jill/txt

Olav Anders Øvrebø writes about a recently announced new Norwegian search engine, Sesam, which will apparently do a kind of google news service where it pays news sources users click through to, and which will connect a lot of publically available information about people:

According to the newspaper, searching for a person’s name at Sesam will return not only web pages, but also address, phone number, overview over the person’s board memberships (!), photos of the person and articles about him or her in Norwegian newspapers the last 20 years (enter again the Retriever archives)!

Olav Anders raises lots of pertinent questions and has links; go read what he says.

Oh, btw, I haven’t corrected ZoomInfo’s information-gathering about me declaring me ex-prime minister of Denmark. A bit of positive misinformation never hurt ;)

Hey, I’m on the jury of Gullbloggen, Dagbladet’s blog competition. You can nominate Norwegian blogs (written in Norwegian or English) until November 2, and then the jury - Bente Kalsnes, Olav Anders and me, will select three in each category, leaving the final selection to the readers’ vote. The list of nominated blogs so far is an interesting list of Norwegian blogs - there sure are a lot of them these days…

Today at 12:15 Pål Dimmen, one of the first batch of masters students (well, cand. philol. really, it was before the switch) to graduate with a post graduate degree in humanistic informatics is returning to his alma mater to tell current students and staff about Life After Humanistic Informatics. Pål wrote his MA thesis on piracy, and recently got a job as a journalist in Computer World - I haven’t seen him since his thesis defense in 2003, and I’m really looking forward to hearing about his success! The talk is open to all, it’ll be in room 264 in the HF-building.

Whoops. A psuedonymous blogger complained about a friend who’d lived off welfare while the blogger had paid taxes, and the friend found the blog entry and told the real story in a comment to the original post - yesterday the blogger admitted having exaggerated a lot in order to make the story better. There’s a cautionary tale about telling tales on blogs about friends and acquaintances - and also a warning not to believe stories about “friends” that handily confirm all the prejudices about lazy single mums/immigrants living off welfare.

Hey, Bergen said no to Clear Channel’s advertising in public spaces! Awesome!!! Public outrage can actually lead to our democratically elected representatives changing their minds! Yay! Thanks, everyone! (Yeah, I’m late, it was yesterday. I was busy…)

Quote from Liz Lawley’s live blogging of the Pew Institute’s Lee Rainie: “Teenagers are redefining what it means to be present”. I might use that as the starting point for tomorrow’s class on network community.

I think my biggest problem with Flock is that it connects the aspects of my digital life too much. I removed my Flickr feed from my blog because I don’t want my students and colleagues and neighbours to find my photos. I use del.icio.us for links that I’m happy for the world to see - if it’s integrated with my browser, I’m going to need an option for private links as well.

Christian Yde Frostholm’s review of Audiatur is at Afsnit P.

I thought I might as well have a go and try out Flock, the new browser that integrates social software - so rather than having bookmarks, it hooks up directly to my del.icio.us account, and rather than having a “blog this” bookmarklet on the toolbar, there’s an icon of a pen that lets me blog through the browser, even offering to set me up a blog if I don’t already have one. If this publishes, I guess that worked.

So far (after about two and a half minutes) it seems pretty cool. I’ve seen lots of criticism of doing this as a whole new browser (a “fork” of the Mozilla code) rather than continuing to work within the mainstream of Mozilla development, doing this as extensions or something.

I like the idea of “The Shelf”: “a scrapbook for interesting web content that you want to blog about later.” And apparently it’ll track pages I visit often, so that when I’ve been using the browser for a few days I’ll be able to quickly look at my actual favourites rather than what I think are my favourites. That might be interesting….

Oh, and despite the many warnings about how this release of Flock is developers only and full of potential bugs, it was super-easy to install and so far works glitchlessly.

So lets see how it goes.

Claus sent email suggesting we google cross-disciplinary international network for convergence, synergy and innovation if we’re tired of buzzwords and research applications. Well, first try the Norwegian version. Yep, the Norwegian research council’s the number one hit, followed by a number of hard-working copycats wanting funding. The English version is more interesting - notice the top hits are all European.

I suppose it’s just whatever the EU research funding happens to be asking for. What are funders on other continents into, though? I mean, how could you not want “cross-disciplinary international networks for convergence, synergy and innovation”?

:)

Oh my. The neighbours are scraping frost off the windows of their cars outside my window. I’m setting up lists for my students to sign up for their final presentations, and realising that there’s only three weeks left of regular classes before the evaluations and last minute questions before exams start up.

I’ve been head of department for nine months. That’s as long as a pregnancy. Since when did nine months seem such a short time?

New issue of Game Studies out.

Norwegian universities converted to a new grading system a couple of years ago, using letters instead of numbers, and at about the same time the standard undergraduate degree was chopped from a four year cand. mag. to a three year Bachelor degree. Now the powers that be have found that grades awarded to MAs are worse than they used to be for the old hovedfag, as this graph of grades given throughout Norway last year shows.

My impression is that more students expect to do an MA than expected to do a hovedfag. It’s a shorter degree in total, though our expectations for the students write a research thesis are almost the same. They’re spending a year on the thesis now, against a year and a quarter previously. Well, in practice most spend far more than a year; they have great difficulties in completing it, partly, I suspect, because quite a lot of MA students really don’t want to spend a year writing a thesis. There are probably other forms of education or training they’d be a lot happier with. I mean, look at those statistics: 20% of MA students get an E or actually fail? And that’s not even counting the huge percentage of MA students who never finish.

There are a lot of students at university who don’t really seem to want to be at university, who don’t put a lot of work into their studies and/or who I’d imagine would be far happier doing something else.

[Edit 18/10: I’m not sure I’ve read enough about this, to be honest - I can’t find the actual media archive online, and rereading this third party account it sounds as though it’s meant for viewing through a TV not a computer. And of course I should research it properly before writing about it, but well, sorry, didn’t have and don’t have time. It seems like a topic worth someone investigating though…]
NRK put huge amounts of television content online. I payed for that content to be made, along with generations of other Norwegian tax-payers and licence fee papers. But I can’t access it easily, because they’ve locked it up in Microsoft’s DRM (Digital Rights Management) so that my Mac struggles to access it. If they’d released the content in an open format (and they could still, say, limit use to Norway by blocking IP-numbers outside the country if they wanted [edit 18/10: they don’t, to my knowledge, do this now, though I’ve never been able to play their web TV on my Mac]) I could access the content.

Cory Doctorow has a really good short piece about why locking content up in a proprietory format is a terrible idea. Here’s just one reason abdicating control to a huge monopoly is a bad idea:

Norwegian production companies rely on huge state subsidies, direct and indirect, to fulfill the crucial role of providing cultural identity to a small nation. But Norway’s many innovative tech companies provide an equally crucial service to Norwegians: offering economic independence and self-determination. To lock up Norway’s culture in a wrapper that can’t be opened by a Norwegian tech company is economic and cultural insanity.

According to a survey just done for Mandag Morgen (full text subscription only) and reported in Dagbladet, every third Norwegian published something online last week. Isn’t that amazing? On the other hand, there are only 30,000 Norwegian blogs, and even that’s just an educated guess based on various data and not, obviously, an exact number.