Eric Baber's blog

Dopplr came to me by way of Max Everingham - thanks Max. It's a site that lets you input your future travel details - when you're going where, basically. You can then share that information with friends, in particular other friends who travel frequently, so you can see if there's any overlap in case you're in the same place at the same time. Great for people who travel a lot and whose friends and family do too - any easy way to check if anyone you know is in the same city as you at the same time.

Finally got round to watchin this video which came to me courtesy of Michael Coghlan via the Webheads. Fantastic video that discusses YouTube and how it reflects humans' sense and use of community. 55 minutes long but well worth the time - MAKE time to watch this.

A good article on electronic books and the devices available to read them. There aren't yet any dedicated readers on the UK market but the first one to arrive will be the Sony Reader, in September 2008. Some interesting quotes from the article:

"While in the US there are an increasing number of new books available online, publishers in the UK have been slow to release their books in an electronic format. "

""The younger generation have spent their formative years reading from screens. We don't really know how they are going to react," says Goss. "

(I can hazard a guess though - they won't think twice about using an e-reader, and won't miss traditional books.)

And, funnily enough I was thinking exactly the following this morning:

"It is perfectly conceivable that in the future we could have something that looks like a book, feels like a book, reads like a book and with separate paper-thin pages like a book, but which uses e-ink instead of the normal kind."

Much of what people seem to think they will miss in an e-reader is the tactile aspect of it - the turning of the page, the feeling of closing it etc. An answer to this is what is described here - an e-reader that consists of, say, 100 electronic pages which display 100 pages of a book. When you get to the end of those and the book is, say, 300 pages long, you go back to the beginning and tell the reader to start displaying from page 101 - 200, and so on.

Having said that, I would see that as being an interim device - something to please that generation which still values the page-turning feeling. For the next generation this is likely to be a quaint concept, much like turning over LPs or cassettes to play side B. Why would you want to do that if there is an easier way?

Interesting. Just got the following e-mail on one of the lists I'm on. Basically, Microsoft has brought out a web-based tool that allows users (e.g. learners of English) to past or write in text, and it offers corrections based on web-searches to establish possible errors and corrections thereof in the text.

It doesn't seem to work very well though; I entered the text "This sentence lots of mistakes contains. Wonder I how good this worked. " and it returned no offers of corrections. Hum...

"Members of this list may be interested in the prototype web-based
writing assistance service for ESL learners that has recently been
launched by the Natural Language Processing Group at Microsoft
Research. The MSR ESL Assistant uses statistical models to suggest
corrections for a set of common learner error patterns that are not
currently supported by the proofing tools in Microsoft Office
products, and tries to help users judge whether the proposed
modifications really are better by displaying actual writing examples
returned by a web search.

The MSR ESL Assistant service can be accessed at
http://www.eslassistant.com. The service is free and no registration
is required.

Further information about the project can be found on the team
website at http://research.microsoft.com/Projects/msreslassistant and
project updates will posted periodically on the team blog at
http://blogs.msdn.com/eslassistant.

The service is still very experimental. We are hoping that both
learners of English and TEFL/TESL professionals will take a look at
it and will perhaps even find it useful. We look forward to feedback,
and are especially interested in hearing from educators who find ways
to incorporate this service into their instruction."

Thanks to Cleve Miller for this one.

Google has announced the release of Lively, a 3D environment, sort of similar to Second Life. The good thing about it is that it doesn't need a humongous download to operate and works from within a browser; this means that people can create their own rooms and embed them in their website or blog (as long as the blog engine allows iFrames, which mine doesn't, so I've set up a room here). The drawback is that it's still clunkier than Second Life, and only works on Windows. It's still in beta, though, so hopefully it'll go cross-platform at some point.

I very much like the idea that it's browser-based and significantly easier to use than Second Life.