Minding the Gap
Jim Pickworth pointed me to Hans Rosling’s series of TED talks. Clearly I have been sleeping and missed pointers to these in the past. Hans Rosling is an amazingly dynamic and fluid presenter who has embarked on a mission of…
Category Info Architecture
Luxuriating in the Complex
I attended a wildly animated, wonderfully amusing and thought provoking keynote talk by David Weinberger entitled ’The Business of the Miscellaneous’ at the Annual General Meeting of the CIRA this afternoon. Weinberger claims that society has solved the threat posed…
How Canadian Voters Cope with Crises
Apparently, when the going gets tough, Canadians turn to lawyers. I have semi-arbitrarily qualified the two world wars as national crises (yes, we could argue over what other crises may well have faced the nation, but for sake of simple…
Extending Firefox
I don’t normally blog about Firefox extensions. I have far too many installed, but this latest one is something that should have been a part of Firefox on install. If you are running Firefox, you owe yourself to test this…
Medieval Crime and the Modern Database
I attended a great talk by Steven Bednarski of St. Jerome’s University today. His CV lists UQAM, York, Toronto as places of experience. His framing question today: How does a social historian make use of a research database? Bednarski explains…
Pull to Push and Back to Pull Again
The Blackberry was cool because it brought us push versus pull email…realistically RIM was doing the pulling for you and pushing it to you. As an email notification popped up as I was trolling through my RSS feeds, it suddenly…
Open Source Genealogy
I have been searching for ways to improve my genealogical research. I set two specific criteria for my search: A cross-platform browser/editor that uses GEDCOM files natively; A means to share genealogical data in a free and open manner Two…
Realtime Mashup
This one could also be called…another great time waster…but it is well done. FlickrVision uses streaming photo posts from Flickr that have locational references. It displays geo-referenced popups of the images as they are posted to Flickr. Hovering over a…
Google Quick Visualization for Historians
A year ago I wrote a recipe for the TAPoR project to demonstrate a way for historians to utilize text analysis tools to plumb historical data from Google. In the recipe a user aggregated search results from Google and used…
Open Testing 2.0
Tangler offers an innovative approach to open testing of online products. A combination of instant messaging and real-time forums, Tangler provides a repository of joinable discussions and archives discussions for reference. The site seems geared towards testing of new products…
Guelph Memory
A great online historical tour of the University of Guelph campus is now available. It doesn’t feature whizzbang flash effects or implement AJAX functionality. Instead, it delivers a smooth and effective tour in a simple and compelling fashion with simple…
RSS Explained Making the Rounds
The folks at CommonCraft have put together an awesome little video. It explains, as simply as is possible, how RSS works, why its something of value to to you and how you can go about hooking yourself up. The short…