Technorati has added a Blog Finder (beta) based on its tags directory. The HTML they use for that is different than for the normal tags previously used.
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Saturday, September 24, 2005
Monday, September 19, 2005
LIFT Text Transcoder - Web Pages in Text-Only Version
The LIFT Text Transcoder makes it possible to convert web pages to text-only versions. The manual states:
"LIFT Text Transcoder (or transcoder) is a web application that converts a web page into its text-only version on-the-fly by eliminating all page layout that is present in the original page and by hiding many accessibility defects.
The transcoder is useful for the website visitor, since it removes some accessibility issues and small defects like missing image ALTs or forms that are not properly linearized or flash objects. It can be used also by the web developer to determine if the reading order of the information presented in the page makes sense when read in the order that would be followed by a screen reader or speech browser.
LIFT Text Transcoder (enter a URL at that page to try it out) is especially useful for people and situations where:
- graphics cannot be seen (e.g. blind persons, text-only browsers, ...);
- sizes of the page elements have to changed (e.g. a low-vision persons that maximizes the browser windows to enlarge its contents; a PDA user who has to fit everything on a small screen);
- size of text that has to be changed (e.g. a low-vision person; a presenter that has to project a web page to an audience via a projector);
-links and buttons have to be easily located and operated (e.g. a person with motor disabilities that cannot move his/her hand with precision, like somebody with a broken arm);
-form fields need to be easily layed out to be used (e.g. a low vision person using a screen magnifier that restricts his/her field of vision)."
The options that are available for each text-only page so produced are:
"Change the current font size: larger | default | smaller
Current color mode is Black on White, other available modes: Yellow on Black | Black on Cream
Show textual links as buttons
Do not move navbars
Open not handled documents directly
Hide the Text/Graphical View Panel
Hide Text Only Options
Open the original version of this page."
Cross-posted to LawPundit.
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"LIFT Text Transcoder (or transcoder) is a web application that converts a web page into its text-only version on-the-fly by eliminating all page layout that is present in the original page and by hiding many accessibility defects.
The transcoder is useful for the website visitor, since it removes some accessibility issues and small defects like missing image ALTs or forms that are not properly linearized or flash objects. It can be used also by the web developer to determine if the reading order of the information presented in the page makes sense when read in the order that would be followed by a screen reader or speech browser.
LIFT Text Transcoder (enter a URL at that page to try it out) is especially useful for people and situations where:
- graphics cannot be seen (e.g. blind persons, text-only browsers, ...);
- sizes of the page elements have to changed (e.g. a low-vision persons that maximizes the browser windows to enlarge its contents; a PDA user who has to fit everything on a small screen);
- size of text that has to be changed (e.g. a low-vision person; a presenter that has to project a web page to an audience via a projector);
-links and buttons have to be easily located and operated (e.g. a person with motor disabilities that cannot move his/her hand with precision, like somebody with a broken arm);
-form fields need to be easily layed out to be used (e.g. a low vision person using a screen magnifier that restricts his/her field of vision)."
The options that are available for each text-only page so produced are:
"Change the current font size: larger | default | smaller
Current color mode is Black on White, other available modes: Yellow on Black | Black on Cream
Show textual links as buttons
Do not move navbars
Open not handled documents directly
Hide the Text/Graphical View Panel
Hide Text Only Options
Open the original version of this page."
Cross-posted to LawPundit.
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Friday, September 16, 2005
Google Blog Search
Google has launched a blog search function at
Google Blog Search.
The same results in somewhat different format can be obtained at the Blogger Blog Search Beta, which is of course not limited to Blogger blogs.
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Google Blog Search.
The same results in somewhat different format can be obtained at the Blogger Blog Search Beta, which is of course not limited to Blogger blogs.
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Thursday, September 01, 2005
RSS Readers
Chris Sherman reviews RSS Readers in Choosing an RSS Reader, a September 1, 2005 article at Search Engine Watch.
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Monday, August 22, 2005
Blogging in Malaysia
The Oxford Business Group has an August 22, 2005 article entitled The New Blogocracy covering blogging in Malaysia.
An excerpt from that article states:
"The recent news that a group of five online diarists, or 'bloggers', participated in a 24-hour 'blogathon' to raise money for charity highlighted the important role these online journals now play in disseminating information to the Malaysian public."
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An excerpt from that article states:
"The recent news that a group of five online diarists, or 'bloggers', participated in a 24-hour 'blogathon' to raise money for charity highlighted the important role these online journals now play in disseminating information to the Malaysian public."
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Sunday, August 07, 2005
Apophenia and Blogs - The Bridge between the Digital and the Physical
Danah Boyd, a former Googleite and Bloggerite now a Yahootite, blogging at zephoria ipseity, has the blog motto "apophenia :: making connections where none previously existed ". She studies "how people negotiate their presentation of self in mediated social contexts to an unknown audience" in media such as blogs. She is "fascinated by moments when people don't realize the bridge between the digital and the physical." Those out there who think that digital communication is not "real" human communication should read some of these posts. Great Stuff.
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Monday, July 25, 2005
Podcasting as a New Podium
Virginia Heffernan has a nice July 22, 2005 article at the New York Times on podcasting entitled The Podcast as a New Podium. Here is a sample paragraph:
"On "Catholic Insider" Father Vonhögen leads audio tours of Rome, which he often visits, and parses the Vatican's reaction to the new Harry Potter novel; he also boasts about how many subscribers he has, as all podcasters do. Recently he told a reporter: "On Sunday, in my church, I can reach about 500 people. But with my podcasts I can reach about 15,000 listeners or more.""
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"On "Catholic Insider" Father Vonhögen leads audio tours of Rome, which he often visits, and parses the Vatican's reaction to the new Harry Potter novel; he also boasts about how many subscribers he has, as all podcasters do. Recently he told a reporter: "On Sunday, in my church, I can reach about 500 people. But with my podcasts I can reach about 15,000 listeners or more.""
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Sunday, July 17, 2005
Solving Template Problems Arising since the Introduction of Blogger Images
The introduction of Blogger Images has caused some template problems for numerous users because as Blogger Buzz writes:
"In order to provide the layout options in our newly released Blogger Images we had to wrap all posts in a
"In order to provide the layout options in our newly released Blogger Images we had to wrap all posts in a
tag."
This tag is NOT found in your templates, but shows up first when you view the source code of one of your Blogger blog pages.
The solution is to go to your Blogger blog dashboard and set the newly added "Enable float alignment" option in the blog settings to NO.
That will solve template problems but will create left and right alignment problems for the new Blogger Images feature.
Hat Tip to FamilyGreenberg.com.
This tag is NOT found in your templates, but shows up first when you view the source code of one of your Blogger blog pages.
The solution is to go to your Blogger blog dashboard and set the newly added "Enable float alignment" option in the blog settings to NO.
That will solve template problems but will create left and right alignment problems for the new Blogger Images feature.
Hat Tip to FamilyGreenberg.com.
Blogger Dashboard Update Feature Finally Fixed
The Blogger Dashboard update feature has finally been fixed, after months and months of being disabled. Bloggers can now once again tell from the Blogger Dashboard how many posts they have posted for each blog and when their last posting for each blog was made. It used to also be possible to see how many words a blogger had posted, but this feature appears to have been discarded for this newly fixed Dashboard version.
Tuesday, March 15, 2005
Saturday, February 26, 2005
Google Bombing
As we have recently stated, we have shifted from Google to Yahoo as our search engine of choice because of the fact that Google searches were too often resulting in sites that LINK to the desired page rather than the page itself.
A commentator informed us as to why the current Google search algorithm is faulty, precisely because it places too much emphasis on links, rather than paying more attention to what a site is about, even at the simplest level of the URL itself.
This emphasis on links has resulted, at its worst, in what is called Google Bombing, utilizing the principle that if enough sites link to any given site using the same link word or phrase, then that site will come up first on the Google results page.
Some links to Google Bombing are.
Adam Mathes - the original Google Bomber
Word Spy - definition of Google Bombing
A superb lengthy article by John Hiler on Google Blombing at Microcontent News - The Online Magazine for Weblogs, Webzines, and Publishing
Infothought - Seth Finkelstein's blog
The Underground Dailectic - blog
Links and Law - links
A commentator informed us as to why the current Google search algorithm is faulty, precisely because it places too much emphasis on links, rather than paying more attention to what a site is about, even at the simplest level of the URL itself.
This emphasis on links has resulted, at its worst, in what is called Google Bombing, utilizing the principle that if enough sites link to any given site using the same link word or phrase, then that site will come up first on the Google results page.
Some links to Google Bombing are.
Adam Mathes - the original Google Bomber
Word Spy - definition of Google Bombing
A superb lengthy article by John Hiler on Google Blombing at Microcontent News - The Online Magazine for Weblogs, Webzines, and Publishing
Infothought - Seth Finkelstein's blog
The Underground Dailectic - blog
Links and Law - links
Blog-Fearing ALA President Bitten by the Blogs
The Law Pundit has frequented libraries since his early days and has quite a private library of his own, so that he is certainly no enemy of good libraries.
However, we see that Google's digitization of millions of books for online access by "the masses" has the poor library people up in arms. Indeed, particularly the rise of the masses in blogs seems to be a cause for the librarians' wrath.
Michael Gorman, president-elect of the American Library Association, and Dean of Library Services, Madden Library, California State University, Fresno, has an appropriately blog-fearing article in the Library Journal of February 25, 2005 entitled Revenge of the Blog People!.
Gorman has made the mistake of attacking bloggers (this is generally done only by those who really understand nothing about blogging), and also the present posting is his reaping of the fruits of the seeds he himself has sown.
Here is how Gorman describes blogs:
"A blog is a species of interactive electronic diary by means of which the unpublishable, untrammeled by editors or the rules of grammar, can communicate their thoughts via the web. (Though it sounds like something you would find stuck in a drain, the ugly neologism blog is a contraction of "web log.") Until recently, I had not spent much time thinking about blogs or Blog People."
What a stupid thing to write. It is rather hard to believe that the president-elect of the ALA could be this out of touch with reality.
Not having learned from experience, he writes the above article defiantly after bloggers had already criticized him previously for questioning the usefulness of Google book digitization, by which he called into question the usefulness of digital availability of such information to all citizens. Some people still do not understand "democracy" in its core value.
With uninformed people like this at the head of the main US library institution, the demise of libraries is not far off. Mark our words that the next decades will be marked by massive library closings since all the world will doing their research on the screen. Blog Bitten People such as Gorman will have accelerated this development.
The entire controversy reminds us of the Egyptology library at the University of Trier in Germany, our former abode as Lecturer in Law. That library is kept unter lock and key like the safe of a bank to make sure that unauthorized persons do not obtain access to books which might be used to upset the dusty applecarts of the virtually mothballed academic disciplines which deal with this region of the world.
Freedom of Information is simply not something relished by information monopolists.
Gorman wirtes:
"In the eyes of bloggers, my sin lay in suggesting that Google is OK at giving access to random bits of information but would be terrible at giving access to the recorded knowledge that is the substance of scholarly books. I went further and came up with the unoriginal idea that the thing to do with a scholarly book is to read it, preferably not on a screen. It turns out that the Blog People (or their subclass who are interested in computers and the glorification of information) have a fanatical belief in the transforming power of digitization and a consequent horror of, and contempt for, heretics who do not share that belief."
Horror, no. Contempt, yes.
However, we see that Google's digitization of millions of books for online access by "the masses" has the poor library people up in arms. Indeed, particularly the rise of the masses in blogs seems to be a cause for the librarians' wrath.
Michael Gorman, president-elect of the American Library Association, and Dean of Library Services, Madden Library, California State University, Fresno, has an appropriately blog-fearing article in the Library Journal of February 25, 2005 entitled Revenge of the Blog People!.
Gorman has made the mistake of attacking bloggers (this is generally done only by those who really understand nothing about blogging), and also the present posting is his reaping of the fruits of the seeds he himself has sown.
Here is how Gorman describes blogs:
"A blog is a species of interactive electronic diary by means of which the unpublishable, untrammeled by editors or the rules of grammar, can communicate their thoughts via the web. (Though it sounds like something you would find stuck in a drain, the ugly neologism blog is a contraction of "web log.") Until recently, I had not spent much time thinking about blogs or Blog People."
What a stupid thing to write. It is rather hard to believe that the president-elect of the ALA could be this out of touch with reality.
Not having learned from experience, he writes the above article defiantly after bloggers had already criticized him previously for questioning the usefulness of Google book digitization, by which he called into question the usefulness of digital availability of such information to all citizens. Some people still do not understand "democracy" in its core value.
With uninformed people like this at the head of the main US library institution, the demise of libraries is not far off. Mark our words that the next decades will be marked by massive library closings since all the world will doing their research on the screen. Blog Bitten People such as Gorman will have accelerated this development.
The entire controversy reminds us of the Egyptology library at the University of Trier in Germany, our former abode as Lecturer in Law. That library is kept unter lock and key like the safe of a bank to make sure that unauthorized persons do not obtain access to books which might be used to upset the dusty applecarts of the virtually mothballed academic disciplines which deal with this region of the world.
Freedom of Information is simply not something relished by information monopolists.
Gorman wirtes:
"In the eyes of bloggers, my sin lay in suggesting that Google is OK at giving access to random bits of information but would be terrible at giving access to the recorded knowledge that is the substance of scholarly books. I went further and came up with the unoriginal idea that the thing to do with a scholarly book is to read it, preferably not on a screen. It turns out that the Blog People (or their subclass who are interested in computers and the glorification of information) have a fanatical belief in the transforming power of digitization and a consequent horror of, and contempt for, heretics who do not share that belief."
Horror, no. Contempt, yes.
BlogBib Goes Biblio Blog
BlogBib, An Annotated Bibliography on Weblogs and Blogging, with a Focus on Library/Librarian Blogs..., by Susan Herzog, Information Literacy Librarian @ Eastern Connecticut State University has an excellent series of postings on blogging in 8 PARTS.
Part 1: Introduction
Part 2: Articles & Interviews About Blogs
Part 3: BlogBib: Blogging @Your Library
Part 4: BlogBib: Blogging Tools
Part 5: BlogBib: Select Librarian/Library Blogs
Part 6: BlogBib: Books on Blogging
Part 7: BlogBib: Studies on Blogging
Part 8: BlogBib: Presentations on Blogging
This is must read about blogging.
Part 1: Introduction
Part 2: Articles & Interviews About Blogs
Part 3: BlogBib: Blogging @Your Library
Part 4: BlogBib: Blogging Tools
Part 5: BlogBib: Select Librarian/Library Blogs
Part 6: BlogBib: Books on Blogging
Part 7: BlogBib: Studies on Blogging
Part 8: BlogBib: Presentations on Blogging
This is must read about blogging.
Thursday, February 17, 2005
The FeedBurner Weblog - Burning Questions
We have just subscribed to Burning Questions the offical FeedBurner Weblog, which has 934 subscribing readers as of this date +1 for our subscription. Take a look. The last posting there was on RSS Metrics and Podcasting.
Giving Google the Goodbyes
What has Google recently done to its search algorithm? It is a disaster.
There is an old wisdom which holds that "power corrupts" and "absolute power corrupts absolutely". And Google appears to be corrupted - absolutely.
Whereas most of the world has increasingly been singing the praises of Google, we have become increasingly wary of this search engine whose overly smart but increasingly complicated algorithms are perhaps beginning to run asunder.
Until about a week ago, the entry of "lawpundit" into Google expectedly returned the blog "LawPundit" as the first search listing, as it should be, since there are no competing websites or blogs with that name.
What we now find is that the entry of "lawpundit" into the Google search box no longer turns up that blog but an absolutely confused mess of websites that LINK to the blog. There appears to be no rhyme or reason to the listing whatsoever and many of the sites who do link to our blog are not very important, since some of them are our own LESSER, seldom used, blogs.
Or to put it another way, when looking for the blog LawPundit on Google, Google is useless. Even keying the words "LawPundit" and "Blog" does not provide the desired result. Something has gone very badly bonkers in the algorithm of the Google search system in the last week or two.
Our tolerance level for nonsense is low. We do not wait long. We have installed both the Yahoo and MSN toolbars and are going to give Google the boot. Yahoo's first four results for LawPundit are perfect:
1. http://www.lawpundit.com/blog/lawpundit.htm - the LawPundit blog page
2. http://www.lawpundit.com - the LawPundit website index page
3. http://lawpundit.blogspot.com - the previous LawPundit blogspot location
4. http://feeds.feedburner.com/lawpundit - the FeedBurner RSS feed
That's the way it should be. For any entered artificial keyword such as lawpundit, we - at the least - expect the search engine to find the comparably named URLs and RSSs and rank them ahead of sites that merely LINK to them. God forbid.
Goodbye Google. Yahoo is now our toolbar of choice. It has some new features we were not even aware of, such as an anti-spyware button which permits immediate scans of the hard disk. Terrific. And the search results are just as good, if not better now.
Giving Google the Goodbyes....
Crossposted to LawPundit.
There is an old wisdom which holds that "power corrupts" and "absolute power corrupts absolutely". And Google appears to be corrupted - absolutely.
Whereas most of the world has increasingly been singing the praises of Google, we have become increasingly wary of this search engine whose overly smart but increasingly complicated algorithms are perhaps beginning to run asunder.
Until about a week ago, the entry of "lawpundit" into Google expectedly returned the blog "LawPundit" as the first search listing, as it should be, since there are no competing websites or blogs with that name.
What we now find is that the entry of "lawpundit" into the Google search box no longer turns up that blog but an absolutely confused mess of websites that LINK to the blog. There appears to be no rhyme or reason to the listing whatsoever and many of the sites who do link to our blog are not very important, since some of them are our own LESSER, seldom used, blogs.
Or to put it another way, when looking for the blog LawPundit on Google, Google is useless. Even keying the words "LawPundit" and "Blog" does not provide the desired result. Something has gone very badly bonkers in the algorithm of the Google search system in the last week or two.
Our tolerance level for nonsense is low. We do not wait long. We have installed both the Yahoo and MSN toolbars and are going to give Google the boot. Yahoo's first four results for LawPundit are perfect:
1. http://www.lawpundit.com/blog/lawpundit.htm - the LawPundit blog page
2. http://www.lawpundit.com - the LawPundit website index page
3. http://lawpundit.blogspot.com - the previous LawPundit blogspot location
4. http://feeds.feedburner.com/lawpundit - the FeedBurner RSS feed
That's the way it should be. For any entered artificial keyword such as lawpundit, we - at the least - expect the search engine to find the comparably named URLs and RSSs and rank them ahead of sites that merely LINK to them. God forbid.
Goodbye Google. Yahoo is now our toolbar of choice. It has some new features we were not even aware of, such as an anti-spyware button which permits immediate scans of the hard disk. Terrific. And the search results are just as good, if not better now.
Giving Google the Goodbyes....
Crossposted to LawPundit.
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Ancient Signs
NEW! Ancient Signs The Alphabet & The Origins of Writing, a print & ebook,
shows modern alphabets are derived from ancient alphabets that in turn were derived from syllabic scripts (Sumer, Egypt, Elam, Anatolia, Crete, Cyprus).
shows modern alphabets are derived from ancient alphabets that in turn were derived from syllabic scripts (Sumer, Egypt, Elam, Anatolia, Crete, Cyprus).