carried away

In Other's Words

The web is truly worldwide when we can communicate with people whose weblogs are written with languages different from our own.

If you're using a Mac you're probably familar with a Sherlock channel called "Translation". Its hosted by SYSTRAN, a company whose own website allows you to translate one language to another. There really is no need to ignore the Japanese sites just because you can't read Japanese. While it is not always 100% accurate, using the translator often brings poetic results:

というわけで
いろいろ残念なことをやりつつ開始です。

With being the case that it is said
While doing various regrettable things, it is start.

Update: When I translated the first line of this post into Japanese, and then back again into English, this is what I got:

網は私達がweblogs が私達の専有物と別の言語と書かれている人々と交信できるとき世界的偽りなくである。

The network when us weblogs another language from our monopolized ones communicating with the people who are written, is the world not to lie.

The "Recently Updated Weblogs" Effect

This weekend TypePad introduced 2 prominent new features: Categories and Recently Updated Weblogs. The Recently Updated Weblogs feature is proving to be a useful tool in helping people find out where their hits are coming from. William, who publishes "the life - or NOT!", checked his referrers list and found a hit coming off of my site, and in turn checked out my site and then TrackBacked a post to me here. I know that's the whole point of the TrackBack feature, that readers are allowed more insight into a particular topic, but there is also an element of "connecting" going on. At least right now when blogging is still realtively new to a lot of us.

Check out William's site. He's from the "Lucky Generation". He is a student studying comp sci/poli sci/education/econ at a time when technology, as a tool, can only accelerate the learning process. Its interesting to read his journal and see how technology is ingrained into his everyday life so matter-of-factly. When I graduated high school, Apple was just starting to form as a major company. 20 years later I'm still amazed at the idea of sending letters electronically through telephone lines and having it delivered in a matter of seconds. Its good that we have these blogs. We can know of people we would not otherwise have met.

Update 09/05/03: Ever since Everything TypePad! linked to this post my weblog has seen a lot of traffic. Thanks Mena.

Please also check my sidebar for a list called "Typeople" (its towards the bottom). Its a growing list of other TypePad weblogs that I think deserve attention, just in case you've missed them when they were being Recently Updated.

[I should add that the people on this list are by no means affiliated with each other, nor do they necessarily share similar views. They're just a bunch of weblogs that I like to read.]

Update 09/06/03: I just found out who Mena is. huh.

OpenCourseWare Open for Business

MIT OpenCourseWare
a free, open, publication of MIT Course Materials.

This month the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) officially launches its Web-based electronic publishing initiative, MIT OpenCourseWare. MIT OCW is "a free, open, publication of MIT Course Materials" offered to the internet public. The materials include course syllabuses and assignments as well as access to videos of lectures. Last September the piolt version eased itself into public awareness with a limited number of courses, and this year offers several hundred more. The program has roadmapped a plan to get virtually all courses on the Web by 2007.

MIT OCW is free, as in beer. It is available to anyone with internet access. If you don't have an internet account there's always the local public library or internet cafe. September's issue of Wired features an article about how a young man in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam is using MIT OCW to take a course in software engineering for $600 (USD), while a "classmate" in Nashville, Tennessee uses it to supplement what he started learning in community college a year ago before he dropped out.

One thing the student does not get is an accredited degree. This is not Distance Learning and MIT is quick to point that out (see question #6):

MIT OCW is not a distance-learning initiative. Distance learning involves the active exchange of information between faculty and students, with the goal of obtaining some form of a credential. Increasingly, distance learning is also limited to those willing and able to pay for materials or course delivery. MIT OCW is not meant to replace degree-granting higher education or for-credit courses. Rather, the goal is to provide the content that supports an education.

There has been a lot of debate over what may be problematic with online education, and the players involved continue to examine closely any potential drawbacks. I'm not an educator so I cannot argue from that perspective, but some concerns I've heard about include the idea of promoting "camera star" professors (via the need to video conference lectures) over "camera shy" professors, and how this might alienate otherwise legitimate agendas. Also the idea that the online experience is not a true surrogate of the campus life experience. There are others issues, like copyright laws and the intellectual rights of teachers and professors. And then there is always the issue in education about who (what culture) propagates what information, and why.

In October of 2001, First Monday published an article by Kei Ishii that addresses some of these issues. It also makes a case for a more intelligent grasp at power:

Soft power is best explained by Joseph Nye and William Owens: "[Soft power] is the ability to achieve desired outcomes in international affairs through attraction rather than coercion. It works by convincing others to follow, or getting them to agree to, norms and institutions that produce the desired behavior" (Nye and Owens, 1996). One of the results for nation-states is that they "may not need to expend as many of its costly traditional or military resources". Thus, soft power also is about the attraction of U.S. democracy and free markets. Again, OpenCourseWare and Open Source provide the field for the participants to use the soft power, to create the norms and institutions necessary to learn, create, invent, innovate and last not least succeed economically.

For the most part the Academe has recognized the decentralized nature of the internet and how this may serve for a more equitable dissemination of education. MIT is not the only school looking into this, and the MIT OCW program isn't the first attempt of its kind. While it may not be the most comprehensive learning system yet, it is the most evolved program to date. It is a start. Looking ahead, the successes and failures of this program will serve as model to the future of Education.

Columbia Journalism Review on Blogging

In addition to sporting a brand new look, this month's Columbia Journalism Review features an article by Matt Welch on the current relationship between weblogs and the Media. In it Welch states that the rise in popularity of blogging could help revitalize the industry of Journalism.

From The New Amateur Journalists Weigh In:

...Blogging technology has, for the first time in history, given the average Jane the ability to write, edit, design, and publish her own editorial product — to be read and responded to by millions of people, potentially — for around $0 to $200 a year. It has begun to deliver on some of the wild promises about the Internet that were heard in the 1990s. Never before have so many passionate outsiders — hundreds of thousands, at minimum — stormed the ramparts of professional journalism.

Also, if you haven't read Tom Coates' recent article on blogging yet, here it is.

A Collection of Photographs

One of the most interesting weblog projects I've come across is :: as time goes by. It is a compendium to a larger project that is a collection of photos that span a lifetime, Fotolog: As Time Goes By.

From the publishers first post:

In the longer term, when the fotolog timeline catches up to the present, the Weblog will morph into an ongoing journal of aging. I am 62 as I begin this and it is almost impossible find thoughtful writing about the personal reality of getting older. Except for some isolated essays and one or two books, most writing on aging is frivolous, patronizing or concerned exclusively with failing health. But aging, I am finding, is much more. Perspective shifts, but the context is as deep and wide and complex as any other era of life.

This is a very interesting woman who is in the process of archiving her past and letting people in on her personal history. The photo album is set up so viewers can leave comments. She's even got a photo of her in there with John and Yoko. (Yes, that John and Yoko.)

HyperDictionary.com

HyperDictionary.com is an online dictionary where practically every word in a definition entry is hyper-linked to another definition. From what I can tell it is still evolving towards what it ultimately wants to be, but what's there so far is interesting and fun to use. The hyper-linking aspect allows you to associate one definition with another and meander through the meanings of words.

The database currently consists of 5 sections: English Dictionary, Computer Dictionary, Thesaurus, Dream Dictionary, Medical Dictionary.

A search box can even be put in your sidebar.

[For TypePad users simply create a "Link" TypeList and place the code into the "notes" field of the link. Make sure in the "Configure" panel (of the TypeList) that "Display Notes as" is set to "text".]

(let me know if that last part was unclear.)

Refrigerator Magnet Messages

I can't remeber where I found this link from, but this is a Flash based site that lets you send animated refrigerator magnet messages to someone via an email. The recipient clicks on a link in the email and it takes them to the site where your message is spelled out in those blocky magnets from your childhood. (Give it several seconds to load even with a high speed connection, also it requires the Flash 6 plug-in.)

Nicely done.

Alibris - Used, New and Hard-to-find Books, Music and Movies

Alibris - Used, New and Hard-to-find Books, Music and Movies

An interesting online book store.
[Link found via The Blind Man Eateth Many A Fly]

Novel In November

[Link found via Three Worlds]

There's an online project facilitating the kick in the ass it takes to get a novel started. In fact not only does NaNoWriMo help you get started, but it sets the goal of finishing the entire thing in a month. By the way that's writing a 50,000 word novel in a month, not reading one.

From the website:

Valuing enthusiasm and perseverance over talent and craft, NaNoWriMo is a novel-writing program for everyone who has thought fleetingly about writing a novel but has been scared away by the time and effort involved.

Because of the limited writing window, the ONLY thing that matters in NaNoWriMo is output. It's all about quantity, not quality. The kamikaze approach forces you to lower your expectations, take risks, and write on the fly.

Make no mistake: You will be writing a lot of crap. And that's a good thing. By forcing yourself to write so intensely, you are giving yourself permission to make mistakes. To forgo the endless tweaking and editing and just create. To build without tearing down.

Sounds right up my alley, because you know the great American novel is somewhere in my hindered spirit, somewhere in there next to all the cliches. I set up another blog to document how far I get: Carey Armstrong's Head First. (Carey Armstrong is a name I made up a while ago.)

A word of warning: the NaNoWriMo site is extremely slow and buggy. Maybe because as of this morning when I checked there were already 21,500 people signed up.

WordCounter

I've noticed for some time now that I use the word "apparently" a lot. Apparently this would imply that I find the obvious ubiquitous. My over use of certain words probably says 2 things about me: first, that my vocabulary is apparently limited and second, that I'm probably projecting certain attitudes through the over use of these words. Well, thanks to WordCounter I can now get stats on my most commonly used words. Its a .cgi script that allows you to paste text in a text field and then shows you the frequency of specific words in that passage.

This is how I found out that in the month of September I used the word "really" 11 times in posts on this blog. There's got to be another word to express that which is in accordance with truth or the factual.