Eric Blue's Blog

One key theme that keeps popping up at me is the critical need to alleviate information overload, and find techniques that let you focus on what matters most. As a knowledge worker, enthusiastic self-learner and knowledge management junkie, I'm bombarded with way too much info (emails, IMs, magazines, books, online news, blogs, and now by my own volition..... microblogging).

Much of my online reading these days comes from the blogosphere. As of today, I have 259 RSS feeds, and that's *after* I took time a few months ago and considerably trimmed my number of subscriptions. Long ago, I used to be able to read new blog posts on a daily basis. Due to my busy schedule, and the shear volume of articles, I typically only spend 1-2 days a week combing through a handful of favorite feeds. I'm fairly certain I'm missing some really great posts. Luckily, I discovered a service last week that seems to be the answer to my problems! Enter aideRSS.....

What does aideRSS do? (from their FAQ):

"There are over 86 million blogs, and each one has an RSS feed. All it takes is a few subscriptions to the sites that interest you, and your feed reader is overwhelmed with a never-ending stream of hundreds of headlines. Like an aide or a personal assistant, AideRSS helps to filter and rank these feeds based on a number of criteria to help you read what matters, ensure that you find the good stuff, and to help keep things organized and manageable."

The magic is really in their PostRank scoring system. All blog posts are given a score of 1 - 10 (low - high), and popularity is based on a number of factors (# of comments, hits, del.icio.us posts, diggs, etc.). For a detailed overview, check out the PostRank page.

As a standalone service, aideRSS is great. For a given RSS feed, you can see the following:

• PostRank for each article, along with online conversations
• Articles categorized by Good Posts, Great Posts, Best Posts, and Top 20
• Widgets to embed aideRSS goodies on your own site (I've used this for my Popular Posts section

You can check out my aideRSS stats at: http://www.aiderss.com/all/eric-blue.com/blog/

Now, the feature that I'm most interested in is integration with Google Reader. You can either install a Firefox plugin, or GreaseMonkey Script. Here's a quick screenshot of what Google Reader looks like with aideRSS support:

Overall, I'm impressed! Check it out, I'm sure you won't be disappointed.

Posted by EricB at 05:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Post to del.icio.us | Do you Digg it?

OK, so last month I blogged about the proliferation of microblogging sites like Twitter, and how I just don't get them! I received some great feedback on the post, and decided that I probably should give Twitter a try before I totally dismiss it. With that said, I've decided to give it a go for at least a couple months and see what it's like. I've only created a handful of tweets, but so far I've connected to some fellow bloggers out there, and have discovered some people with similar interests.

If you're interested, checkout my Twitter page at http://twitter.com/ericblue.

Posted by EricB at 05:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Post to del.icio.us | Do you Digg it?

Many of my posts the last few months have been geared towards Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) and Semantic Wikis. Since I last posted about Vannevar Bush's vision for a Personal Memex, I decided to focus my efforts on building an impressive personal travel journal, and share the results to illustrate the capabilities of a Memex.

What's this Memex thing all about?

While the process for setting up a Personal Memex can be quite involved, the idea is fairly simple. My memex is a personal semantic wiki that exists for the sole purpose of centralizing my research notes, learning activities, personal journals, and allows me to easily retrieve important data and memories that I enter into the system. My memex is built entirely from existing open source projects, and essentially runs MediaWiki (the wiki software used for Wikipedia) with a number of Semantic extensions, and a few extensions I have written for myself. The Personal Travel Journal is a single integrated feature and section of my Personal Memex.

Motivation

Although you can't exactly call me a world traveler, I've gone on my fair share of trips in the last decade, and have spent a lot of time visiting my friends and family on the east coast. Since I purchased my first digital camera in 2000, I've literally taken thousands of photos and videos. And, back in 2005 I started keeping a written journal of the places I visited (family visits, weddings, vacations, weekend getaways, cruises, business trips, etc.) So far I can account for at least 60 major trips.

Ultimately, I wanted to have a central place to store all the details of the my travels (dates, places, people), And, have a nice personal (private) website where I can view photos, videos, maps, and comment on each trip. Sadly, for many people, as time passes memories of trips and events can often fade. With the help of the Memex, forgotten memories will be a thing of the past.

What can the personal travel journal do?

At first glance, the travel journal may look like a plain old webpage with some embedded photos. But, it's much more powerful than you might expect. Here's what you can do in a nutshell:

• Semantic markup and searching
• Visual timeline browsing
• Easy embedding of photo and video slideshows

Semantic Markup and Searching

This is arguably the most interesting and powerful feature of my travel journal. With the help of the Semantic MediaWiki extension, adding Semantic capabilities to a wiki makes browsing and searching a breeze. What does semantic mean in this case? Many wikis such as Wikipedia have tremendous amounts of text for each article, and in many cases you can find what you're looking for doing basic searches (via Wikipedia or Google). However, it becomes *much* more difficult to easily issue a single query/search that asks:

"Show me all philosophers living between 1800-1850 who were born within 50 miles from Weimar, Germany and who published more than 6 books"

Unless you have a Ph.D in philosophy AND are a wizkid with Google searches, chances are you'll spend a better part of a day doing research to find this answer. Thankfully the type of searching and browsing I'll need to do for my travel journal is much more simplistic. Nevertheless, adding semantic details for each trip greatly helps with indexing and organizing. I've added the following semantic information:

• Trip start date
• Trip end date
• Trip location - Major city
• Travel destination - Important place, landmark, or area within the trip location
• Person - who was there

How does this work exactly? Like most wikis, each travel journal entry contains simple text with some basic wiki markup. In order to indicate that a particular piece of text is Semantic, you simply add some markup around it. For example, once added to a travel journal entry, the article will semantically come to life:

[[Location::Key West, FL]]
[[Person::Eric]]
[[TravelDestination::Duval Street]]
[[TripStartDate::2008/04/12]]

Now I can do searches that let me easily show all trips within a certain date range. Or, I can query for trips based on location or people who were there (Ex: Show me all trips between 2002-2004 where I was in Florida and my wife and I visited a beach, or for that matter Show me all trips where I was on a beach).

Although adding the semantic markup is fairly straight forward, it can become very tedious to remember the exact fields names and required fields for each travel journal entry. Thankfully a MediaWiki extension called Semantic Forms drastically simplifies this process. All I needed to do was create a template with the required fields and markup, and then let Semantic Forms create a new form for me. Now, whenever I want to add or edit a travel journal entry, I simply click a link and fill out a regular web form.

Since the journal entry is now created with the special markup, each article will show the semantic details:

And, I can easily search and create index pages that will show all relevant trips:

Visual Timeline Browsing

With the placement of my semantic trip details and SIMILE Timeline, I can easily browse and locate any trip.

I can drag or click anywhere on the timeline and instantly view my travel journal entry. Seeing all the trips on a single timeline also greatly helps with discovering where entries are with relation to each other.

Easy Embedding of Photo and Video Slideshows

This was actually a *huge* undertaking. It took me a little over a month to consolidate all of my photos and videos, and find a web-based solution for easily embedding multimedia slideshows into my wiki. I originally blogged about my search for flash-based slideshow software back in June, and have since picked SlideShowPro as my solution. I created a simple PHP Mediawiki extension and Perl webservice to dynamically locate my photo and video albums on disk, and generate the appropriate gallery and slideshow. I've organized all of my media into folders based on the date/time. So, all I need to do is edit my travel journal entry and add the following markup:

=== Photos ===

<embed_slideshow>
id=1
album_name=Dixie and Chan,Key West Day 1,Key West Day 2,Naples
album_path=2008/04-13-2008,2008/04-14-2008,2008/04-15-2008,2008/04-16-2008
</embed_slideshow>

Once added and loaded, the slideshow extension will process each album name and dynamically generate thumbnails and download links complete with media info.

What's Next?

I'm really happy with the results so far! Not only do I have all of my photos and videos organized for the last 10 years, I've managed to fill out almost all of my travel details for close to 60 trips. I can safely say that the semantic browsing and searching capabilities helped my ability to recall, re-enforce, and write down many of my memories. The power of association is really amazing!

At this point, my Personal Travel Journal portion of my Memex is nearly feature complete. What are some other features and possible uses? I've already started experimenting with Google map integration for some trips.

Right now this is a manual process of adding latitude and longitude details. However, I can envision the ability to enhance this with geocoding/geotagging information of location details inside JPG using EXIF. Using my GPS and geotagging software, I've been able to automatically encode lat/long info inside each picture (Using RoboGeo for example). It would be great if I could dynamically pull the lat/long info outside of each picture and plot on a map for each journal entry.

This is only the beginning, so stay tuned in the future for new developments!

Posted by EricB at 03:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Post to del.icio.us | Do you Digg it?

OK, I'm going to take a short break from my posts on productivity, creativity, mind mapping, and using technology to enhance learning. You can call this an uninformed rant if you like, but I seriously can't comprehend all the buzz that is surrounding the "MicroBlogging phenomenon". No doubt, many of you are aware of Twitter. For those of you that have been hiding under a rock, or are not plugged into the blogosphere as of late, Twitter essentially takes blogging to another extreme and lets users broadcast at any given moment exactly what they're doing. Here's a concise description from Twitter's website:

"Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?"

I've always been a little bit hesitant to adopt the latest technology craze du jour, but I've been circulating these thoughts internally for some time. And, it wasn't until this week that I read a few posts that had me really question whether this is uber-hype or a case of me just refusing to get with the times. Case in point.... 2 recent articles illustrate the microblogging buzz:

1. How Twitter Could Be Worth A Billion in a Year
2. Indent.ca - Another microblogging service that just recently hit the del.icio.us popular list

My premise for my argument/rant is this: Aren't we already to the point where we've reached information overload and communication saturation? Of all people, I'm probably one of the biggest technology evangelists, technophiles, and all around geeks out there. However, in the last year I finally reached a point of realization that there is just too much noise in the wild, wonderful, world wide web.

I'm what you would call a "connected person". I love the fact that you can use technology to enable communication, find people with common interests, and make long-lasting connections. I've met some of my greatest friends and acquaintances through the PC. My passion for using technology to enable communication drove me to develop one of the first web-based chat applications on the web (Lucid Chat).

I've been connected to the net since '94. In fact, I've been involved since the BBS days back in '88. Yes, I'm a member of most of the major social networking sites out there, love using Linked.in, use del.icio.us at least a dozen times a day, and am constantly hunting for the latest and greatest blog posts. I also have accumulated at least 250+ RSS subscriptions to some pretty cool blogs. At this point... the information overload bubble sort of reached critical mass.

I finally realized that I just can't *possibly* keep up with the amount of information out there. I've started to take a more pragmatic and realistic approach to simplifying my focus and attention on my most critical sources of information. Do I still subscribe to most of my RSS feeds? Yes, however I've significantly decreased how frequently I read the feeds, and only tackle at least a half dozen of my favorite feeds at a time.

I have email. I have social bookmarks. I have a multitude of social network sites that keep me connected with others. I have instant messaging. I have RSS feeds. Do I really need a microblogging service that keeps me up to date on what friends (and strangers) are doing at any given second? I'm not sure on this one.

I actually really want to like Twitter. I want to embrace it and jump on the latest technology bandwagon. However, I just can't get away from the feeling that we've reached the apex of the golden age of communication, and are now on the downward trend of turning valuable information into useless "datababble" (yes, I just made that term up). Enter the age of Information Entropy.

Please help me understand what I'm missing here.

Posted by EricB at 09:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (8) | TrackBacks (0)

Post to del.icio.us | Do you Digg it?

Thanks again to del.icio.us, I discovered an amazing site today called Thinkbase.

"Thinkbase is a new way to navigate and explore information on the web. It is what we call a 'Visual Wiki'. It is based on Freebase, an open, shared database of the world's knowledge - in other words a Semantic Wiki. Thinkbase uses a visualization tool (Thinkmap) to create an interactive visual representation of the semantic relationships in Freebase."

This is actually something I've been wanting to do with my own Personal Knowledge Manager(a.k.a. Semantic Wiki or Memex). I'm a huge fan of visualization, and ThinkMap (The software used to power ThinkBase) is a pretty comprehensive toolkit. I've looked at quite a few different visualization solutions over the last few years, and ThinkBase is one of the most impressive ones. Recently I came across a stunning Flash-based project by Ruben Swieringa
called the interactive mindmap (http://www.rubenswieringa.com/blog/interactive-mindmap). It would be interesting to leverage some sort of open source solution like this to accomplish what the guys at ThinkBase have done. Overall, ThinkBase is a step in the right direction and I'm hoping it gets some well-deserved attention.

Posted by EricB at 11:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Post to del.icio.us | Do you Digg it?

Most of my weekend was spent laboriously locating and consolidating my digital photo collection over the last 8 years. You would think that my nack for organization would have payed off in this area, but you'd be wrong. ;) It took combing through 4 old hard drives, multiple Ghost images, an Iomega Peerless Drive, and a Terapin Mine to consolidate my photos since 2000. I now have close to all of my 3,000 photos and videos accounted for.

My main motivation for *finally* consolidating my photo collection is for my wiki-based travel log. Fueled by my recent post on the Personal Memex, I decided to finish cataloging and detailing all of my trips and travels since the turn of the century. This was by no means a simple feat. I'm actually only partially done at this point, but have enough semantic detail and information to make finding out details of each trip a breeze. My next major step is to integrate my photo repository with my wiki.

I love software like Picasa for managing my photo collections and albums. However, I'm looking for something that can be easily viewed over the web. My thought was to use some simple flash-based photo/slideshow viewer to embed directly into the wiki. I've been collecting links for some flash-based slideshow applications and figured I'd give them a whirl. Here are the major ones that I'm aware of:

• MonoSlideShow ($19.95) - I've used this application in the past, and have embedded slideshows directly into my blog posts. It's fairly comprehensive and gets the job done
• SimpleViewer (Free) - Similar to MonoSlideShow, but with some additional options. I like the ability to right-click and open the image into a new window
• WorldMap/TripperMap ($9.74 / year) - This blew me away when I first saw it. Slideshows with Map integration. TripperMap supports FlickR right now, but support for other images sources is being developed.
• SlideShowPro ($29.00) - As with TripperMap, this application stuck me as quite impressive. The interface is visually appealing, and it also supports video playback. Very nice! I decided to experiment with this one and see if it suits my needs.

This is by no means a comprehensive list, but I think it does illustrate some pretty compelling flash-based slideshow applications. I'm curious what other software is out there. In the meantime I plan on experimenting with SlideShowPro, and will share my feedback on a subsequent post of creating an impressive wiki-based photo and travel journal.

Posted by EricB at 09:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Post to del.icio.us | Do you Digg it?

The memex ( "memory extender") is the name given by Vannevar Bush to the theoretical proto-hypertext computer system he proposed in his 1945 The Atlantic Monthly article As We May Think. The memex has influenced the development of subsequential hypertext and intellect augmenting computer systems. Bush's vision for the memex extended far beyond a mechanism which might augment the research of one individual working in isolation. In Bush's vision the ability to connect, annotate and share both published works and personal trails would profoundly change the process by which the "world's record" is created and used.

Excerpts from Bush's article:

"Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified. The lawyer has at his touch the associated opinions and decisions of his whole experience, and of the experience of friends and authorities. The patent attorney has on call the millions of issued patents, with familiar trails to every point of his client's interest. The physician, puzzled by a patient's reactions, strikes the trail established in studying an earlier similar case, and runs rapidly through analogous case histories, with side references to the classics for the pertinent anatomy and histology. ... The historian, with a vast chronological account of a people, parallels it with a skip trail which stops only on the salient items, and can follow at any time contemporary trails which lead him all over civilization at a particular epoch. There is a new profession of trail blazers, those who find delight in the task of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record. The inheritance from the master becomes, not only his additions to the world's record, but for his disciples the entire scaffolding by which they were erected. "

-- As We May Think

And

"Consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanized private file and library. It needs a name, and, to coin one at random, "memex" will do. A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory."

It seems to me that the Bush's concept and proposal of a memex, while fanciful and even bordering on futuristic fantasy (having been written in 1945), is obviously becoming a reality for normal, everyday people. Yes, there are definitely parallels with hyperlinking systems, the WWW (yes, it's 2008 and I said WWW), and the recent surge in social networks. There is nothing particularly revolutionary with this comparison. However, the real power in this type of personal knowledge manager is putting the memex to use for personal applications. By putting to use, I mean augmenting your personal knowledge (learning new information and recalling existing knowledge) and creating a "trusted system" for storing your most important and cherished information.

Much of my time the last few months has been devoted to the topic of Personal Knowledge Managment, and in particular, the application and use of Semantic Wikis. I've been experimenting with a few different applications of my own memex, and so far the results have been very promising. So far, I'm working on the following:

• Personal Journal - Basic forms for filling out a diary/journal entry
• Dream Journal - Detailed form and record of dreams. Complete with semantic, table-based, and calendar views (Simile)
• Travel Log - Travel details including geographic information and integration with Google Maps
• Personal Learning History - Tracking all books and audio/dvd courses completed in the last few years. Complete with semantic, table-based, and calendar views (Simile)

In some upcoming posts I plan on sharing how to implement these applications.

Credit: Thanks to Jamie at Semantic Wave for bring the work of Vannevar Bush to my attention a couple years ago. It wasn't until recently that I really started making progress in implementing some of these ideas for my personal use.

Link to the online version of the Atlantic Monthly article is here. And, excerpts of this post were taken from the Memex article at Wikipedia.

Posted by EricB at 08:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1)

Post to del.icio.us | Do you Digg it?

Back in March, I began evaluating some open source Document Management Systems (DMS) to help compliment my wiki-based Personal Knowledge Manager (PKM). That's a little bit of acronym-overload. But, in simple terms I really am looking for a way to easily store, categorize, and retrieve a number of my documents related to research and learning (PDFs, Word Docs, etc).

I quickly discovered that although my wiki can manage attaching simple documents, there was no way to easily store metadata for the documents or search within the wiki itself. As I alluded to in my original post, I narrowed down my search to 3 main DMS choices: SCAN, Alfresco, and Knowledge Tree. Of these three, SCAN (Smart Content Aggregation and Navigation) ended up being the most feature-rich and least complicated. Alfresco and Knowledge tree are both fantastic products, but they ended up being too complex for my needs. I believe this ultimately boiled down to the fact that my DMS is for one person (me) and not an entire team or company. Many features related to roles, access restrictions, and document workflow aren't a concern to me right now.

At a high-level, SCAN supports the following features:

• Java-based UI with a multitude of browsing, searching, and tagging functions (Can run on a variety of platforms - Linux, Mac, & Windows
• Support (with plugins) for PDF, Word, Excel, XML/XHTML, Plain text
• Tag cluster browsing for both Documents and Del.icio.us links
• Sophisticated tagging and text analysis

A full list of features can be found here. I received an anonymous tip the other day (well, it was actually from a guest Google chatter) that SCAN version 1.3 was just released. This release has a number of UI enhancements for browsing the document collections, adding document annotations, and better management of metadata through document properties.

For the most part, SCAN ended up being my "Killer App" for Document Management Systems. One slight drawback on my wishlist is that there is no web-interface for SCAN. Most of my time spent searching, browsing, and tagging will more than likely be on my primary desktop where SCAN is installed. Using the SCAN GUI is fine for 90% of the time, however if I am remote I would like to have access to my documents.

For the short-term I've simply configured my wiki to display my document repository so I can download documents as needed. What's convenient is that I can preserve the document directory hierarchy however I like in the file system. And with SCAN, I can choose to create multiple document repositories and organize & aggregate my document collections with tags. Sure, I can only get a hierarchy (file system) list for my web view, but this is OK for now.

Long-term, I would like to experiment with adding the following features for my own needs (I am a fan of Eating My Own Dog Food or Sipping My Own Champagne):

• Add support for password-protected PDFs (if this is possible with Lucene)
• Add support for indexing and searching MindManager mindmaps. This is a *huge* must have for me given the number of mindmaps I've created for my own research.
• Create a basic SOAP-based service layer on top of SCAN so I can access metadata, create tag clouds, and search from a web-interface. This web-interface will more than likely be a barebones MediaWiki plugin.

This, of course, will need to be added to my ever-growing Personal Pet Project Queue.

I'd highly recommend giving SCAN a whirl, especially if you're interested in wrangling a large number of documents. SCAN is simple, effective, & powerful. And, best of all, it's free!

Posted by EricB at 11:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Post to del.icio.us | Do you Digg it?

Simply amazing........ wow!

Nintento Wii Remote + Infared Goggles = Amazing 3D Experience

Source: http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=976

Posted by EricB at 10:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Post to del.icio.us | Do you Digg it?

Just found a great set of links from OEDB:

If you think that iPods are used just for listening to music, you obviously haven't been keeping up with the latest technology. The Apple-developed music player now features all kinds of accessories to help you study better, and now other companies are in a rush to get their designs in sync with the iPod. Pre-teens, college kids and even adults are taking advantage of the educational benefits an iPod affords them. From downloadable podcasts to just-for-iPod study guides and applications, learning on the go has never been easier. To find out about the many different ways you can transform your iPod into a learning device, check out our list below.

Source: http://oedb.org/library/beginning-online-learning/100-ways-to-use-your-ipod-to-learn-and-study-better

Posted by EricB at 10:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Post to del.icio.us | Do you Digg it?

The other day, ReadWriteWeb posted an interesting article on Visualizing Social Media Fatigue.

"Our attention is stretched so thin these days that there are times when I have actually tried to register for what I thought was a new service only to realize later that I already had an account -- it just got lost in the shuffle. With so many new web sites and services vying for our attention it is easy to feel the effects of social media fatigue. Andrew Shuttleworth, a social media junky living in Japan, thought it might be helpful to try to map his social media usage. The result is a staggering view of how information we put on the web flows."

You can check out Andrew's original post here:
http://hq.andrewshuttleworth.com/hq/2008/02/social-media-on.html

Posted by EricB at 02:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Post to del.icio.us | Do you Digg it?

This is potentially the best analogy I've ever heard describing the possible Microsoft-Yahoo merger.

"Imagine a circus act in which two enormous, clumsy, awkward elephants that don't really like each other are supposed to mate while riding on skateboards. Now imagine that it is your job, you lucky bastard, to be one of the little circus clowns standing alongside trying to make this extremely unnatural and unholy act take place."

Source: http://fakesteve.blogspot.com/2008/02/ballmer-im-completely-out-of-ideas.html

Posted by EricB at 03:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Post to del.icio.us | Do you Digg it?

After a little bit of tinkering around, I created a Firefox plugin for the MindMap Viewer. The plugin adds a right-click menu option. Whenever you right-click on a supported mindmap URL/link and select 'View MindMap', the mindmap viewer will be launched in a new window.

Right-Click Context

You can download from here, just make sure to allow install from "eric-blue.com":

Posted by EricB at 10:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Post to del.icio.us | Do you Digg it?

Three words..... Best Video Ever ;)

Posted by EricB at 06:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Post to del.icio.us | Do you Digg it?

Background

Earlier in the year, I posted about the need for a common mind map file format. With the proliferation of the next-generation mind mapping applications (e.g. MindMeister, Mindomo, etc.), the need to import/export in a standard way and to share mindmaps easily is becoming critical.

As I discussed in my earlier post, I'm a huge fan of commercial mind mapping applications (in particular MindManager). And, I love to share my mind maps with friends and colleagues, however there is a bit of a barrier if those people don't have my specific mind mapping application of choice.

One of the greatest things that the newer web-based mind mapping sites have done is to allow people to easily share their maps, and embed them directly onto their personal sites, wikis, and blogs. Yesterday while researching some sites on knowledge management, I discovered some wikis that support embedding of FreeMind maps using either a Java applet or flash player.

I thought to myself, wow....... I feel really left out. I would *love* to be able to do this myself using my existing MindManager maps. So, I decided to put on my "hacking cap" and wrote an application that allows you to easily convert, embed/share, and view your mind maps. The ultimate goal is have this service become some sort of Universal MindMap Viewer: multiple mind map input types, and multiple outputs (java applet, flash, and other forthcoming visualization frameworks/toolkits). Until the day that we do have a common mindmap format, this type of application will do the trick.

MindMap Viewer

Website: http://eric-blue.com/projects/mindmapviewer/

Screenshot:

* Downloads the mindmap at the provided URL (previously converted maps will be cached for a short time)
* Extract/convert the .mmap file to XML
* Translate to the FreeMind .mm format using XSL
* Embed or launch using the FreeMind Java Applet or Flash Viewer

Source: http://eric-blue.com/blog/download/Goals%20Mind%20Map%20Template.mmap
Website: http://eric-blue.com/blog/2007/03/use_mind_maps_to_achieve_your_goals.html
Type: Flash

Roadmap

This is obviously a work in progress, but definitely a great start. The Flash viewer is certainly promising since it's quite a bit faster than the applet, however there are currently some rendering problems with certain nodes. All in all though, this gets the job done. In the next few weeks I plan on adding some enhancements and would greatly appreciate some feedback!

Thanks!

Posted by EricB at 03:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (1)

Post to del.icio.us | Do you Digg it?

For readers that know me, it's not a stretch to say that I *love* learning new things. I've always been a bit of a self learner (autodidactic if you want to get technical), and a few years ago I started a search (a quest actually) for finding tools to help streamline the learning process. Over time I discovered that the realm of knowledge management is vast and, quite honestly, fairly nebulous at times. In the next few months, I'm going to shift the focus of the blog for a little bit and write some more in depth posts on discoveries I've made with respect to personal knowledge management and highlight software that facilitates organization, collaboration, and learning.

Personal Knowledge Management

First of all, what exactly is "Personal Knowledge Management", or PKM? I think the following collection of quotes from the KnowledgeBoard (Technologies for Personal Knowledge Management) summarizes best:

"PKM involves a range of relatively simple and inexpensive techniques and tools that anyone can use to acquire, create and share knowledge, extend personal networks and collaborate with colleagues without having to rely on the technical or financial resources of the employer."

AND

"PKM is a conceptual framework to organize and integrate information that we, as individuals, feel is important so that it becomes part of our personal knowledge base. It provides a strategy for transforming what might be random pieces of information into something that can be systematically applied and that expands our personal knowledge."

In my personal experience, I've used a range of tools to help organize my information. These have included traditional PIMs (Personal Information Managers), outliners and note taking applications, and mind maps. I highlighted a number of these tools in my recent post on Mind Maps as Personal Dashboards. What I find intriguing is the potential to enhance PKM by leveraging newer technologies and applications(semantic and "web 2.0"). This recent breed of applications and technologies can help people discover, collect, aggregate, and share knowledge in new and interesting ways.

Personal Learning Environments

Organizing information and sharing knowledge is critical, but it helps to have a strategy and framework for approaching your learning endeavors. Personal Learning Environments, or PLEs, are defined as follows:

Personal Learning Environments are systems that help learners take control of and manage their own learning. This includes providing support for learners to

* set their own learning goals
* manage their learning; managing both content and process
* communicate with others in the process of learning

and thereby achieve learning goals.

The following diagram is courtesy of Jeremy Hiebert:

Again, I think there is *huge* potential in this area. Advances in social networking and further development of the "Social Graph" will help accelerate learning and the development of communities geared towards specialized learning goals.

Posted by EricB at 07:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1)

Post to del.icio.us | Do you Digg it?

Wow, now that's a tall order to fill! And, it appears that gnizr has delivered that order. Gnizr (short for organizer) is one of the latest additions to the Google code repository, and this code-base has been donated from Image Matters LLC.

I haven't had a chance to install yet, but from looking over the website and screenshots it looks pretty amazing!

gnizr™ (gə-nīzər) is an open source application for social bookmarking and web mashup. It is easy to use gnizr to create a personalized del.icio.us-like portal for a group of friends and colleagues to store, classify, and share information, and mash-it-up with information about location.

* Archive saved bookmarks and organize bookmarks using tags and folders.
* Edit notes using WYSIWYG bookmark editor.
* Assign geographical location values to bookmarks and view bookmarks on a map.
* Define relationships between bookmark tags -- broader, narrower and member-of.
* Tag bookmarks using Machine Tags.
* View bookmarks in Clustermap and Timeline.
* Import new bookmarks from user-defined RSS subscriptions -- RSS, Atom and GeoRSS.
* Create new application behaviors using gnizr API. For example:
o Add modules to support custom Machine Tags;
o Add listeners to handle bookmark change events;
o Develop custom RSS crawlers to perform automated bookmark imports; and
o Create third-party mashups from data published by gnizr (RDF, RSS and JSON).

Screenshots (Click here for more)

Thanks to James at Semantic Wave for bringing this to my attention via del.icio.us!

Posted by EricB at 07:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Post to del.icio.us | Do you Digg it?

It's obviously hard these days to ignore the Web2.0 phenomenon (although the term still causes me to cringe), and the labels given to the forthcoming Semantic Web (the "real" semantic web or web<put your version number here>). See Mike Bergman's post Please, Squash that Web3.0 Cockroach if you want to gauge a common reaction to the latest buzz word o' the day attached to new technologies. Nonetheless, it's interesting to see the memes that sometimes burst onto the collective web consciousness, and take on lives of their own.

I've used Google Trends in the past and thought it would be interesting to see how some of these hot topics fare against each other in popularity: Web2.0, Web3.0, Web4.0, The Semantic Web, and Social Networking. Here are a few observations:

Social Networking virtually popped out of nowhere starting early Sept '05. And apparently it's more popular in India, Singapore, and New Zealand than the United States.

Web2.0 was born on Sept 30th 2005 when Tim O'Reilly published What is Web 2.0: Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software. Since then, there's been a plethora of "Web 2.0" applications and sites. And, there's been no shortage of controversy of what "Web 2.0" actually is. Lack of definition or not, Web 2.0 doesn't appear to be going anywhere anytime soon.

Web 3.0, Web 4.0, and the Semantic Web seem to be fairly close in popularity. Although, Web 3.0 is beginning to gain in search popularity over the Semantic Web. I honestly can't tell you what Web 3.0 or Web 4.0 is, so please don't ask ;)

Posted by EricB at 07:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Post to del.icio.us | Do you Digg it?

In honor of its 10th year, I finally decided to officially retire the original LucidChat.com site. Lucid Chat hasn't been actively developed since 2000, and I figured it was time to focus on other projects. Although the site is still up (and probably will be for some time), I've put a memorial page in it's place. This is in part due to nostalgia's sake, since this required a tremendous amount of time and effort to bring to life. And, for historical purpose, since Lucid Chat was one of the first web-based chats of its kind when I launched it in '97.

Lucid Chat was the original reason why I started my first company Star Computing Solutions in early 1997 (at the tender age of 21). I eventually branched out into other areas (network consulting, software development, and web hosting). However, this proved to be a great business experience and showed me what was involved in starting and running your own company.

Here's an excerpt from the about page:

"Lucid Chat was one of the original web-based chat products in the mid-late '90s (Web 1.0). Many of the early web-based chat rooms were very rudimentary, and either used META refreshes (remember "screen flashing"?) to update and display user's comments, Java applets, or Netscape plugins.

What made Lucid Chat unique at that time was the ability to provide real-time text streaming through a web browser using a simple CGI interface. Many of the techniques used were the precursor to what is now referred to as AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML). "

AND

"For a period of time, Lucid Chat was sold and used on dozens of websites (a couple famous bands, record labels, movie sites, and large businesses). It was also featured in numerous reviews of chat products(most famously, ServerWatch) and compared against some of the most popular products of the day (iChat, ParaChat, ConferenceRoom, etc)."

I included commentary on the history, quotes, images, and credits.

Posted by EricB at 08:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Post to del.icio.us | Do you Digg it?

I recently came across a great map and article on the Underlying Blog.

Information Architects has created a comprehensive web trend map that diagrams the 200 most successful websites on the web, ordered by category, proximity, success, popularity and perspective.

Posted by EricB at 09:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Post to del.icio.us | Do you Digg it?

Tim Berners-Lee, father (Sire, actually) of web, was interviewed recently and provided his commentary on the vision for the future of the semantic web.

Tim discusses some of the latest "terminology" that is somewhat related/intertwined with the semantic web: web2.0, web3.0, and even web4.0. He also touches on the origins of the web, what the semantic web is all about, and net neutrality. When asked about the long-term future of the web (web 4.0?), Tim replied:

"IDG: Some people like Nova Spivak and Microsoft's cofounder Paul Allen work with a timeline that envisions the arriving of Web 3.0 by 2010 and a future Web 4.0 by 2020. Can you imagine what this Web 4.0 is supposed to be?

Berners-Lee: (Laughs) No, I don't do that. I think about real technology. I didn't invent the term "Web 3.0." The Web is constantly developing. If you want to see what's happening that I am interested in now, there are several technologies laced together. In Web 2.0 there are some technologies like JavaScript and others that are all standards that came out of allowing people to do things. Most standards are coming out now that will have a good push towards the mobile Web initiative, which is the use of the Web on lots of different devices.

In the future we will have the Semantic Web that will allow a whole lot of other things. One of the powerful things about networking technology like the Internet or the Web or the Semantic Web, one of the characteristics of such a technology is that the things we've just done with it far surpass the imagination of the people who invented them. Take for example the inventors of TCP/IP, the original protocols for communication between computers over the Internet, created by Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn in 1974.

When I invented the Web, I thought of it as an infrastructure; I designed the Web as a foundation for many things. With Web 2.0, social networks and all kinds of things happen on top of it. When the Semantic Web arrives in the next few years, things will be using it in a way we cannot know yet. So, in a way, it's foolish to try to imagine what Web 4.0 will be like when we still don't know what will be done with 3.0.

For Web 3.0 to succeed, the people who are studying it at this moment will have ideas which will enable the new technology. They will design fantastic things just like people with Web 2.0 are designing fantastic things right now. People working with the Semantic Web will make much more powerful things. We can't imagine what they will do. But we have to build the Web to be an infrastructure. It shall never be used for particularized purposes but just to be a foundation for future developments."

Posted by EricB at 08:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Post to del.icio.us | Do you Digg it?

Signals vs. Noise recently posted an article: Is the web killing our culture?. In this article, the guys from 37 Signals discuss a new book from Andrew Keen titled The Cult of the Amateur: How today’s Internet is killing our culture.

Keen sees the web, and "Web 2.0" in particular, as technology that enables mass narcissism, and perpetuates the problem of the "dumbing down" of our culture and society.

Mr. Keen argues that “what the Web 2.0 revolution is really delivering is superficial observations of the world around us rather than deep analysis, shrill opinion rather than considered judgment.” In his view Web 2.0 is changing the cultural landscape and not for the better. By undermining mainstream media and intellectual property rights, he says, it is creating a world in which we will “live to see the bulk of our music coming from amateur garage bands, our movies and television from glorified YouTubes, and our news made up of hyperactive celebrity gossip, served up as mere dressing for advertising.” This is what happens, he suggests, “when ignorance meets egoism meets bad taste meets mob rule.”

Posted by EricB at 11:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Post to del.icio.us | Do you Digg it?

Last week I started adding SpeedLinks to this blog. I've been looking for a good excuse to experiment with Yahoo Pipes for some time now. So, I wanted to find out if I could take the concept of the original Perl script I found, and create a pipe to do all the work (with little, to no programming). This original script basically does the following:

1) Allows you to store your Speedlinks with del.icio.us using a common tag like 'speedlink'.

2) Fetches Speedlinks using the Del.icio.us API on a daily basis (tag='speedlink', date='YYYY-MM-DD)

3) Parses the XML output using XPath, creates an HTML summary of the speedlinks, and automatically posts a blog entry.

For those of you that haven't yet heard about Yahoo Pipes (from their website):

Pipes is an interactive data aggregator and manipulator that lets you mashup your favorite online data sources.
Like Unix pipes, simple commands can be combined together to create output that meets your needs:
* combine many feeds into one, then sort, filter and translate to create your ultimate custom feed.
* geocode your favorite feeds and browse the items on an interactive map.
* remix your favorite data sources and use the Pipe to power a new application.
* build custom vertical search pages that are impossible with ordinary search engines.
* power badges on your web site.
* extend your web site by accessing the JSON or RSS output from Pipes.

The following screenshot illustrates what the pipe looks like after you run it. You can choose to download the query results in RSS or JSON format:




Now that the 'RSS Filter By Date' pipe was created, I proceeded to create a new pipe 'Del.icio.us Speedlink Filter' that accepts your del.icio.us username, speedlink tag, and date range (default is UTC today, but can be converted to any date range) and linked to the RSS filter pipe.




Unfortunately, one major limitation I found with Pipe's RSS output is that it strips a good bit of the original metadata associated with the original feed. This is discussed in the following post. Although you do get the original link, name, and description, the tag info is lost. If you want to include tag info in the speedlink results, you'll have to download as JSON and parse/format to HTML.

Although using Yahoo Pipes to parse and fetch my del.icio.us links definitely works and is nifty, it doesn't really simplify the original approach. But, this experiment was certainly fun, and it definitely shows the potential of Pipes to allow users to easily create, and manipulate data with little to no programming required.

Posted by EricB at 04:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Post to del.icio.us | Do you Digg it?

From Popular Mechanics:

Microsoft has quietly been developing the first completely new computing platform since the PC — a project that was given the internal code name Milan. This past March, when the project was still operating on the down low, I became the first reporter invited inside these offices. My hosts politely threatened legal consequences if I blabbed about the project to anyone not directly involved in it, then escorted me down a dark hallway to a locked corner conference room. Inside that room was Microsoft's best-kept technology secret in years ... a coffee table.

Posted by EricB at 10:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Post to del.icio.us | Do you Digg it?

Information Aesthetics (infostetics) recently posted an intriguing article on a new network monitoring product called Netcosm.

"Netcosm is one of many technology projects underway in the NetQoS Performance Labs and is one example of research on advanced visualization techniques to make complex network performance data simple.... Using color, shape, speed, size, changes in sound tone and level, and even smoke, fire, and explosions, Netcosm shows real network traffic traversing local and wide area networks, and when and where performance issues occur, whether they are in the network, server or application."

Posted by EricB at 10:31 PM | Permalink |