Here's a quick link to a discussion of PHP vs. Java. Sure, that's much like a discussion of Coke vs. Pepsi, or Mr. T vs. Hulk Hogan, but some interesting points are raised. Note, though, that Raible is a hard-core Java guy, but many of the comments come from hard-core PHP folks.

David Wiley talks about something called the "Reusability Paradox" of learning objects. It's one of the fundamental issues in dealing with learning objects, and basically boils down to this (grossly oversimplified Coles Notes version of Wiley's paper):

I just whipped up a brain-dead simple bookmarklet to check Technorati's link cosmos for the currently viewed web page. Just drag the link below into your bookmarks or toolbar or whatever, and whenever you click it, you should get the Technorati report on who's linking to that page.

Technorati This

No warrantee, express nor implied. Use at your own risk. If it nukes your system, you should be using a better OS, and it's not my fault... ;-)

Well, you're probably not, but if you know someone who is, they might be thankful for this page, containing what appears to be a pretty comprehensive list of RSS readers for a whole lotta platforms.

From the Intranet Journal: a handy tip list for how/who to best generate and manage a requirements specification for a project.

Just a reminder to anyone who is interested in teaching/learning in a higher-ed setting, that the Teaching Reflections 2003 Conference is taking place August 20-21 here at the University of Calgary (conducted by the Learning Commons, no less!)

More info here and no, I did not design those web pages.

I just noticed this. I have no idea how long it's been available. Wired.com now has RSS feeds for any search query.

Just copy the "RSS" link from any search results page and subscribe to your heart's content. Sound familiar?

I've been using MacJournal for some time now, and have been quite happy using it as my outboard brain (for accounts, registrations, code snippets...) but it started barfing on me over the last couple of weeks - new entries not saved, etc... I know... MacJournal is open source (well, the source is available, anyway), so why don't I just fix it myself? I've got enough of my own code to manage without taking on an unrelated project. That, and I'm getting lazy in my approaching middle age.

Handy page on integrating RSS feeds into JSP pages...

I've updated my blogroll using the Blogroll plugin for Movabletype. It now renders directly from the .opml output from NetNewsWire... It includes a link to the .opml source.

Enjoy!

We've been getting some awesome feedback from those who attended the Syndicating Learning Objects with RSS and Trackback presentation at Merlot2003.

I've been told by several people now that it was one of the best presentations of the whole conference (which I find more than a little hard to believe). The audience did seem to perk up to the concepts we were demonstrating, and I think the whole RSS-syndication-of-learning-objects meme is getting some decent traction now.

Notes from the Federated Search session.

• Merlot Federated Search
  • Martin Koning Bastiaan
  • Sam Shamseldin
  • Alyssa Lalanne
  • http://fedsearch.merlot.org
  • Why?
    • original problem: hard to find/evaluate learning materials
    • emergent problem: number of collections/repositories/communities
    • various ways of addressing the emergent problem - they chose federated search over harvesting
      • 2 issues with harvesting
        • lots of authors - how to get info together?
        • if lots of collections, we could create one "union catalog" with all collections harvested in it, BUT that removes the value added by the individual collections
          • Harvesting would "take away the life" of the communities and collections that are harvested
    • 2 parts
      • services
        • expose partner resources
      • clients
        • connect to partner resources
    • Federated search = cross collection client
    • Simultaneous search of all partners, collecting results into integrated hitlist
    • Limit number of results, to prevent harvesting (can't get more than 25 results at a time)
    • use Long Response Page to show progress bar during search (like WOLongResponse)
    • Built in JSP
    • Ranking weighs title over description, etc...
    • How are controlled vocabularies managed?
      • not at all. vocabulary agnostic
  • Demo
    • Merlot
    • EdNA
    • SMETE
    • Relevancy ranking applied at the fed. search client level (not in sources)
• Can you run a federated search against Merlot? What API?
  • based on Google WebService API
  • A tweaked version used by Merlot and its partners (DN: CAREO should probably support this)
  • search is open to partners only (both ways) - not open to the The World
• No RSS feed or bookmarkable URL for searches
• Federated Search Collections
  • Current partners: MERLOT, EdNA, SMETE
  • additional partners needed
    • general collections
    • discipline-specific collections
• Fed. Search Architecture
  • proxies
  • service dispatch mechanism
  • result handlers
  • user interface customization
  • future requirements
• Discussing putting their implementation into Open Source, or Shared Source with their partners
• Federated search community
  • can't solve these problems individually:
    • search syntax - what is the query?
    • results requirements - what info is returned?
    • sharing knowledge and solutions
  • Community charter: develop simple standards for searching multiple collections and a federated search framework as an implementation of those standards
    • RE-USE EXISTING SIMPLE STANDARDS
      • eg. used Google as model, not Lucene.
• What about network latencies?
  • different services respond at different speeds
  • use timeout - if no result after so long, disregard source.
  • use intermediary page before results to show status of search (progress bar)
  • EdNA is in australia, and are one of the faster responses - latency not really an issue.
• Cacheing?
• How to handle scalability?
  • searches run simultaneously (in parallel) so they all happen at the same time
  • no real cost for increased sources - the entire search is only as slow as the single slowest source
  • have a resultlistener that gets callbacks from each source query, aggregates and ranks all results together.
  • assume that the individual sources are giving their results with the "best" first, since we use only the first X records...
  • Aggregated results from all sources are then sorted together for overall relevancy at the fed. search client level
  • If there are missing fields, they just aren't displayed (if there is no author returned, it's not put as part of the result display item)
• Built it to grow easily
  • just add 2 classes to the server to manage fed. queries on new source
    • source and listener?