IlliGAL Blogging

Blogging has been changing how people disseminate ideas. There are blogs covering almost any topic one may be able to think about. Blogs were seen as mere on-line entities where people express; just a bunch of digital information here and there. But recently they are starting to change into something you can touch and feel.

Blogbinders is a site for turning your blog into a book. For instance, if you have your blog built using Blogger, WordPress, MovableType, Livejournal, or Typepad, Blogbinders allow you to edit it and publish your blog into a book that you can sell. Another interesting alternative is Lulu. It does not directly edit the blog for you, but you can: edit it in a Word file, upload the file to the site, decide the cover and price, and voilá, you have a book. They also shelve it on on-line stores such as Amazon. Lulu is also a very interesting alternative for cheap book publishing. Books that major publishing stream may not be interested in publishing because of their tiny revenue may be published via Lulu-like sites.

And you may think now: will IlliGAL blogging eventually turn into a collectively-written book some day? ;)

The DISCUS project has always supported that intuition that annotation capabilities are a must for knowledge and information exchange. For instance, imaging that you are analyzing the KeyGraph generated from a particular discussion (here you can find an example). You may want to enrich such graph with your analysis, comments, or related information. Basically, you want to add metadata to the KeyGraph. If such a capability is available, a whole new bunch of information will need to be efficiently stored to allow, not only fast and easy retrieval, but allow analysis of the added metadata.

The Kowari project is an Open Source, massively scalable, transaction-safe, purpose-built database for the storage, retrieval and analysis of metadata. It provides a simple query language to interact with the metastore (iTQL). If you are familiar with SQL the resemblance will help you get up to speed very fast. The design is oriented to efficiently manage large volume metadata. Informal tests from Joe Frutelle, a NCSA colleague, have convinced me that this metastore can be the way to go for storing the large volumes of metadata that annotation may produce in DISCUS.

Matthew Lewis studies and teaches generative art at Ohio State University and frequently uses genetic algorithms as part of his toolkit. See a short online exhibition of his work here and a list of his projects here. Hat tip generatorx.

I haven't been a very good blogger this semester. My regular blogging schedule has been upset by my teaching a new prep, an engineering stat course, to 150 students, and the thrice a week lecture preparation and a committee load that would kill a lesser man have sucked the small shards of free time that I used to use to blog out of my schedule.

I'm going to make an effort to get back to blogging a 2-3 times a week over the course of the rest of the semester. Stay tuned.