Wikirevisionism

More grist for the Wikipedia trashers: a report in a Massachusetts newspaper disclosing the fact that congressional staffers have been editing entries to "correct" unfavorable information. Not much of a surprise there (though Nature did recently publish the results of a study showing Wikipedia to be about as accurate as Encyclopaedia Britannica, so I'm not giving up on Wikipedia yet).

But I wonder if Wikipedia's open-editing process can be used to more openly track historical revision?

A Master Library?

I've been reading for some time about the controversial Google library-book-scanning project, but a recent Chronicle article brings up something even more exciting (and less controversial): the Open Library and the Open Content Alliance, an effort to scan and make available all manner of public-domain holdings from libraries all over.

I/O Brush uses world as palette

From the website:
I/O Brush is a new drawing tool to explore colors, textures, and movements found in everyday materials by "picking up" and drawing with them. I/O Brush looks like a regular physical paintbrush but has a small video camera with lights and touch sensors embedded inside. Outside of the drawing canvas, the brush can pick up color, texture, and movement of a brushed surface. On the canvas, artists can draw with the special "ink" they just picked up from their immediate environment.

Ourmedia.org stores videos free

but I don't yet have a real handle on how it works. I've just uploaded one video to it so far. But they're partners with the Internet Archive and Creative Commons, so they're worth watching. They store anything, really: video, audio, images, text -- and have a full range of social software features (blogging, tagging, etc.).

Speaking of phoned in,

tonight I made my first moblog posting, on a whim amidst Friday night decompression at Leon Pub.

(Come to think of it, that's where I was when I downloaded the cellphone version of Doom a few weeks ago. There's probably a connection.)

Phoning in a performance....

Test (click post title above) of Odeo's phone-in audio recording service, part of their free package of tools.

Reanimated

I signed up for this over two years ago and never used it (I ended up going with LiveJournal and still use it for a personal blog).

I've decided to reactivate this as a journal of discoveries and observations relevant to my day job and my planned foray into a doctoral program in Communication.

What stimulated this was discovery of the Odeo online audio/casting tool, which -- along with Flickr and del.icio.us -- uses folksonomies, as does this tool. The interconnected sociability of "web 2.0", plus the ease-of-use generated by recent innovations, makes it interesting (to me, anyway) to journal what's happening in my world.

And so we'll see if this goes anywhere.