is it just me

As you may have noticed the great service Wordle.net is offline.

If you want to create cool wordl clouds from your texts you’ll need some other tools in the meanwhile. I created a small list of tools that you can use and analyzed one of my papers on Artefact-Actor-Networks, so you can see how they will look like.

1. TagCrowd, http://www.tagcrowd.com/
2. WordItOut, http://worditout.com/
3. WordSift, http://wordsift.com/
4. Tagul, http://tagul.com
5. ABCya WordClouds, http://www.abcya.com/word_clouds.htm

Popularity: 1% [?]

One of my favourite web services – Wordle.net – is down because of some weird legal reasons. If you are a laywer specialized in trademark affairs, please help to get Wordle back online.

Here is what the Wordle founder says on his page:

I am seeking pro bono legal advice, to evaluate a trademark claim against my use of the word “Wordle” for this web site. If you’re an intellectual property lawyer, with expertise in trademark law, and you wish to offer professional advice on this matter, please contact me.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Maybe you have already seen Recognizr, a TAT prototype of an augmented ID concept. If not here is the pretty stunning video.

Can you imagine the great impact on scientific conferences that tool could have? You just talked to someone pretty cool and want to stay in contact with him. Normally you would need to exchange analog or digital business cards or use tools like More! where you still need to know a name or use QR codes to identifiy your communication partner… With the Recognizr you’d only need to make a picture of his face and add the person to you network. How cool is that?

I am aware of the privacy issues that arise from such a tool and I am pretty sure many people would be frightend to use it, but for us technical geeks that live in the Social Semantic Web and use all new cool toys and tools it is simply awesome. Seems like I need to get me an Google Nexus somewhere…

Popularity: 1% [?]

Jana Herwig hat sich in den voestalpine digitalks in der dritten Ausgabe mit Microblogging, Video und Weak ties beschäftigt. Das sehr interessante Video findet sich auf YouTube, die Folien auf Slideshare und ein ausführlicher Beitrag in Jana’s Blog. Enjoy.

Popularity: 8% [?]

Da ist es wieder. Das alte Problem mit neuen Gadgets. Natürlich braucht niemand wirklich einen Kindle oder ein iPad aber es sind einfach coole moderne Spielzeuge für den Mann (oder eben Apple-Jünger).

Als einer meiner Studenten eines Tages mit dem Kindle hier stand dachte ich mir so “das Ding ist aber echt ganz schön häßlich… und dann noch dieses umstellen der Kristalle… ich weiß ja nicht”. Dann haben wir ein wenig über Einsatzzwecke im Rahmen der Universitätsausbildung gesprochen und sie da: man findet Anwendungsbereiche in denen ein eBook-Reader für Mitarbeiter und Studenten von sehr hohem Interesse sein kann (Zugriff auf Publikationen oder die gesamte Uni-Bibliothek, Annotation von Hausarbeiten und Synchronisierung mit einem zentralen Repository…). Heute bin ich dann dank Martin Lindner auf einen schon etwas älteren, ehrlichen Test des Kindles gestoßen, der mich sagen lässt. NEIN, kein Kindle.

Und dann kam Polly der iPad. Ein Gerät, auf das wir mindestens schon 10 Jahre warteten is endlich da. Es ist cool und smart und hat den iBookStore und es hat mobiles iWork und und und… Kurzum: eigentlich ist es das Gerät, dass wir alle haben wollen – zum Spielen natürlich, nicht weil wir es tatsächlich bräuchten. Sicherlich wird man auch für den iPad Einsatzszenarien im Lernbereich finden aber momentan ist es ein (gar nicht soooo teures) Spielzeug. Leider stellt man an solche Spielzeuge sehr hohe Anforderungen und da überrascht es nicht, dass es wohl mehr als 5 Gründe gibt, um auf Version 2 des iPad zu warten.

Wie Steve Jobs so eleoquent betont hat, ist das iPad ein mobiles Endgerät, dass sich deutlich von SmartPhones und Netbooks unterscheiden soll und das tut es leider auch. Keine Kamera in einem mobilen Gerät? Was soll das? Nur iPhone OS und kein echtes Betriebssystem mit Multitasking und so? Kein USB-Anschluss oder Karten-Slot. Och komm Steve, warum? Die angekündigten 10 Stunden Akku-Laufzeit sind sicher wieder nur Apple-Stunden (die verhalten sich etwa im Verhältnis 1:3 zur Realität).

Ja sicher, das ist meckern auf verdammt hohem Niveau; aber es ist ja nun mal auch ein Spielzeug. Von Apple. Da darf man doch Erwartungen haben, oder? Und man wird wohl warten, auf Version 2 des tollen Dings. Ich glaube ich werde dieses Mal kein Early Adopter. Danke aber schon mal an die, die es werden und uns alle heiß machen …2010 ist ja noch lang, mal sehen, was die Jungs aus Cupertino noch so aus dem Hut zaubern werden. Stay tuned.

Popularity: 1% [?]

I came across Sikuli today, a MIT User Interface Design Group project that is just awesome and allows to automate or script your computer based on screenshots.

Sikuli is a visual technology to search and automate graphical user interfaces (GUI) using images (screenshots). The first release of Sikuli contains Sikuli Script, a visual scripting API for Jython, and Sikuli IDE, an integrated development environment for writing visual scripts with screenshots easily. Sikuli Script automates anything you see on the screen without internal API’s support. You can programmatically control a web page, a desktop application running on Windows/Linux/Mac OS X, or even an iphone application running in an emulator.

What you do ist basically tell the program which region on the GUI it should click or move or rotate bei making screenshots of the region. Sikuli even let’s you automate the fill in of forms (e.g. IP adresses in the network preferences dialog).

See the demo video they put online for a detailed inspection and give the tool a try. This is really cool…

Popularity: 2% [?]

The latest presentation of Steve Wheeler on Slideshare contains a very good quote of Paulo Friere:

Education must begin with the solution of the teacher-student contradiction, by reconciling the poles of the contradiction so that both are simultaneously teachers and students.

In his presentation Steve shows how the latest technology of smart devices can be used in educational settings. Especially interesting are the Venn diagrams showing the overlaps of virtual and augmented reality and the use of gestures with really smart devices (MIT style).

Popularity: 2% [?]

Today I received a beta invitation mail from BumpTop – something long awaited. Whereas the Windows version of the great desktop tidier is on the market since last year, the Mac version is only in version 0.5 and lacks some of the Windows features. But BumpTop still helps a lot (at least for me). Here is what my desktop normally looks like:

But with BumpTop it looks like this:

It created automatic piles of documents by type what makes it really easy to interact with them. Also it allows to stick documents to the walls to access them easy.

I still wait for some invites to share but you can go to http://bumptop.com/download.php and sign up for the beta yourself. Give it a try

Popularity: 4% [?]

The German Startup of the year is called PaperC. PaperC lets you read current scientific books for free and online. The service stays free unless you want to print some pages, annotate and copy text passages or add your personal notes. So far this is the only service of that kind and for all you researcher worth a view. As of now the service seems to be in German only (if you need help in translating just let me know…).

The coolest thing about the service is the possibility to annotate any passage or save a passage as quote for later usage. You can even do a full text search over the complete content of the book. Great! It would be great to see such tools incorporated in our research communities and to cooperatively annotate papers, see what others have marked at specific passages and so on… Is anyone of you working on something similar?

Popularity: 25% [?]

I am very interested in which online tools are used by researches in different domains to stay up-to-date with the colleagues. In the TEL community for example many fellow researchers are on Twitter and Blog semi-regulary in their own or corporate blogs. In the context of my Ph.D. I am developing the model of Artefact-Actor-Networks (AANs) where online communication and cooperation channels are analyzed and used for enhancing group and knowledge awareness of group members. As the research community is one of the groups I am very interested in, I’d like to know which online tools you are using and which one we should consider as an additional data source for AANs. If I did not mention the tool you are using, please use the “other” option in the TwtPoll or comment on this post.

Popularity: 7% [?]