Puzzlepieces

Translation Sources - I’m trying something new, and I love it already. Normally when I create something for Fagan Finder, I spend a long time scouring the web, and working on a document. When I think I’ve covered everything, I put it up on my website. Currently I’m upgrading a couple of pages on Fagan Finder. When Feedster introduced translation (using Google), and in the discussion which followed (see the comments), I was reminded that my Translation page was out of date. I have for a long time thought of how I could improve it. Unfortunately, as I said, I am occupied with some other things on Fagan Finder right now.

So I tried something different. Instead of quietly working by myself for a long time and then releasing it, I started working on my page on Wiktionary’s Translation Sources page. Last night I started it, and this morning I see that someone else has already contributed to it! When I eventually make this into a page on my website, I will credit everyone who has contributed. I think this is a great way of helping ease my workload :-), helping Wiktionary, and the web community at large. By enabling anyone to add to it, I think I can cover more languages that I otherwise would have.

Google Blogoscoped is on a roll. Lots of neat/interesting/entertaining/useful stuff in the last few days. One of five trillion sites I need to add to my blogroll.

A curious surprise - it seems Microsoft is recruiting bloggers! - for MSN Search, which MS wants to beat the competition with. Very interesting.

Memomarks: Google Protection Against Link Rot - there have been many, many things written about how to prevent/reduce/elminiate linkrot, software to fix it, new technology to fix it, better practices to fix it, etc. Keeping links up to date on Fagan Finder is a daunting task, and I tend to let individual pages lapse for a while and then give them major upgrades. Not very good, but that’s what I have been doing. I long ago gave up using browser or web-based bookmarks. Today I keep things organized in five ways: my newsreader has all the sites I read with RSS feeds (and outputs an OPML file); my Speed Browse tool includes all the blogs and news sites without RSS feeds; I keep most links in a couple of large text files; I blog some items; and other times I use a wiki. I have a vision of a wiki-based PIM (personal information manager) that does almost everything (i.e. calendar, e-mail, address book, bookmarks, text files, etc.), and I may build it.

Anyhow, the point here is that rather than bookmarking pages, it may be better to record a one-to-four-word extract of the page that is likely to be unique, and then use a search engine to find that page when necessary. I like this idea a lot because it is simple, effective, and immediately feasible.

Blogumentary Preview Trailer v1.0 - media collide on Blogumentary. Via Blogdex.

Washington Journal - I am watching this C-SPAN program on the Internet, mainly on blogs. I had heard about it but didn’t take a look until Steven Cohen mentioned that Gary Price was on it. I rarely watch/listen to call-in shows, and I have to say I’ve got a lot of respect for the host who has to put up with all sorts of callers, including people that don’t stop talking about unrelated topics.

Living on the Internet :-) I forget how much most people don’t know about it, let alone blogs. Some of the talk about misinformation on the web reminded me of 1997. Information anywhere, including offline, should be varified from a number of sources, and all sources should be checked for crediblity and bias. It is as simple of that. As Glenn Reynolds said on the show, bloggers do a great job of eliminating misinformation and fact-checking. Gary Price had what seemed like just a few minutes to try to explain searching and research on the net. With that much time, how much can you really say? If I had the same amount of time, I probably would’ve mentioned some of the same sites and some different ones. Having a longer interview would really have improved listeners’ knowledge, though.

Sugar and Independent Journalism - a confluence of two things here. One is the Big Sugar issue I blogged about recently. The other is the Internet and independant publication, which I rarely talk about. In this case, David Appell, a freelance science writer is trying to raise $200, at which time he will write an article about the Big Sugar issue and put it online for anyone to read. This is much less than he would get by selling his story to a magazine or newspaper. There’s a lot going on in online publishing and I won’t try to cover it all here. But I will mention Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (Google query) by Cory Doctor, and The Tip Jar as Revenue Model: A Real-World Experiment, an article analysing the results of publishing a novel on the web, by its author, Roger Williams. Via Corante on Blogging.

I posted this to the Personal Publishing for Money channel on the Internet Topic Exchange, although I think the channel was originally intended for making money by blogging.

Discontinuation of the free showcase - Gary Price says that xrefer will close their free reference site in June. Too bad.

Google to fix blog noise problem - I have up until now avoided posting rants about Andrew Orlowski, writer for The Register. But with each new article he writes, my wonder of why he seems to hate both blogs and Google gets louder. This particular article (note the headline) is what he comes up with after hearing the news that Google will soon introduce a blog search. For more info, see the following search engine queries, sorted by date where available: Daypop (blogs only), Feedster, rssSearch, and BlogDigger.