Discourse Architecture

These are incredible. Stefanie Posavec visualized Kerouac’s On The Road in a really clean, incredible way. Using variables of sentence length as well as topic categories of her own construction, she can give you a bird’s eye view of the book. And she has used the same dataset in several different illustrations, each with a feel of their own. Pretty, poetic.

An article about Helium.com, a site that pays a authors for individual pieces, basically creating a market for spec writing, linking buyers and sellers. Similarities to ohmynews.com? Evidence that small rewards for knowledge sharing can work? Standards? Quality? Comparisons to code sites that assess demand for a script, then commission coders to make it?

from: http://whereistand.com/Help/AboutTheCompany

WhereIstand is an online community that organizes Internet content by
opinions and affiliations for searching and comparing. Driven by our
members, whereIstand’s mission is to reliably present the stands taken
by public figures and organizations as well as encourage users to weigh
in with their own opinions.

Using our comparison engine, whereIstand users can quickly answer the following questions:

• What are the opinions of the public figures, blogs, and people I know – whose opinion I value – on a particular issue?

• How do my opinions on the issues that are important to me
  compare to those of public figures, as well as others in the community?

I stumbled across this designer’s blog in the course of research for a project. I really like her prediction about Facebook. I am of the opinion that Facebook is the next Myspace, which was the next Friendster, and on down the line (was AOL the first of this genre?!). At any rate, I think very she’s worth listening to, adding her as a trusted source.

Semapedia.org is a project that allows users to tag places with a cell phone scannable barcode. Cue DIY geo-tagging…

What a great site! They have a number of things happening, but most interesting is to look at their Global SchoolHouse Projects Database. They have a series of projects occurring at any one time, so it’s pretty easy to look at several examples of live collaborations that are happening across a number of disciplines and age groups. But if you take a look at their past projects, you can get a sense of how they organize their collaborations. Here are a few screenshots from their search page:

Choice of Curriculum that the Project Applies to:

The types of technological platforms and file formats used:

And finally, the kind of tasks accomplished and/or skillsets employed:

It’s exciting to think about sharing video and audio files in an educational context, especially across cultures. Pretty uplifting stuff…

An interesting Open Source application that allows you to model a set of data into a social network map. I have not yet had a chance to tinker with it, so I don’t know how extensible it is. Have a play

A pretty complete decision tree of which technology to use for which need: wikis, commercial groupware, videoconferencing, blogs, IMs, or email
Also an interesting example of questions used as the guiding format for this case scenario diagram.

URL: http://www.lifehack.org/articles/communication/when-to-use-email-when-not-to.html

this is to see whether all categories are appearing. this post will be deleted

A cool mapping site with a few different maps to switch through. From the site:

Watch the sun rise and set all over the world on this real-time, computer-generated illustration of the earth’s patterns of sunlight and darkness. The clouds are updated every 3 hours with current weather satellite imagery.

URL: http://www.die.net/earth/