Greplin

A few day’s ago Pat Lockeley alerted me to the Greplin person search engine.  Greplin indexes various personal services including:

• Gmail (not gTalk Chats)
• Google Docs
• Google Calendar
• Facebook (your profile, events, notes, messages, friends, news feed and wall posts)
• Twitter (your tweets, timeline and direct messages)
• Dropbox (titles and filenames only)
• LinkedIn (your status updates, contacts)
• Evernote*
• Google Apps Mail*
• Google Apps Calendar*
• Google Apps Docs*
• Yammer*

Can you trust the service, I wonder?  In finding an answer to this question I would ssuggestion reading about the company. A Crunchbase article informs me that the service was launched in September 2010 and has received over $5M in funding.  It has recently been featured in a Techcrunch article.  There is also a techie blog which allows comments.  Seems worth investigating to me.

Markup.io

Yesterday Pat Lockley alerted me to the  markup.io service. It took me less than a minute to install the Chrome extension and annotate a page of mine. Is this less of a concern regarding copyright as it is adding annotation on to of a resource, rather than allowing a copy of the resource to be edited, as is the case with the Bo.lt service?

Delicious Finds New Owner

On 20 December 2010 I wrote a post on Lessons From Delicious’s (Non)-Demise in which I suggested that, despite the tweet from Neil Sclater that “@mweller @psychemedia delicious. i rest my case” the speculations regarding the demise of Delicious shouldn’t be regarded as having any great significance for making decisions on use of Cloud services. Today I read that announcement that “Yahoo! Finds! Buyer! For! Doomed! Delicious!“.  Case dismissed 🙂

On the other hand, as was pointed out on Twitter, there will still be a need to assess the risks of loss of the service under its new ownership.

Mendeley App for the iPod Touch

Earlier today I read a post on Les Carr’s blog in which he mentioned the Mendeley app for the iPhone/iPod Touch.  This was good timing as I have recently been looking at various repository tools such as iamresearcher.com. I’ve installed the app – I’ll be interested to see if it provides any value.

Facebook ‘Like’ and ‘Send’

Yesterday the Facebook Developer blog announced “The Send Button, Because Sometimes It’s Private“.  There’s a simple HTML fragment which can be added to Web pages which now enables Facebook messages to be sent to individuals as well as the public ‘Like” function which has been available for some time.

I added the following fragment to a page containing details of a forthcoming event:

<div id=”fb-root”></div>
< script src=”http://connect.facebook.net/en_US/all.js#xfbml=1″&gt; < /script>
<fb:like href=”http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/digital-impacts-2011/&#8221; show_faces=”false” width=”450″ send=”true”>
</fb:like>
</div>

So yes you can ‘Like’ this page or sent details to one of your Facebook contacts.  However the page does not validate – despite updating the DOCTYPE and tag as suggested on the Intense Websites’ blog. More importantly, however, is the question as to whether this is desirable

Ethical Approaches to Social Web Metrics

I’ve an interest in ways of gathering evidence of the effectiveness and impact of use of Social Web services. But the evidence needs to be gathered and the services themselves need to be used in an ethical way. If you provide services, either for personal or institutional purposes, what ethical approaches should be used?

The Google Adsense Program provides some policies which may provide a starting point:

Invalid Clicks and Impressions

Publishers may not click their own ads or use any means to inflate impressions and/or clicks artificially, including manual methods.

Encouraging Clicks

Publishers may not ask others to click their ads or use deceptive implementation methods to obtain clicks. This includes, but is not limited to, offering compensation to users for viewing ads or performing searches, promising to raise money for third parties for such behavior or placing images next to individual ads.

Content Guidelines

Publishers may not place AdSense code on pages with content that violates any of our content guidelines. Some examples include content that is adult, violent or advocating racial intolerance.

Content Guidelines

Publishers may not place AdSense code on pages with content that violates any of our content guidelines. Some examples include content that is adult, violent or advocating racial intolerance.

Webmaster Guidelines

AdSense publishers are required to adhere to the webmaster quality guidelines.

Traffic Sources

Google ads may not be placed on pages receiving traffic from certain sources. For example, publishers may not participate in paid-to-click programs, send unwanted emails or display ads as the result of the action of any software application. Also, publishers using online advertising must ensure that their pages comply with Google’s Landing Page Quality Guidelines.

Ad Behavior

AdSense code may not be altered, nor may the standard behavior, targeting or delivery of ads be manipulated in any way that is not explicitly permitted by Google. For instance, clicking Google ads may not result in a new browser window being launched.

Ad Placement

Publishers are encouraged to experiment with a variety of placements and ad formats. However, AdSense code may not be placed in inappropriate places such as pop-ups, emails or software. Publishers must also adhere to the policies for each product used.

Site Behavior

Sites showing Google ads should be easy for users to navigate. Sites may not change user preferences, redirect users to unwanted websites, initiate downloads, include malware or contain pop-ups or pop-unders that interfere with site navigation.

If the future is mobile

I’ve been exploring various new apps on my iPod Touch over the last few days including Photosynth and a couple of photo and video apps. If the future is mobile in what areas will it be important? Capturing and manipulating images? Visualisation? Writing and publishing? Communications? Or something new?

Today I used Bo lt to create copies…

Today I used Bo.lt to create copies of various blogs I have contributed to, including a number of archived blogs (UKOLN’s Cultural Heritage blog and the IWMW 2009 and IWMW 2010 blog). It occurs to me that Bo.lt could be used to annotate ones archived content, whether, as in this case, blogs from completed projects through to archived course work.

Pulse, Bo.lt and Iamreseaercher

This morning I read Phil Bradley’s blog post which reviewed news aggregator tools available in the iPad. I then found that one of them – Pulse – is also available for the iPod Touch. So  I installed it (along with Slide Reader).  On Pulse I came across a TechCrunch announcement about the launch of the Bo.lt service.  I subscribed tho the service – and wrote a post about it.  Later on I added some of my papers to the iamresearcher.com service.  Busy morning!

OER Commons

Whilst finalising a blog post on “Archiving Blogs and Machine Readable Licence Conditions” I came across the OER Commons Web site. This contains links to various resources about OER or resources which are available under a Creative Commons licence. I have submitted the UK Web Focus blog as an item to be included in the community.