22 November 2009

Summary of this week 16 Nov - 22 Nov

From my Diigo Bookmark this week. Please also feel free to follow me on twitter at http://twitter.com/Web_Evolution!




[Data]

infochimps.org — Find Any Dataset in the World

"The first open marketplace for data. For anything from polling surveys to market research to fantasy sports statistics, we can connect your data to a massive audience of customers. You control the terms, you set the price, we handle storage, distribution and billing. "




[Health]

Welcome - Medpedia

"Medpedia is a collaborative project launched on 17 February 2009. Its aim is to create an open access online medical wiki encyclopedia[1] in association with Harvard Medical School, Stanford School of Medicine, Berkeley School of Public Health, University of Michigan Medical School, the U.K. National Health Service (NHS)[2] as well as other contributors. (From Wikipedia)"




[Digital Native]

Digital Natives with a Cause? — Centre for Internet and Society

Thorough research on digital natives. Reports are available here and here.




[Web]

The War For the Web - O'Reilly Radar

Some important quotes of Tim O'Reilly
"It could be that everyone will figure out how to play nicely with each other, and we'll see a continuation of the interoperable web model we've enjoyed for the past two decades. But I'm betting that things are going to get ugly. We're heading into a war for control of the web. And in the end, it's more than that, it's a war against the web as an interoperable platform. Instead, we're facing the prospect of Facebook as the platform, Apple as the platform, Google as the platform, Amazon as the platform, where big companies slug it out until one is king of the hill."
"I agree with you that Google is an ethical company, and is really trying to do the right thing. They aren't monopolists by intention in the way that some other companies are or have been. But the gravity well is growing deeper, and more and more things will be sucked into it."
"That's OK when you're a small company, but it's not OK when you're as powerful as Google is. That was Microsoft's mistake: they didn't realize soon enough that the rules had changed, that they were powerful enough that they had to act with new restraint. It's the spider man rule: "With great power comes great responsibility.""
Another important piece on the intensifying competition among leading web companies, especially focused on Google, can be found here.



[Blog]

Treasury Invites Bloggers to Round Table - NYTimes.com

An example of blogging becoming mainstream as an important media source.
"The Treasury Department opened its doors to economic bloggers this month, and the meeting was productive in at least one respect: as John Jansen of the blog Across the Curve concluded, “After meeting them, I feel I cannot refer to them as Timothy Geithner and his minions” anymore."



[Language]

Official Google Blog: A new look for Google Translate

Official Google Blog: Automatic captions in YouTube

Google's automatic translation has been seeing very rapid improvement. Some simple experiments reveal that translations from European languages into English have become good enough for English speaking populations to be able to read the texts without being constantly annoyed by the unsatisfactory quality of translation. Similarly, Japanese⇒English, Chinese⇒English and any other language⇒English translations seem quite readable and understandable (It's not necessarily the case the other way round). This fact, combined with Google's newly released automatic captions feature in YouTube, will likely consolidate the dominant position of English as a global web language. Another interesting piece on the importance of translation is available here.




[Learning]

The Argument for Free Classes via iTunes - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com

Some interesting statistics with regard to online learning are available.
"Apple now says it has about 250,000 individual classes available to the public. That’s everything from the “The Biology of Autism” from the Stanford School of Medicine to “A Global History of Architecture” from M.I.T. Tuition may be sky-high on those campuses, but on iTunes, the lectures are free."
"Near the head of the class, with more than 375,000 downloads a week, is Open University, a distance-learning institution based in Britain. The school said that last weekend its lectures on iTunes U crossed the 10-million-downloads mark.""


Vol 10, No 5 (2009)

Thorough reviews on online learning.
Openness, Dynamic Specialization, and the Disaggregated Future of Higher Education
From Open Content to Open Course Models: Increasing Access and Enabling Global Participation in Higher Education
The Impact of Openness on Bridging Educational Digital Divides
Open Textbook Proof-of-Concept via Connexions
Peer-To-Peer Recognition of Learning in Open Education
Open Educational Resources: New Possibilities for Change and Sustainability
The Technological Dimension of a Massive Open Online Course: The Case of the CCK08 Course Tools
Incentives and Disincentives for the Use of OpenCourseWare


2009 November | Online Universities

Some online learning resources.




[Government]

Open Government Laboratories of Democracy | The White House

"Inspired by the President’s call for more open government, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts launched its data catalogue, following in the footsteps of Washington, DC, San Francisco, New York, and elsewhere around the country (as well as cities in Canada and the UK), to provide public access to information by and about government. What makes this exciting is not merely having transportation information available in machine-readable formats, but that professional and amateur enthusiasts can then get together, as they did last weekend, to create new software applications and data visualizations to better enable public transit riders to track arrival times for the next subway, bus, or ferry. Publishing government information online facilitates this kind of useful collaboration between government and the public that transforms dry data into the tools that improve people’s lives. (For another great example, check out what happened when we published the Federal Register for people to use.)"




[Others]

tecosystems » What’s in Store for 2010? A Few Predictions




Many other articles or studies on various topics can be found through the following links.
Science
Government
Learning
Google
Micro Payment
Publishing
Crowd Sourcing
Health
Open Access


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