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eFoundations

The future of social networking?

I note that the position papers for the W3C Workshop on the Future of Social Networking are now available. There are 73 in all so there's a lot of new year reading to be done if you are interested.  In the meantime, here is a quick Wordle of the aggregated text (the creation of which wasn't helped by the lack of an RSS feed for the papers and the fact that most have been submitted as PDF... boo!).

Two of the papers have been written by people we are currently funding, one by Shirley Williams, Pat Parslow and Karsten Oster Lundqvist on behalf of the University of Reading and one by Harry Halpin entitled Ten theses on the Future of Social Networking.  Good stuff.

W3c-words

Finding eBook Neverland

Or "why publishers need to unlock more than their imagination".

At the JISC IE and e-Research Call briefing day last week John Smith of UKC mentioned that discovering the availability of eBook titles is way harder than it should be. The lack of any single point of aggregation of information about eBooks means that libraries are basically left manually searching/browsing multiple suppliers to see who has what.

I just took a very quick look at NetLibrary, Dawsonera, MyiLibrary and Books@Ovid, wondering what information I could find from each about a search API, RSS feed or anything vaguely machine-to-machine oriented.

Nadda.

Apologies if I missed something obvious.

I mean, come on guys... this is the bread and butter of the Web these days isn't it?  Throw us a frickin' bone :-).  I'm not asking you to make your eBook content openly available, just offer an interface that lets me write code to see what you have available without having to manually browse or search your Web pages.

ArtsPlace SL

Maximising the effectiveness of virtual worlds in teaching and learning

Those of you not attending the joint CETIS/Eduserv "Maximising the effectiveness of virtual worlds in teaching and learning" event in person next week in Glasgow may like to note that we are planning on making the audio and slides of all the presentations available in real time on Eduserv Island in Second Life.

Audio will be made available using the SL voice chat facility and copies of all the speakers' slides will be visible in-world.  We will also try and allow for questions to speakers from virtual delegates via text chat.

As virtual delegates you should make your way to the Virtual Congress Centre on Eduserv Island

Presentations start at 10.30am (2.30am SL time) though I suggest getting there a little earlier to test out audio, etc.  You are welcome to drop in for only those presentations that interest you.  The full programme is available at the first URL above.

Lively not looking so lively anymore

Lively - Google's chat room with knobs on - is to close.  I can't say I'm sorry - I didn't like it much anyway!  But I am a little surprised.  Not because I thought it was good enough to stick around but because I thought Google might have the will, and the effort, to make it better.