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.
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.
Perhaps the most important piece of any application development project is requirements gathering. After all, if you’re not clear on where you’re going, how will you know when you get there? So why do most intranet teams spend so little time focusing on developing the skills necessary to do this piece well?
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!)
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.
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.
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.
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