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Issue #3 for joeyhclai

2/8/2008 - 2/17/2008

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Free Web Clipping Tools: Permanently Save Anything That You Find On The Internet

By LAI Ho-chung Joey (LAI Hochung Joey's starred items in Google Reader) Submitted at 2/11/2008 4:52:22 AM

With billions of web pages around, keeping track of information that you discover on the web is extremely tough. Some of us rely on bookmarks but they are unmanageable and become useless over time when the underlying pages disappear because the website structure may have changed.

If your bookmark folder is also getting obese, switch to any of these web clipping tools - they help you capture and save anything from the Internet including text notes, images, complete web pages, documents, PDFs, etc.

So even if the source website is gone, you will never feel lost again.

Microsoft Onfolio - Onfolio is an outstanding note taking application that lets you collect information from web pages as well as all other Windows programs (like Excel, Outlook, Notepad, etc) so you have a central repository of all content captured from websites, emails, screenshots and documents.

Onfolio provides some very unique features. For instance, you can capture complete websites or single web pages in their entirety including CSS, Javascripts and images so the captured web page looks the same even in offline mode. Onfolio can also download PDF files and Microsoft Office documents from the web with a simple click.

You can also assign colored flags to

captured content. The tool is integrated with Windows Live Writer and all popular blog services so you can quickly publish scrapped content onto your blog with proper attribution to the original source.

A limiting point is that Onfolio stores all the content to your local hard drive and so you may not have access to your web research on another computer. You can however export web clipping as compressed web pages (MHT) and share them via email attachments.

Onfolio can either run as a standalone desktop application or as a sidebar in Internet Explorer provided you have installed Windows Live Toolbar.

Other commercial alternatives to Onfolio include Microsoft OneNote and EverNote.

Clipmarks - Working like a pair of scissors, Clipmarks is a very innovative web based software for clipping snippets from web pages, images and even YouTube videos you place the mouse cursor over a portion you want to save, Clipmarks will then intelligently draw a logical boundary surrounding that snippet and a click will put a copy of that portion to your online Clipmarks account.

This is a perfect solution for grabbing specific portions of any web page that matter the most to you - it could be a video on YouTube, contact address of a friend, a quote on Wikipedia or anything else. And Clipmark will always include a link to the original source so you always know the origin of your clippings. For IE, Firefox and

Natural Selection Can Act on Human Culture

By LAI Ho-chung Joey (LAI Hochung Joey's starred items in Google Reader) Submitted at 2/17/2008 3:46:00 AM

Hugh Pickens writes "Scientists at Stanford University have shown for the first time that the process of natural selection can act on human cultures as well as on genes. The team studied reports of canoe designs from 11 Oceanic island cultures, evaluating 96 functional features that could contribute to the seaworthiness of the vessels. Statistical test results showed clearly that the functional

canoe design elements changed more slowly over time, indicating that natural selection could be weeding out inferior new designs. Authors of the study said their results speak directly to urgent social and environmental problems. 'People have learned how to avoid natural selection in the short term through unsustainable approaches such as inequity and excess consumption. But this is not going to work in the long term,' said Deborah S. Rogers, a research fellow at Stanford."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

only decent choice. This online web clipping tool from Google is available for IE, Firefox and they also have a version for mobile phones so you can take notes from your iPhone or BlackBerry.

One of the most useful features in Google Notebook is the integration with Google Web search. You can save any search result to online Google Notebook by clicking the Note This link that appears next to every search result on Google.com.

Flock.

ToRead and InstaPaper - You discover an interesting web page but do not have the time to read it. So you either save the URL of that page to your Browser bookmarks or store it in del.icio.us with the tags "follow" or "toread".

Now this methods involves some effort so you want to try toread or instapaper for keeping up with unread web pages - both services are dead simple but extremely useful. You neither have to type anything nor open any new windows.

With toread, a click will send a full copy of the current web page to your email address. In case of Instapaper, the address of the current web page is captured to your online instapaper account so you have a instant list of unread pages.

Google Notebook - If you want quick access to all your web research while on the move, Google Notebook is the

The sharing features in Google Notebook are also impressive. You can publish certain notebooks as public so anyone (including search engine bots) can read your web clips like a regular web page.

Alternatively, you can invite friends or family members to work together on a particular notebook. Nice option if you want to do some collaborative research for a group project or an upcoming vacation.

Google Notebook are currently not supported on Apple Safari or Opera.

With any of these tools on your system, there’s little probability that you will ever loose touch with important stuff you ever discovered on the Internet.

Iterasi is another promising tool for clipping web pages but it’s in closed beta. Also check out Ript for ripping text and images from web pages and converting them into scrapbook.

Free Web Clipping Tools: Permanently Save Anything That You Find On The Internet - Digital Inspiration

Mapping Top News Stories with Yahoo NewsGlobe

By LAI Ho-chung Joey (LAI Hochung Joey's starred items in Google Reader) Submitted at 2/13/2008 11:17:47 AM

New from Yahoo Next Research Labs: NewsGlobe From the announcement: The Yahoo!

NewsGlobe consists of three basic pieces: a Yahoo! News Top Stories RSS feed, a geo-encoding web

service from Yahoo! Maps, and a free, open-source library of 3D classes for ActionScript 3 called Papervision3D. The application loads the Y! News RSS feed every few minutes and extracts the dateline for each story. It sends this descriptive textual information off to the Yahoo!

Maps service to find a matching location, an

Some Creative Web Page Animation Videos

By LAI Ho-chung Joey (LAI Hochung Joey's starred items in Google Reader) Submitted at 2/8/2008 10:54:47 PM

Open this shopping site in your

browser and see how the products make a mess of the web page. Thanks Nick.

And here are some more webpage animations:

Animals invade Google.com Website Some Creative Web Page Animation Videos - Digital Inspiration Animator vs. Animation

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With visions of EduGlu dancing in their twisted spamblogging heads...

By LAI Ho-chung Joey (LAI Hochung Joey's starred items in Google Reader) Submitted at 2/17/2008 2:28:21 AM

At The Very Heart Of Where The Action Is, originally uploaded by drp.

Stephen Downes mentions that David Wiley's Wordpress-based OpenCourseWare proof of concept mixed with one of Tony Hirst's many bits of rich, RSS-flavoured open learning goodness might make something extra yummy. By one of those weird strange quarks (strangeness and charms) of serendipity or synchronicity Tony and Jim Groom are looking at each others' stuff. Jim gets inspired to take the next step, (one of those steps that seems obvious in retrospect -- but if they are so obvious, how come nobody else is taking them?), and pulls off something so astonishing that I am blogging it at 2 AM: The first course from the OpenLearn site I republished was titled Goya. I chose this one for two reasons: a) I wanted to learn more about Goya, and b) it had a number of images and videos associated with it and I wanted to see how they would work. As a result, I now know more about Goya & the images and videos pulled into the site beautifully, very impressive XML! The first time I pulled this course the Introduction and background posts balked, this didn’t happen the second time I tested it however.

Compare the re-published blog site above (click on the image to see it) with the original course in the OpenLearn OER here.

Moreover, each of the course sections was in the proper logical order, meaning that the topmost post on the blog was the introduction, next the background, etc. This fortunate happenstance made reproducing the course outline on the sidebar of the blog simple. I just included the recent posts widget and re-titled it Unit Outline. After that, I had an entire course republished in my WPMu account within minutes.

As for the other two courses I tested (Hume and Word and image), they

work perfectly save for a few stray a tags on the Word and image site.

Compare the original Hume course on the OpenLearn site with the republished blog site here. Do the same for the original Word and image course and the republished one here.

This was a pretty amazing experiment for me because it illustrates just how much I learn from reading blogs on a daily basis. Ideas happen in a series of relations, and I so thoroughly enjoy taking other people's genius and testing it out. When I saw the Goya class get pulled in successfully in just over a minute, I started to realize just how powerful these open resources can be once they are freed from their repositories. [My emphasis.]

To add a wonderfully perverse touch, Jim is employing a classic web jujitsu move, using Wp-O-Matic, "a tried and true spamblogging plugin."

Meanwhile, all D'Arcy Norman is doing is building EduGlu.

Wait... what?

Students add feeds to the system, placing them in any relevant groups, and tagging the feed appropriately.

Items from these feeds are then aggregated, inheriting the feed's tags and group settings. Students are able to view the incoming content in any (or all) of their groups at a glance, and apply social rating to sort and rank the items - items ranked over a threshold are pushed to the front page of the site. Tag clouds are generated, allowing easy browsing of content.

And a full search engine is available, providing some pretty fully featured data mining tools. The aggregated items are archived for as long as needed, and discussion can occur within the context of the EduGlu website rather than being spread across dozens/hundreds of blogs and other applications scattered around the web.

The beauty of this implementation is that it involved no custom code. I didn't write a single line of code. All I

did was integrate a set of off-the-shelf modules for Drupal. This is all generalizable and re-implementable in any number of various ways. [My emphasis.]

Oh, did I mention it's my privilege to convene a session at Northern Voice that Jim and D'Arcy are doing entitled "Don't call it a Blog, Call it an Educational Publishing Platform."

Given what these fellows have pulled off in the past week, I shudder to think what they might be up to one week from now...

What I find most compelling about this burst of development is the strong suspicion that similar frenzies are being played out in other relevant domains right now as well. There really is undeniable power at work when words like "open" and "free" don't merely function as abstract principles, but as keys that unlock doors...

Visualize Breaking News Stories on a Rotating 3D Globe

By LAI Ho-chung Joey (LAI Hochung Joey's starred items in Google Reader) Submitted at 2/12/2008 11:04:14 PM

Yahoo! Newsglobe is another interesting way to visualize news stories as they happen in any part of the world. The news globe takes the feed from Yahoo! News and is

therefore almost real-time. Thanks

MYBYTES.com - Make Your Own Ringtone

David Friedman

By LAI Ho-chung Joey (LAI Hochung Joey's starred items in Google Reader)

By LAI Ho-chung Joey (LAI Hochung Joey's starred items in Google Reader)

Submitted at 2/16/2008 9:28:00 PM

What it does Tired of the same old boring ringtones that come with your

cell phone? Make your own.

MYBYTES lets you create a musical piece using its online music mixer software. Once youve created your own original loop, you can publish and store it on

Submitted at 2/16/2008 4:00:00 PM

"The direct use of force is such a poor solution to any problem, it is generally employed only by small children and large nations."

Lucas Shuman Visualize Breaking News Stories on a Rotating 3D Globe - Digital Inspiration