing up with Hotmail, because of MSN chat.

http://www.wirelessgoodness.com/2010/11/12/hacked-kinect-does-multitouch-minority-report-just-around-the-corner/

There's 3 hacked Kinect stories this week, because I'm really excited and impressed about it. The potential for really accurate motion sensing is fascinating.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/nov/12/lib-dems-tuition-fees-clegg

Depressing that I was taken in by the Lib Dems, before the election. It seems Clegg was planning to raise student fees  before the election.

Quite a funny video of Alonso and Massa on a rollercoaster in Abu Dhabi (I'm assuming in the Ferrari World theme park). Not sure Alonso is really enjoying himself...

http://apparat.io/

I'd like to know more about this, but the web page is very bare with no real explanation of what it does, but I think it turns HTML5 into native phone apps. Which would be awesomely cool if true.

http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2010/11/all_the_lonely_people.html

An excellent piece on loneliness by Robert Ebert, capturing some of my thoughts and feelings perfectly

http://billt.posterous.com/now-i-can-wear-my-merit-badge

Would want one of these :-) Badges for inbox zero!

http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/index.php/news/content/view/full/97629

Report that David Cameron's "favourite" think tank "insisted that Thatcher's policy had not gone far enough" :-(

http://spacelift.adactio.com/

Pretty cool webapp from the HTML5 genius Jeremy Keith, hacked together at Science Hack Day SF. 

http://www.crunchgear.com/2010/11/14/more-kinect-craziness-mind-blowing-3d-video-effect/

More Kinect stuff - this guy has overlaid the live video feed on the depth sensor, thereby creating a pseudo-3D. It's pretty cool :-)

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/open-kinect-contest/

Finally Matt Cutts, the web spam guy at Google, sets a open Kinect challenge offering $1000 to the "coolest" Kinect hack, and another $1000 to whoever makes it easiest to write programs on Linux.

PS. Sorry this post is a little late - lost track of time...

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The connected house

Today's blog is going to be pretty short because it's really just a quick idea dump, because I'm pretty tired.

It's not exactly a new idea, a connected house - one that knows what's happens inside it, and can communicate this to the world. If you go back and look at predictions of the future (love this blog) from anytime in the 20th Century, you'll see the concept of home automation - mostly in the form of robot servants and helpers. While I think robotics is still a way off from this, we can build homes that are 'aware' and networked right now - putting sensors on different things and connecting them to the internet allows great control. Andy Stanford-Clark has built a range of sensors into his home, and connected them to Twitter, so he can follow his house. There are services that'll do this for you, but they're massively expensive and not very customised. The Twitter house is build using open-source hardware, and some programming skills for much less. That's something I'd love to do myself (once I actually get a house).

Here's what I would try to connect up:

• Temperature sensors - so I can adjust heating for energy efficiency.
• Electricity sensors - monitor the amount of electricity I'm using, for the whole house, and for particular appliances.
• Light sensors - so I can adjust lighting around the house, and maybe automate some lights.
• Phone sensor - detect's who's called, and when.
• Water sensor - to increase water use efficiency.
• Broadband speed test - see my blog about this.
• Doorbell sensor - so I can tell if someone's called while I'm out.
• Hacked Kinect - for advanced motion sensing, maybe even detect who's in the room.
• A screen - showing me real-time energy use, and other relevant information.

I'd connect this to not only Twitter, but to some sort of system for data mining it so that I could extract more information on how the house is being used. Maybe I could even incorporate some external things, to increase efficiency. This is part of another of my small obsessions, the Internet of Things, which is explained really well in this IBM video.

That's just a quick dump of ideas that I had, I'm sure that I could think up more. The hard bit is making all the data consistent and interoperable. I think I'll start small with a CurrentCost energy meter :-)

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10 pence per tweet

I was an intern at the British Red Cross, earlier this year, working in the Digital Fundraising team to help develop their website. I was thinking about raising money for charity quite a lot, and especially new interesting ways of fundraising digitally

So when I saw this article in RWW I was definitely interested: basically a new service called Help Attack allows you to donate a certain (small) amounts of money each time you tweet (with support for "Facebook and more" coming soon) to charity. Now this is a great idea, but it relies on you to go to Help Attack's website, link it up with your Twitter account, set a donation amount, etc. This is (I think) a bit of pain for the average user - and it means Help Attack has to get the message out about the service.

My solution: charities do a 'licensing deal' with Help Attack, so that the charity can put a simple "Sign in with Twitter to donate" button on their website (obviously with an explanation of what it'll do). This will then automatically set it up to donate say 10 pence for every tweet - or however much the charity wants to set. At some point bank details would have to be entered, but maybe you could set up an autotweeter with a link to the relevant site.

I think this'll even be pretty easy to set up for the charity - Help Attack could even build an API to make it more frictionless. I've seen some charities do similar sort of things before - for example using Just Giving as portal for donations.

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Programme or be programmed

I'm stealing that headline from Douglas Rushkoff's latest book, which I heard about on BBC Outriders. And I just wanted to post quickly about how I agree with the concept (I haven't actually read the book, so....)

Basically he says that kids should be taught programming in school, probably at secondary school level. This would mean that people would be much more aware about basic computing issues, something that affects us everyday. If you understand a little about how Facebook works, then you can learn a little about how to protect yourself. Computing has become so ubiquitous that not learning how to actually make programs is like learning how to read but not write. 

This was brought home to me by Mozilla Drumbeat presentation on the state of IT education in the UK. Basically some parts of the curriculum are plain wrong, and some parts are 10 years out of date. According to the curriculum kids should be making web pages on Microsoft Word and Powerpoint, a completely laughable idea. Also it has somehow missed the web's move towards a semantic web, by about 10 years!

It's no wonder that I can walk into a Computing degree with no previous experience - so I've benefited quite a lot from this! The problem is that we're going to fall behind, if all we're doing is teaching kids how to be obedient, unimaginative office drones. 

So I propose that we start teaching kids how to make stuff on computers, not just spending masses of money on buying computers.

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Bugger....

Damn - my watch broke again. Not the worse thing in the world I know, but I wear my watch every day and it's really annoying not to have it around. I think it's pretty easy to fix though.

See and download the full gallery on posterous

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Automatic Broadband Speed Test

A quick one today as I'm dashing out to Southampton Dorkbot tonight - Maybe I'll write it up tomorrow.

I was reading Gina Trapani's post on the Federal Communications Commision's first ever hack day. The FCC is very much like OFCOM over the pond in the States. First of all I think that a hack day for OFCOM would be great, though much of it I think would be covered by hack days for Open Gov data (much like OpenTech 2010 - write up thanks to @edent).

But what I was most intrigued by was the FCC's API for testing broadband speed - something that would greatly help an idea I had sometime last year. At home, back in Finchampstead, we have terrible broadband often as slow, if not slower than dial-up. So in an effort to persuade BT/Tiscali/whoever-might-fix-that-mess I tried to do a broadband speed test every day and tweet out the results, maybe even chart them somehow. But I had to do this manually - going to speedtest.net (or something similar), do the test, and type up the results. What would have been great is if this would happen automatically every day - which is where the FCC's API comes in. Unfortunately it only seems to work in the US, but I think that OFCOM should build something similar if they're serious about getting fast broadband to everyone in the UK.

An idea that just occurred to me: I could include the speed test data in my house Twitter feed that I've had ideas about for ages.

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Why Did You Buy Me That: Reindeer Candle Holder

via whydidyoubuymethat.com

Someone linked me to whydidyoubuymethat.com earlier, and I stumbled across this...

Seriously - What. The. Fuck.

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Frustrating evening with RSS

I've had a very frustrating evening - I said yesterday that I might actually have a good idea for a post, rather than pointless rambling....

I use an extremely useful little Twitter application called packrati.us which grabs any URL that I post on Twitter and automatically saves it in my Delicious account. This allows me to very easily find links that I've found interesting in the past and find them again. What I was planning to do was somehow grab all the links that I've posted in the last week and serve them up every Sunday as a simple list, with a quick explanation of why I thought them useful. I was hoping that Yahoo Pipes, might be able to help do this, but I've found the documentation very poor and no real explanation of how to do things. All I need is a good way of saying once a week, but without using a specific date, as this would obviously not work. If anyone knows a good way of doing this drop a comment below, or check the contact details in the sidebar (the best is probably Twitter).

Maybe I'll be able to figure it out sometime, but I wanted to get a blog post out today. Or I guess I could do it manually, but that feels a bit stupid considering how useful RSS is.

However on a more positive note, my Mum, Dad and my little sister came down to visit me today. We had a pretty cool day out in Portsmouth, to celebrate my birthday :-)

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Blekko on ReadWriteWeb

First of all, sorry I missed yesterday (I don't know who I'm apologising to, but that's not the point), but I did have a good excuse what with it being my birthday and me being in the pub. So hopefully one missed day is the only one.

I've been working quite a lot today, writing up lecture notes mostly, so I don't have much to report unless you're desperate to learn about negative binary numbers and how they relate to binary subtraction. But if you insist - try here

I did however get the chance to read this great piece by Marshall Kirkpatrick (one of the smartest tech bloggers that I know of) on ReadWriteWeb (probably my favourite of the tech blogs) about Blekko, a new search engine type thing. But how's it different to Google? It allows you specify a certain list of sites to search on, so for example you could set up a list of the best sites on the Internet of Things, and get Blekko to only search that list. It's sort of a curated search, where you know that the content being searched is good quality. It's not so good for general web search - stick to Google for that (I just did a search for that Internet of Things link, and I found it straight away on Google, and not at all on Blekko). Anyway Marshall does a great job of exploring the possibilities of Blekko, and I'm definitely more interested in it after reading the post.

Planning a good post for tomorrow, which may turn out to be a regular feature...

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The Best Podcasts You'll Ever Hear! Or My Favourites At Least

I listen to a hell of a lot of podcasts, 23 in fact, which is quite a lot of audio... And I thought I'd share some of my favourites :-)

What's a podcast I hear (some of) you cry? A regular audio show, much like radio, that's uploaded to the internet for anyone to download and listen to. You can subscribe in iTunes and it'll automatically download the new ones for you. Sometime's they'll be actual radio shows that you can listen to whenever, sometimes they'll be made purely for podcasting. 

This Week in Google: My favourite show on the TWiT network, that is supposed to be about Google and the cloud, but is actually just three really smart people talking about the web, journalism, ethics, openness, and tech in general. Leo Laporte runs the show, the long time tech journalist; along with Gina Trapani, a blogger and open source programmer; and Jeff Jarvis, a journalist and new media (horrible term) advocate. I love the new perspectives that they get on the news, not just the traditional gadget reporting of specs and rumours.

Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: Awesome podcast that makes history fascinating and exciting. He has a knack for really making it feel like a story, not just dry facts about who did what when. He's covered everything from the fall of the Roman empire to the Eastern Front in World War II.

Another F1 podcast: There's a lot of dreadful F1 podcasts out there - boring, boring, boring - Another F1 podcast however is different. Done by two comedians, there's lots of (genuinely funny) jokes, swearing and ripping into Jonathan Legard. They actually manage to make reviewing the race I just watched entertaining, which is properly impressive.

This American Life: Hipster's favourite, a American (funnily enough) radio show about well... loads of cool and interesting stuff. It's kind of investigative journalism, combined with fascinating real-life stories. Excellent

Fighting Talk: Sport/Comedy/Quiz show on BBC Radio 5 live. Colin Murray is the host, with a whole load of sports people, comedians, sports reporters to do a quiz about the week's sport. Really funny, fast paced - love it

Finally, my Huffduffer feed: this one's a little different, because Huffduffer is a really cool site that lets you capture random bits of audio floating about the web, and turn it into your own personal podcast. I use it for listening to conference talks, podcasts that I want to try out, random bits of weird music. I also like following @Huffduffer on Twitter, as I'll occasionally see something that looks cool and grab that. You can also see what other users are Huffduffing and subscribe to their feeds, which I do a lot with Jeremy Keith, the site's creator because he always manages to find some cool new stuff. 

As I said I listen to 23 podcasts regularly, so here's the full list, using BridgeURL: http://bridgeurl.com/Podcast-Full-list

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Building a website

Part of the Web Authoring and Design coursework that I have to do is to build a website, something I've wanted to do for quite a long time now. I'm actually quite excited as at least some of the website I'm building I'll try and keep up somewhere as I think it'll be useful in the future. The pictures I took (I pull them into Evernote so I can find them later) are from the planning that I started this morning.

The site will initially run only on my memory stick, as I don't actually have a host yet, but I'll probably get one (either the free version of Amazon Web Services or pay for a proper Dreamhost account)   soon. Then I'll try and move most of the stuff across, as I hope it'll have some value in the future. I'll keep you posted as I get along.

See and download the full gallery on posterous

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NaBloPoMo

So I'm finally getting round to trying out NaBloPoMo - National Blog Posting Month - basically posting a blog post every day for a month. Hopefully I can keep this up for a month...

I'm going to try to focus on mostly text posts, because I feel like my writing skillz are pretty poor. I figure writing something everyday for 30 days will have some benefit. On the days I don't have time or inclination it may end up being just a link with some context.

NaBloPoMo is a sort of community over at nablopomo.com that I joined up to, but you'll can get all my posts right here or on my Twitter.

Well that's all I can think of for my first post - wish me luck for the next month....

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Bottle Bank Arcade

via youtube.com

Fun idea (thanks to this Slideshare for the link). Wonder if this could be reproduced or at KISC...

Not sure if something identical could be built, but something that makes recycling fun. Especially when the alternative is to force campers to do it under the watchful eye of a Pinkie (and when it's dumped the Pinkies have to do it themselves).

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