i’m sorry, i just don’t know

Google has just applied for a patent (more on that in a bit) for Product View, a search system that lets you find text in images.  Could be incredibly cool for semantic webbites, if it weren’t for the whole patent thing.

Collective intelligence is generated as users engage with Web content. In a review for the book Programming for Collective Intelligence, Tim O’Reilly talks about understanding how users can help indicate the semantic meaning of Web content.

No one would characterize Google as a “user generated content” company, yet they are clearly at the very heart of Web 2.0. That’s why I prefer the phrase “harnessing collective intelligence” as the touchstone of the revolution. A link is user-generated content, but PageRank is a technique for extracting intelligence from that content. So is Flickr’s “interestingness” algorithm, or Amazon’s “people who bought this product also bought…”, Last.Fm’s algorithms for “similar artist radio”, ebay’s reputation system, and Google’s AdSense.

via jill

The papers from the Folksemantic web tools project are now available on the COSL Website. link

You’ll find information on the tools we built to enable the finding, reuse, remixing, tagging, and sharing of open Web resources. Projects include Send2Wiki, Make a Path, Ozmozr, Relstore/Scrumdidilyumptio.us, and the RDF Content Licensing tool our engineers built for Plone.

So the Online Education Database (OEDb) pulled together a grand list of open educational resources. They also mentioned web 2.0 tools that can help a person learn from OCW stuff. Lots of good resources. And not one of the folksemantic tools is mentioned. I guess we need to get on the ball getting the word out. At least USU OpenCourseWare was listed

So the source code is available for the folksemantic tools Joel corrected me. The code from send2wiki and Ozmozr are downloadable.
send2wiki
ozmozr
and you can browse the source for the other folksemantic tools… http://cosl.usu.edu/osmotrac/browser/

So I read this article on elearnspace. George Siemens concluded that open APIs are killing open source. Steven Downes takes a more moderate approach suggesting that developers will eventually tire of writing code for open APIs and, I assume, go back to coding open source applications.

This made me think about the folksemantic tools we are building at COSL. We are open. We like to share. We intend one day to expose the code to our tools so they can be really open source. But as it turns out, we haven’t gotten around to it. But we are building a tool called shareAPI, that allows developers access in and out of our stuff. And I have no concluding statement.

I actually gasped while watching this. I know I’m a geek, but really, this is amazing.

Sea Dragon is a very cool data representation tool that allows for incredibly rich, dense data to be displayed on screen. Photosynth is a Microsoft Labs project. Pull these together with flickr and reveal the Semantic Web via images. Human semantic visual representations tied together… watch for the example of Notre Dame. Come on… be patient and watch the whole thing (minus the BMW ad at the end, unless you want to explain to Justin the subconcious meaning of water and powerful machines).

You know, when talking about the Semantic Web, I always have difficulty describing how relational, folksemantic data will change things for the average person. Maybe I’ll force-feed this video to everyone who doesn’t get it because of my inept attempts to explain it. Rah rah microsoft… maybe you aren’t the devil.

NMC (New Media Consortium conference)… what a great experience that was this year. Lots of engaging conversation. That group is right for Web2.0 tools. They are interested in new teaching technologies, of course, but there is more of a philosophical view about technology and it’s role in education that seems to sync with COSL. We talked about Folksemantic and got lots of engaging conversation. I, of course, did not make the deadline to submit my presentation materials, but I’ve put my slides up on slideshare.

We’ve changed. MOCSL is now Folksemantic.

So I can’t seem to get my wikipedia entry on Folksemantic to stick. I’m doing something wrong. The moderator gods there keep deleting it, and I’m starting to feel a bit de-motivated to contribute to that community. Moderation by unknown beings…the best way to kill participation in your community. That’s probably fine for wikipedia because they have so many entries.