Wednesday, April 3, 2002

Fight Yahoo spam #

"In e-mail messages that began going out last week, Yahoo advised its users that their account preferences had been changed, by Yahoo, to indicate that they wanted to receive advertising solicitations through spam, snail mail and telephone." To change the preferences back to getting no Yahoo-sponsored spam, go to http://subscribe.yahoo.com/showaccount and change all the options to "no". (For more info, you might be interested in a post in one of the Yahoo groups.)   Posted by Raymond Yee on 4/3/02; 5:29:14 PM from the Unclassified dept. Discuss

The Rejection Line #

It's amazing what I learn from listening to CBC's As It Happens.  To wit, if any sweetie gives you 212-479-7990 as her or his phone number, you have just been handed the number for the "Rejection Line". "We do the rejecting. You spend time doing things you enjoy, like walking in the park, going to cultural events, and dating attractive people."   Posted by Raymond Yee on 4/3/02; 4:16:25 PM from the Unclassified dept. Discuss

Nicholson Baker to speak on campus #
I'm looking forward to hearing him speak.   Posted by Raymond Yee on 4/3/02; 3:56:24 PM from the Interactive University dept. Discuss

David Davies' RLO work #

David Davies has been at work using Userland technology to present and distribute Reusable Learning Objects (RLOs).  There's great and exciting parallels between what he is doing and what we are doing here at the Interactive University. I just read from David's instant outline:  "04/04/2002 00:28 Back from my trip (discussing learning object interoperability for a new major international eLearning consortium). It's after midnight now though so I'm going to hit the hay..."  I'm looking forward to hearing more...   Posted by Raymond Yee on 4/3/02; 3:15:22 PM from the Web Technology dept. Discuss (4 responses)

Tying Library work (MOA2) to Instant Outlining (OPML) #

I've been working on interoperability among three areas:  the library/museum, educational technology, and general web technologies, specifically those that involve writing for the web.  The UC Berkeley Library (and many other university libraries) have started to mark up their digital content in the MOA2 format (and soon in the METS format).  I converted one example digital object, the diary of Yoshiko Uchida , from MOA2 to OPML, which I then rendered as a Manila directory.  Since the Uchida diary is already converted to OPML, it can be read into an instant outline.  For fun, one can even add the Uchida diary to your Radio buddy list by clicking on:  Add the Yoshiko Uchida Diary to your Radio buddy list. (I've been playing with this subscription link because subscribing to an instant outline is akin to the scenario that we have in B-OLE:  that of users dropping objects into their digital box of learning materials.  In this case, the Uchida diary is the learning object -- and one's Radio buddy list is the "box".)    Posted by Raymond Yee on 4/3/02; 2:47:02 PM from the Web Technology dept. Discuss

Playing with Instant Outlining #

The latest excitement over at Userland has been Instant Outlining.  The term is a play on the term Instant Messenging (IM).  With IM, one can exchange messages with other people online.  The conceit behind I/O is "what if instead of just exchanging a series of text messages, what if we can send each other entire outlines?"  Those of us who have been avid users of outlines might immediately appreciate the idea.  I myself use Ecco Pro, my favorite program.  With an outliner, I can quickly write out and organize a lot of thoughts and information -- and organize them in a rich hierarchical context.  Indeed, I usually do a lot of thinking and writing first in Ecco and then translate the outlines into text.  But sometimes the outlines themselves are basically clear in and of themselves and could be published on the Web -- if only I didn't have to take the next steps of doing the outline to HTML translation. Instant Outlining in Radio is supposed to ease that transition.  One can make an outline in Radio that gets transparently saved to the hard drive and then streamed up to one's Radio blog.  But the big deal comes with the ability to share outlines and include (or "transclude") other people's outlines into one's own.  One can "subscribe" to other people's outlines (which then get added to one's own buddy list -- parallel to buddy lists in IM).  When a person's outline changes, you are notified.  The idea is that one can be narrating one's work in this outline and then with close-to-zero effort notify others of this work. This is my quick explanation.  For a much better one, I recommend reading Jon Udell's new article on I/O I also have an Instant Outline.  There are different ways to interact with it.  You can look at the raw XML representation of my outline (the outline is in the OPML format).  This format is useful to software that is programmed to work with OPML, such as Radio and Manila.  For instance, if you are running Radio, you can subscribe to my outline (i.e., add me to your Radio buddy list) but clicking on this Subscribe to Raymond Yee's Instant Outline link, which would be equivalent to the iconic representation common on Radio blogs today, the OPML coffee mug: For those of you who don't use Radio but are using a web browser, you can look at my outline as HTML.  Here I show two ways of producing HTML from my outline: HTML, rendered using Joshua Allen's OPML XSLT and the W3C XSLT service HTML, rendered using Sjoerd Visscher's OPML renderer     Posted by Raymond Yee on 4/3/02; 9:30:11 AM from the Web Technology dept. Discuss

Should I switch back to a non-News Item based site #

I'm still playing with the use of News Items in my blog.  But I was wondering this morning whether I should switch back to a non-news item based site.  One problem is that there is no way to sort the items for a given day (other than in reverse chronological order)  (correct me if I'm wrong).  Another problem is the rather rigid department structure (though combining the Metadata plugin with news items might help a lot.) I suppose the biggest reason I was starting to think that I made a mistake in switching over is that integration with Radio and News Items seems pretty weak.  And I just started playing with Radio Instant Outlining (which I'll write more about in another News Item).  There seems to be a big tension between the two fundamental XML formats that Userland is pushing forward:  RSS 0.92 and OPML.   The view of the world embodied by RSS 0.92 is that of a list of HTML chunks.  No hierarchical -- just a list.  OPML, on the other hand, is about hierarchies (which are wll expressed by outlines).  The two don't totally sit well together at times, IMHO.  For instance, news items are naturals for RSS.  The basic Radio weblog is made up of HTML chunks, syndicatable by RSS.   (Using News items in Manila gets one closer to this Radio functionality; my hope is that Radio categories will be reconciled with Manila News Item departments -- and that one can place a given news item in more than one department/category.) Now there's lot of play with Instant Outlining.  But these outlines hang out somewhere else, in another space, not that well integrated with the blog of chunks.  Certainly one can transform OPML into RSS by flattening out the hierarchy (that's what outline renderers do in Frontier/Radio, right?)  But I'm looking for a better blend.... This note might sound quite confusing (and confused) -- but these are my thoughts about all this experimentation.    Posted by Raymond Yee on 4/3/02; 9:04:17 AM from the Site Notes dept. Discuss