Just heard about a really cool flickr visualization called Tag Galaxy (Thanks, Mike!). When you visit the site you can search flickr for a particular tag and then build a stack of related tags to narrow a search. Related tags are displayed in a 3D visualization in the style of a planet with each related tag displayed as a smaller satellite object orbiting the original "planet." As you click through each additional tag in the stack, the process repeats narrowing the search. When you are finished narrowing your search, you simply click the central "planet." Images meeting your search are arranged as the outer surface of the sphere. You can click and drag to rotate the sphere and click on individual images to pull them out and show them in front of the rest on the sphere. Another click brings the full image up and provides some of the flickr metadata and a link to the flickr page for the image.

As a visualization that provides an easy way to browse a large number of related images quickly, this tool is very successful. Often, 3D interfaces do not provide the most efficient means to accessing data. But in this case, there's and excellent fit. Take a moment to check out the site. It's definitely worth the bookmark.

http://taggalaxy.de/

I just saw a post on TeleRead that mentioned that Book Glutton is up for a Webby award. I'd heard of Book Glutton before, but I haven't checked it out until now. It's a really cool idea for a community website.

The idea is that you create an account on the site and then access public domain works or user contributed texts using a slick little browser-based book reader, called The Unbound Reader. The twist is that you can open a pane on either side of The Unbound Reader that lets you chat with other readers of the current book in real-time or make annotations that are stored for your own access or shared with other users. In addition, the community aspect of the site includes reading groups that share interest in particular topics or authors. You can join already existing groups or create your own group, which might include your friends or colleagues.

The idea reminds me of the WordPress theme called CommentPress. These tools are really exciting from an instructional technology point of view. They really allow people to work together in close collaboration on a shared text. And they both provide a mechanism that brings together the strengths of wikis with the close reading of a shared document. There's some great potential here from an educational perspective. It's hard to beat this kind of active engagement.

I'm attending another excellent New Media Consortium online symposium. This time the topic is educational uses of mashups. As with any subject covered by academics, there's been significant effort and time spent in the symposium on defining the topic of the symposium itself. Several of the presenters have spent time trying to put a finger on just what a mashup is.

For the most part, the focus is on new tools and structures that combine data from multiple and sometimes disparate sources in novel ways. Often the product is a visually interesting website or Internet-based tool. But, in its broadest sense, almost any cultural artifact can be seen as a mashup. In a real sense, everything that is a cultural product takes the current cultural landscape as a given upon which it can then build, borrowing more or less from previous cultural artifacts. The movement of mashing up and remixing is transforming how we experience culture and its products. And because educational institutions are situated in culture, it is unsurprising that this movement is being embraced by educators. The topic is fascinating from a technological as well as philosophical point of view.

So far, one of my favorite presentations has been "Confessions of a Mashup Un-Artist" by Brian Lamb of the University of British Columbia. Brian's presentation was itself a masterful mashup, more a live performance employing images, video, music and text than a traditional presentation. In addition, the NMC folks did something really excellent by having Brian perform in Second Life and then streaming the performance out to the web using Adobe Connect. That setup allowed the performance to be recorded, which is how I was able to experience it because I had a class during the actual time the performance was given. Take a peek at what it looked like:

It was absolutely fantastic. Some of the symposium participants really had no idea what to make of it. And many others really got into and started dancing in the amphitheater. Really great stuff.

At the beginning of last week, I had the pleasure of participating in a workshop hosted by the Innovative Learning Center on Digital Storytelling. The workshop was led by two great facilitators from the Center for Digital Storytelling based in Berkeley, California. Daniel Weinshenker, the Director of the Denver Office, and Jessica McCoy, an instructor based at the Berkeley office, did a wonderful job leading the workshop. If you're unfamiliar with Digital Storytelling, take a look at the Center's website. Jessica is also involved with an organization called Stories for Change. Both websites host several amazing examples of digital stories.

[More]

Just saw this post in the NMC's RSS feed. It's dated for tomorrow (24 February) but the post is up now. This is exciting news. I've found my experiences in Second Life to be very rewarding so far, but I have been concerned that Linden Labs has too much power over all aspects of the virtual world to be compatible with the open atmosphere cultivated in American higher education. It's good that NMC is pursuing alternative open source initiatives while still maintaining their commitment to Second Life. This seems like good news all around. I'm excited about participating in the endeavor.

For the last two days, I have been attending a conference sponsored by the New Media Consortium on the Evolution of Communication. The conference is being held wholly in Second Life. This is the first time I have spent any amount of time in-world and it's my first real work being done there. I have to say, I have been very skeptical of the use of Second Life for this sort of thing. But my experience so far has been spectacular. I am using very high-end computers with massive bandwidth, though. My colleague David Robinson hasn't had quite as good of an experience going back and forth among different machines, some of which are not the latest hardware.

All things considered, I am more positive about Tulane's investment of resources in Second Life to build out our island. Participating in a conference like this one has given me some good ideas about how best to use the tool and how not to use it. The conference has been very enlightening and the presentations have been excellent, as is the norm for NMC events.

Just uploaded a recording of a presentation I did yesterday on eBooks. Here's the description:

eBooks: Promise and Reality

eBooks have been around for several years and every couple of years the technology is hyped as being ready for mass consumption. We'll take a look at the current eBook landscape. I'll demo several hardware solutions, including the Sony PRS-500 Reader System and alternative devices like cell phones and the PlayStation Portable. I'll demonstrate how to use BookDesigner to convert among formats and other software tools. We'll talk about sources for eBooks like the Gutenberg Project. We'll also take a look at newly announced technology, including Amazon's Kindle eBook reader, Adobe's new Digital Editions format, and color eInk devices that were shown at SIGGRAPH this summer.

View the Presentation

(Adobe Presenter Flash format)

Just read a nice article on New Scientist about work by Microsoft and Mitsubishi on a novel approach to handling the occlusion problem and the "fat finger" problem of current multi-touch interfaces. There's also a video of a prototype of the LucidTouch device.

The current prototype device uses a camera on a boom focused on the hands on the back of the device. An overlay shadow is superimposed over the image showing the location of the hands without occluding the display. Active finger touch points are shown and a very intuitive method for showing the hand-off of selected items between fingers is also used. It's a nice glimpse of what's ahead in the multi-touch arena.

Check out the very cool tech from Carnegie Mellon University, NASA's Ames Research Center, and CharmedLabs. Here's the press release. The technology includes an inexpensive robotic device that snaps pictures and software for stitching them together and uploading to a community-driven website. In cooperation with Google, a new Gigapan layer is being added to Google Earth to allow fly-throughs of Gigapan-captured environments. Take a look at the Gigapan site and try out some of the shared environments. Very cool.

Just read an article at Information Week about the business of copyright. The article refers to a recent report by the Computer and Communications Industry Association that shows that more value is generated for the economy by the exercise of fair use rights than is generated by copyright alone. To those of us who have been urging people to exercise those fair use rights aggressively, this is welcome vindication. Like an atrophying muscle, our fair use rights will simply go away - taken by greedy corporations and their lobbyists if we don't use them and fight for them.