Hyperviews Online

Online SIG Education Lead Tom Johnson is aggregating podcasts on the STC Suncoast Chapter site: http://www.stc-suncoast.org/podcastfeed Included are many podcasts by technical communicators, and podcasts from the Four Lakes chatper of STC.

These sites continually publish news about online communication:

http://arstechnica.com/
http://www.basement.org
http://www.thinkvitamin.com
http://www.digital-web.com
http://www.techcrunch.com
http://looksgoodworkswell.blogspot.com/
http://radar.oreilly.com/
http://www.readwriteweb.com/
http://blogs.zdnet.com/web2explorer/
http://blog.webreakstuff.com/
http://ajaxian.com
http://blog.wired.com/monkeybites/
http://digg.com/view/technology
http://www.37signals.com/svn/
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/
http://www.informit.com

More are listed in this earlier post.

Nokia is working on augmented reality, the subject of an earlier post on “digital grafitti.” Nokia is demonstrating a system that allows a phone to sense its location and the orientation of its camera, and then pull information about the visible objects from a database: http://www.technologyreview.com/BizTech/17807/

Library and Information Technology Association (LITA), a division of the American Library Association. 2007 LITA National Forum: Technology with Altitude: 10 Years of the LITA National Forum. Denver, Colorado, USA. October 4-7, 2007.

Presentations will have a technological focus and pertain to libraries and/or be of interest to librarians. The scope of the conference call for papers included:

1. Social Computing: social tools, collaborative software, gaming technologies…

2. New Media: wireless connectivity, iPods, handhelds… (more…)

Thanks to Online SIG member Eileen Potter for these links.

You can set up an audio blog, a talk show online, at http://www.blogtalkradio.com/ The “Writing” category has ]interviews with a “top, new poet” in Texas as voted by the Dallas Literary Society and a place where people can call in and share their writing with an audience.

Digital grafitti characterizes messages left “in mid-air,” tied to GPS coordinates for a given location and seen only when looking at that location through a special device. Look through it and see messages from other people, internet addresses, drawings, any messages entered on the device at that location, floating all around you). How will that change technical writing and copy writing? Eileen suggests we imagine creating content for a travel guide with this technology.
http://unrated.wordpress.com/2006/11/08/digital-graffiti-leave-messages-in-mid-air/

Online SIG Education Lead Tom Johnson is aggregating technical writing blogs on the Suncoast chapter website:  http://stc-suncoast.org/blogs

If you need to format XML code for easy reading or for printing, you can download a style sheet to do that. The article has full details of how the style sheet was developed. The style sheet is at the end.

WritersUA has published its 2006 Skills and Technologies Survey results.

A report appeared today on Search Engine Watch that is especially useful because it distinguishes among various types of disabilities and the assoicated requirements for accessibility.

Flow theory is a psychological concept. Applied to online games, it means play without disruptions, easy to understand and follow by impulse. This means no menus or instructions in the way of the gamer. Read about it in the November 28, 2006 online Wall Street Journal.

Edukalibre is a project funded by the European Commission under the Socrates/Minerva program, to promote information and communications technology in education.

The main goal is to explore new ways of producing educational materials, based on the practices and procedures observed in libre (free, open source) software development.

Find more information and try the system at http://edukalibre.org/. The formats are Latex and DocBook. There is integration with the learning management system Moodle. Conversion to HTML and PDF is reported to be available.

Editors Sigrid Kelsey, Louisiana State University and Kirk St. Amant, Texas Tech University, are calling for chapter proposals for this new book, tentatively scheduled for publishing by Idea Group Reference (an imprint of Idea Group Inc.), www.ideagroup-ref.com, in 2008.

If you are interested, submit one single-spaced page on or before September 30, 2006 to Sigrid Kelsey at sigridkelsey@gmail.com (Rich Text Format or Microsoft Word is acceptable). Include the purpose and content of the proposed chapter and how the proposed chapter relates to the overall objectives of the book. Details follow. (more…)

Sun Labs reports researching methods of searching for music by how it sounds, or its acoustic content, They envision a system, “Search Inside the Music.”

Using this technology people would be able to find and organize music based on lyrics, musical theme, melody, tempo, rhythm, and instrumentation. Searching by these characteristics would find music that “sounds like” the music someone has in mind. The intent is to ultimately allow someone to hum a few bars and find a recording in that way. (more…)

Adobe JamJar is an interactive, attractive, and scalable internet application based on Flex 2 technologies. JamJar provides a private, persistent work area for small groups to easily exchange digital content in order to plan events, exchange ideas, manage projects, centralize information, and share files including images.

A service called Grokker is available as a demo to search Yahoo, Wikipedia, and Amazon. Although the demo does not search everything on the Web, it’s a useful tool in research, helping to aggregate results that are meaningful to the searcher.