Observing

Matt Haughey wrote an essay on Google Adsense and the success he’s had with his PVRblog. Blogging for Dollars. Anil Dash and Nick Denton also commented recently about Adsense and its interaction with blogs. The whole sounds worth considering but the trouble is finding the obsession that will prove interesting enough to other people to attract an audience to make the whole thing worthwhile.

Tom Coates of plasticbag has a new weblog called “Everything in Moderation.” Its opening manifesto begins: Online community development is one of my passions, and I have designed and/or managed social software “solutions” for organisations like UpMyStreet, EMAP and the BBC (often alongside Cal Henderson and/or Denise Wilton. Moderation systems are a particular subpassion of mine. In the abstract, people can think they sound bland, technical or intimidating, but fundamentally moderation is really about all those parts of an online community that stop it just being a place where people stand and shout randomly at each other.

As someone who occasionally tries to take the long view of time but seems caught in a cycle of temporary obsessions the news of Matt Haughey’s Ten Years of My Life photo project looks very interesting. Inspiration The initial inspiration for this site also came from a few similar projects. Diego Golberg’s Arrows of Time captures his family on the same day, every year, for 25 years. The 12hr ISBN jpeg project has been running for nearly ten years already.

YAML and the Art of Unix Programming My peregrinations around the web turned up a very interesting markup language called YAML. Basically it is designed to be very readable by humans and capable of easy computer manipulation. This might be useful if I ever get around to developing a book review or annotation system. I like the idea of using text files to enter the data. BibTex is another potent example.

Now this is a very interesting idea.  I have been toying with the idea of a think-tank, university-public cooperation project for some time.  Here’s a simple idea to take an free university and run it through the web. AnarchistU: Toronto free school My former school-chum, roommate, and co-worker Erik “Possum Man” Stewart is hard at work on building a free-school called AnarchistU in Toronto, coordinated via Wiki. The Anarchist U is a volunteer-run collective which organizes a variety of courses on social science and the humanities.

Here are some recent points about using MT to manage all of your content: Beyond the Blog, and Doing your whole site with MT by Brad Choate.

top 25 phil journals Analysis, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, Canadian Journal of Philosophy, Ethics, Journal of Philosophical Logic, Journal of Philosophy, Journal of Symbolic Logic, Linguistics and Philosophy, Mind, Mind and Language, Monist, Nous, Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, Philosophical Perspectives, Philosophical Quarterly, Philosophical Review, Philosophical Studies, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Philosophy and Public Affairs, Philosophy of Science, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Studia Logica, Synthese.

I’ve worked for the past year on a computer security committee at work and just wanted to put a couple of items out here to spur my memory. The Information Systems Audit and Control Association & Foundation has two certifications CISA-Certified Information Systems Auditor and CISM-Certified Information Security Manager. They also provide the intriguing Control Objectives for Information and related Technology CobiT. A lot of the content of the CobiT framework seems to parallel some of the efforts I’ve worked on to create a strategic plan for our corporate IT department.

I’m fascinated by all of the discussions and research that is going on in the weblog world about the interconnections between people and the communities of interest and/or practice that seem to naturally form. One interesting project in this area is the NITLE Blog Census, this site has an entire database of weblogs that can be downloaded and used for research. Another database that might be useful is Journal Citation Reports.

I’m happy to see that Martin Sabo, a congressperson from Minnesota, has sparked a few articles and debates about copyright and access to federally funded scientific research. The free research movement by Farhad Manjoo at Salon and Open Access and the Case for Public Good: The Scientists’ Perspective by Michelle Romero at Information Today give two good summaries of the issues. More can be found at the Open Access News weblog.