The Ten Thousand Year Blog

Congratulations to the Tiki Wiki team for winning in one of the categories for the “first annual OSDir.com Editor’s Choice Awards in Open Source.”

Tags: Collaborative Web by David
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MIT’s Technology Review contains a regular commentary by Simon Garfinkel. This one from December 28, 2003 is about the emerging pandemic of comment spams on blogs. The next release of WordPress (version 1.0), slated for distribution on January 1, 2004, will contain a comment-spam fighting tool, along with a bunch of other improvements.

Tags: Blogging Experience by David
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Nice article by Randy Boswell of CanWest News Service called “Mapping a New Course in the Sea” that celebrates a Canadian software achievement in deepsea mapping through multibeam bathymetric mapping. The article includes information from Gordon Fader, a marine geologist at the Bedford Institute of Oceanography in Nova Scotia, the East Coast equivalent of Victoria’s [...]

Tags: Searcher Magazine Threads by David
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December 22, 2003: According to a Times-Colonist article , British Columbians lead Canada in Internet usage. “The poll was conducted by TNS on the use of government online services.”

Tags: Web Jots by David
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Word for the Day: convergatising or convergence advertising, that is, cross-advertising by media conglomerates. Examples? I made up this neologism earlier in 2003, but can’t remember why!

Tags: Web Jots by David
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The Great Canadian Fossil Trail (La Grande Travers?e Pal?ontologique du Canada) stretches from Newfoundland in the east to Vancouver Island in the west, and consists of museums, fossil sites, and companies such as the Burgess Shale in Yoho National Park, British Columbia, that is also a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Tags: Science by David
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Victoria, BC, will be the site of the Species at Risk 2004: Pathways to Recovery Conference from March 2 to 6, 2004 at the Victoria Conference Centre.

Tags: Science by David
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Hampton Court Palace, Henry VIII’s court on the River Thames, boasts a ghost that’s been captured on a video surveillance camera. It may surprise you to know that investigating ghosts is a pursuit of higher education in the United Kingdom (and likely elsewhere in the world) from a psychological perspective. A Google search for “hampton [...]

Tags: Pseudo-Science by David
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The University of Calgary e-Learning site includes a Best Practices in e-Learning Showcase. The university also offers an online-only e-learning certificate. A Best Practices in e-Learning Conference will be held online via the university in August 2004.

Tags: Distance Education and E-Learning by David
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The Access Copyright (Canada) newsletter for December 2003 I receive reported that Bill C-36, the act to create the Library and Archives Canada (amalgamation of the National Archives of Canada and the National Library of Canada announced in October 2002), and a controversial amendment to the Copyright Act that extended copyright on unpublished works of [...]

Tags: Web Jots by David
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Under development by Simon Fraser University’s Surrey campus, “The Portal for Online Objects in Learning (POOL) Project is a consortium of several educational, private and public, sector organizations to develop an infrastructure for learning object repositories. We address the issues of building such architectures including the metadata, software and hardware considerations and bootstrapping the system [...]

Tags: Distance Education and E-Learning by David
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The December 2003 issue (no. 6) of DigiCULT.Info can be downloaded as an Adobe PDF file at the DigiCULT.Info site. As with previous issues, this one is filled with much useful information relating to digital preservation, digital asset management, new open source software, and learning objects.

Tags: Digital Preservation by David
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The University of Virginia Fine Arts Library maintains a list of online image collections, including photographs, art and architecture.

Tags: Visualization Systems by David
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Institute for Image Data Research: “The Institute for Image Data Research was set up by the University of Northumbria at Newcastle in 1997, bringing together researchers from a range of disciplines with a common interest in images and their use in human communication. Our research is essentially people-centred, concentrating on analysing users’ needs for visual [...]

Tags: Visualization Systems by David
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In a defining moment in the Warr on Terror and the invasion and occupation of Iraq, the United States announced the capture of Saddam Hussein on December 13. Here is the Fox News storiy on the capture, which includes video of the new conference announcing the capture.

Tags: History Findings by David
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Why, this morning, when Paul Martin is being sworn in as the new Prime Minister, is the Prime Minister of Canada’s Web site, a part of govenrnment, pointing to his Paul Martin, member and leader of the Liberal Party of Canada Web site this morning? http://sts.paulmartin.ca/livelink/livelink.exe?func=LL.getlogin&NextURL=%2Flivelink%2Flivelink%2Eexe%3FRedirect%3D1 Site was changed later in the day to http://www1.pm.gc.ca/

Tags: Web Jots by David
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Heard Dr. Kaku this morning on CBC Radio discussing the possibility of time travel. Here’s his Web site that he referenced at the end of the interview: mkaku.org

Tags: Science by David
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The Google Labs released the Google Deskbar tool on November 6, 2003. With this tool running only under Windows, you can search the Internet without opening a Web browser.

Tags: Cool Tools by David
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The Re-usable Educational Software Library (RESL), “a library of resources to support good practice in the re-use of educational software,” comes to you courtesy of The Open University in the United Kingdom. What you’ll find here, upon browsing or searching the site are “case-studies in re-using educational software, plus related software, reports, guides, data-sets and [...]

Tags: Distance Education and E-Learning by David
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From a UNESCO Archives Portal press release, 2003-12-05: Thousands of documents related to the history of the slave trade in Latin America held by the National Archives of Colombia and Cuba are now online available on the websites of these two institutions. UNESCO supported their digitization and publication within the framework of its Slave Trade [...]

Tags: History Findings by David
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New France, New Horizons: On French Soil in America was established to To mark the 400th anniversary of the French presence in North America in 2004, France and Canada are re-creating their singular adventure and sparking new interest in their shared history, by putting documents online, reproduced in their entirety using the latest digitization technologies, [...]

Tags: History Findings by David
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Update for 02008 07 06: Tibet Visual History Online no longer exists and was redesigned as The Tibet Album: British Photography in Central Tibet, 1920-1950, which contains more than 6,000 photographs. For more historical photographs of Tibet, see Tibet, a digital collection from the American Geographical Society Library. Tibet Visual History Online contains a database [...]

Tags: History Findings, Museums and Art Galleries, Visualization Systems by David
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The FLAG Foreign Law Guide Project, “a collaborative Internet gateway to the holdings of foreign, international and comparative law in UK universities and national libraries,” is hosted by the University of London’s Institute of Advanced Legal Studies.

Tags: Searcher Magazine Threads by David
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The Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology, part of the Institute of Archaeology, University College London, has a searchable collection of digital images of the entire collection available for public access. Use the Search the Collections link. The museum is named after the University College’s first Edwards Professor of Egyptian Archaeology and Philology, William Flinders Petrie [...]

Tags: History Findings by David
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Oslo, Norway, 5 December 2003: Ontopia AS, the world’s leading vendor of topic map technology, announced Release 2.0 of the Ontopia Knowledge Suite(TM) will be available from 19 December 2003. This major release of the OKS brings: the full release of the Web Editor Framework for building custom topic map authoring environments; extension of the [...]

Tags: Cool Tools by David
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Network-Lawyers, who run aynchronous online seminars via Yahoo Groups, also maintains a Weblog and a Wiki at http://netls.blogspot.com/ and http://network-lawyers.org/FrontPage The Wiki engine is ZWiki, a Zope application. The Wiki also functions contains a netLS Portal page or central access point to all of netLS’ activities. Thanks very much to lawyer John DeBruyn for alerting [...]

Tags: Collaborative Web by David
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