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.

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)

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.

As promised, I'm going to try to collect in one place all of the resources I have found for dealing with eBooks on the Sony PRS-500 Reader System.

First let me start with a website that is a central clearing house for all things related to eBooks and eBook readers: the MobileRead Forums. If you can't find it there, it just doesn't exist. There are separate forums for each type of eBook hardware - here's the one for the Sony Reader. In addition, most of the software you would need to edit or convert eBooks for the Reader or any other platform can be found there as well.

In working with eBooks that I already have, I have found that several tools have come in handy: BBeBinder and Book Designer. BBeBinder is especially useful for converting HTML documents to the native .lrf eBook format of the Reader System. Book Designer is a much more full-featured tool for converting almost any type of text file or eBook format to .lrf format (and several other formats, as well). Of course, the files need to be DRM-free for the conversion to work.

Because PDF is such a second-class citizen on the Sony reader, one of the steps in my process is to export text from PDFs (when possible) to HTML or RTF. Once I have the text extracted from the PDF, I can use one of the other tools to create an .lrf file.

In future posts, I'll create some walk-throughs of selected conversions, including some Adobe Captivate animations.

Wired ran an article in the latest issue about a new website that takes the idea of user created video to the next level with a focus on experimental methodology in the sciences. The Journal of Visualized Experiments offers howtos on hardcore experimental methods. These methods have been bound up in tacit knowledge which is extremely difficult to extract from the brains of seasoned researchers. Now with a little work and a community of inquiry spirit, these bits of specialized expertise can be easily accessed as needed. This kind of site really brings to the fore the fact that video has reached the level that desktop publishing reached in the last decade. What's next you might ask? Desktop fabrication. Work has already begun on DIY open source rapid prototypers.

I wrote the other day about Microsoft's new multi-touch display technology, called Surface. I just saw a TED Talk with Blaise Aguera y Arcas on a software product that was recently acquired by Microsoft and a tool that takes advantage of it. The underlying technology that re-envisions how we interact with data is called Seadragon. The current implementation of Seadragon is called Photosynth.

I am not a fan of 3D interfaces in general, but this is clearly a powerful implementation that make sense because of the nature of the represented objects. Because the content being organized is one we naturally interact with in three dimensions (the external world of objects), making sense of pictures of objects in three dimensions is natural. What Photosynth and Seadragon underneath it give us is a powerful way to represent and navigate these natural 3D spaces. Very cool stuff.

So I recently inherited a PowerBook G4. I had to wipe the drive and install Tiger from scratch, which ended up being a real pain in the ass because this PowerBook only has a CD drive and our copy of Tiger is on DVD. I finally got a working set of CDs to install from and got it up and running. After which I thought, why not setup Ubuntu on this machine. It'll probably run faster than OSX Tiger on this old hardware.

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So I was working on getting a search engine setup for our new version of the Tulane Technology Services website and I went to check out how to do this with Google. I knew there was a way to do it, but I wasn't sure what the process for getting it setup was.

As usual, when I got to Google's customized search information, I was very pleasantly surprised not only by how easy this was to do, but all of the really cool customization and presentation features available. Check out the page for doing this at Google:

Google Co-Op - Custom Search Site

Besides an exclusivity clause, the user agreement looked reasonable. As for exclusivity, is there a real competitor to Google out there to consider? I'd say, No. So it's not like this is currently a problem.

You can customize what sites are searched (you're not limited to just one) and how the results are ranked. Because we are a non-profit university we qualify for Public Service Search, so there are no ads on our results pages. Very Nice. Thanks, Google!

Check out the new Technology Services site - the search is in the footer for the site.

Technology Services

Just ran across a really cool social networking site based on one's book collection. It's called LibraryThing and it's an online catalog where you can store your own personal library.

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