DISQUS

I try to make sure my blog and presentations on slideshare are completely opaque to most people, so i can pretend that I've been publishing my ideas out there in the open, happy in the knowledge that no-one will understand a word of it... But then, I didn't even get nominated for the edublog awards, so maybe that approach doesn't work either?

Here's a 2p thought...

Journal papers etc are atomic in that, whilst they do rely on previous literature and cite it, they also work as standalone documents.

Blog posts are more conversational, and a lot of the context is lost if the reader is not aware of the stuff round the edges - the content of previous posts, the content of posts that are linked to etc?

"everyone uses it in a different way"

More than that - individuals use it in many different ways...

I've popped a couple of bookmarklets up at http://ouseful.open.ac.uk/iPaper/ to make it easier to view docs on arbitrary web pages using scribd's ipaper... If a pdf or a doc is linked to from a public (nonauthenticated) web page, the bookmarklets will either rewrite the link to point to an online view of the doc on the scribd site, or embed the doc using flash ipaper in the current web page...

No probs - if you can think of ways I can make it easier/more useful, please let me know.

eg I'll try to add a feature that generates a tinyurl of the rss feed over the weekend...

Hi
I've posted a utility that will generate the geoRSS url for a mymaps 'geoblog' given the URL of the 'View in google earth' kml file URL from a MyMap:

http://ouseful.open.ac.uk/maps/

A couple of days ago, I put together a Yahoo pipe that lets you use a Google MyMap as a crude geoblogging interface.

The pipe will produce a (geo)RSS feed from the "View in Google Earth" kml output of the mymap, and also have a go at adding a publications date and link/URL for each 'post'.
There's a brief write up of the hcak, along with a link to the PIpe, at http://blogs.open.ac.uk/Maths/ajh59/012936.html

A couple of issues I have with the growing number of instructional video sites are there incomplete coverage, and knowing which one to go to for a particular class of video (for example http://www.ivideosongs.com/ for musical instrument tutorials)...

... which is why maintain and use a custom search engine - "How Do I?" - that works over all the instructional video sites I come across: http://ouseful.open.ac.uk/howdoi

I was playing with a twitter/yahoo pipes/google maps mashup today that displays your tweets (or those of the people you follow on twitter) on a google map, after passing the twitter feed through a geo-coding yahoo pipe.

A comment suggested if you visualise Obama's twitter feed in this way, you can see how he's ringing up the miles... see the map here: http://blogs.open.ac.uk/Maths/ajh59/012712.html

Here's an update on the use of feeds and Grazr widgets to display UC Berkeley video lectures - a feed that lets you browse their playlisted courses, as well as search over all their youtube uploaded video courses. I'll facebookify it if i get a spare 20 mins somewhen!

http://blogs.open.ac.uk/Maths/ajh59/012375.html

tony

ps as far as Facebook goes, the first proper app was Curse Profiles ( http://blogs.open.ac.uk/Maths/ajh59/010855.html ). There are a couple more on the drawing board...

tony

Please ignore the vitriol in the above post... been a long day and I was frustrated with things breaking...

Grazr has saved me so much time over the last year, I don't think I could so much development without it!

Here's a Facebook app that integrates allows you to search and play UCB Video Lectures within Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id...

It builds on this Grazr UCB video search'n'play widget: http://ouseful.open.ac.uk/blog/010633.html

tony