Digital media annotation takes another step forward with Footnote, a buzzword-compliant browsing and annotation tool for images of historical documents.

Footnote original historical document database:

Newly-hatched webapp Footnote offers an impressive database of original historical documents for searching, viewing, annotating and discussing.

See detailed images of historical documents over 100 years old like the Bill of Rights or the Gettysburg address (pictured above) in a modern, dynamic interface. Footnote offers many images for zooming and browsing for free, but you can buy a single image for 2 bucks, or become an “All Access” member for about 10 bucks a month. Great resource for history buffs, students and researchers who need primary sources. See also Wendy’s past feature on finding original documents on the web. — Gina Trapani

Footnote [via Micro Persuasion]

(Via Lifehacker).

The Wordpress team announced the immediate availability of the next major relese of their popular blogging and content management system last night. This site is run partly on WordPress, and other parts of the site have been extensively re-written to take advantage of the WordPress theme system.

We’ll be upgrading very soon, and this should offer some tangible benefits for users: Faster page loading times, more complete feeds and more. It looks like 2.1 also solves some minor problems for us too!

 You can download the new release at WordPress.org. Read on for more information on the release.

(more…)

Click.tv is offering a nifty Flash-based collaborative video annotation and tagging service, somewhat similar to our Northwestern University partners’ Project Pad web application. A seemingly unique feature of Click.tv among the widely-available web annotators is its capacity for multiple annotation tracks.

One early application has been to combine Engadget, Gizmodo, Wired’s Cult of Mac and others’ coverage of last week’s keynote address at the Macworld conference in San Francisco. So if you want to get your geek on and witness the first searchable, collaborative streaming index of the Reality Distortion Field in action, head on over to the Jobsnote on Macrumors/Click.tv.

More Web 2.0 shenanigans: this time it’s a video aggregation and annotation tool, Mojiti. Looks interesting, and is built in Flash on the client side.

Annotate online video with Mojiti:

Video sharing web site Mojiti lets you add your own comments and notes to internet video.

Mojiti is a little strange in that if you want to add a video, you just paste a link to the video and Mojiti yanks it from the site of origin to their own - meaning that you can use Mojiti to annotate any YouTube video really quickly and easily. To get a better idea of what I’m talking about, check out the video after the jump.

If you go to the source page, you can see that this video was snagged from YouTube - a process that takes only a few seconds.

Mojiti really does make adding notes and spotlights to videos a cinch, so if you’ve been looking for something like this - maybe you want to share a YouTube video with your friends with a couple of notes of your own - Mojiti makes it simple. — Adam Pash

(Via Lifehacker).

Internet search firm Yahoo is reported to be in talks to buy social networking website Facebook for $1bn (£527m). US-based Facebook, popular with students, has also held separate discussions with Microsoft and Viacom, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Read more here.

Something along the lines of Chris Anderson’s Long Tail thesis, this page confirms Jimmy Wales‘ contention that Wikipedia, far from being reliant on a nebulous and far-flung posting userbase, is actually much more like a conventional organisation than the revolutionary rhetoric associated with some elements within the Wikipedia community would suggest. New content often comes from the anonymous writers or one-time posters, but the majority of edits come from regulars. And it’s even more skewed than you might expect:

How Wikipedia entries get written:

Cory Doctorow: Aaron Swartz, who is running for the WIkipedia executive, has done some data-crunching using a rented supercomputing cluster, against many Wikipedia entries to determine how Wikipedia entries get written. It turns out that while the majority of edits come from a small group of 500 core editors, the majority of new content is inserted by drive-by, unregistered users whose contributions are then massaged into encolopediahood by the core 500.

Link

When you put it all together, the story become clear: an outsider makes one edit to add a chunk of information, then insiders make several edits tweaking and reformatting it. In addition, insiders rack up thousands of edits doing things like changing the name of a category across the entire site — the kind of thing only insiders deeply care about. As a result, insiders account for the vast majority of the edits. But it’s the outsiders who provide nearly all of the content.

(Via BoingBoing).

We’ve been looking at possible Wiki solutions for enabling student collaborations next semester - a product which has had a few rave reviews is Writely. It uses a Wiki engine and appears to have excellent functionality; the interface looks nicer and easier to use than some other Wiki software I’ve seen. The good news is that the company has just been purchased by Google, which probably means it’s on the up. The less good news is that although it is free now while it is in Beta, in the future ….
‘Our hope is to have the basic service be free, with some extra features
requiring a reasonable subscription fee*. We will also be charging license fees
to corporations and partners.’

It’s not easy to try out right now because they have temporarily suspended registrations, presumably while they sort out Google branding. But if you have a look at the web site, demo and the FAQ you get an idea of what is possible. I also found an interesting short paper on the use of Writely in a student collaborative learning environment which is worth reading. Any thoughts?

I think it’s also worth looking at Writeboard again (from 37signals, the people who make Basecamp) to compare functionality …. What do we gain/lose with products like these vs. running our own open source Wiki?

Iain

Hi all. OPML continues to be of interest? Did anyone see this on scobleizer What’s it all about?

May 7, 2006
I‚ve shared my OPML, will you?

I’ve already shared my OPML with Dave Winer’s new service. Opens tomorrow. TechCrunch has the details. If you can’t wait, my current feed list is on NewsGator (it’s a Web service so you’ll always see the latest list here). Two weeks ago I deleted all my feeds. I’m already back up to 99 feeds. Will be adding more over the next week. I’ve raised the bar to get added to my list, though. I want to increase the geekiness factor of what I’m reading and get away from the more marketing and business oriented blogs. Why? Cause I want to focus on people building software, since that’s what I’m interested in most.

How do you pick feeds to subscribe to? How do you clean them out?

Update: Dave Winer says “it’s an instant hit” and gives more details.
Filed under: Uncategorized, RSS @ 7:18 pm #

John Tropea has a interesting page view of his feeds at Share Your OPML - A commons for sharing outlines, feeds, and taxonomy.…

The BBC have created a blog to accompany the launch of the new prototype Programme Catalogue. The first post by Tom Loosemore,  Project Director, BBC 2.0  provides an excellent introduction to the Archives and the history of the Catalogue project (including a link to an excellent blog post from last year about Windmill Road, home of the Archives). Some questions Tom considers:-

‘What programmes were on the BBC on the day I was born? Had anyone I knew ever appeared on TV? (My father had, to my surprise…) When did Margaret Thatcher first appear on the BBC? Which was the last band
to appear in session for John Peel? What’s more, the programme
catalogue was being updated constantly by those wonderful archivists.
Not only was this a cultural goldmine, but it was getting richer day by
day.’

The next post gives details of the first tool built on top of the Programme Catalogue. The BBC is keen to encourage these kind of mashups by external contributors. You can let the BBC know if you have any thoughts about how this prototype could be improved. If you spot an error in the data then please use this form to tell the BBC about it.

The blog should continue to provide information on new developments with the Catalogue and related tools.

Iain

BBC on Last.fm:

Last.fm isn’t just for humans. Matt Biddulph, a systems architect for the BBC, rigged a homemade plug-in for Last.fm (Previously on MeFi) that, over the course of a year, transmitted over 50,000 songs played on BBC 6Music to a Last.fm account named Sekrit. (Oh, and wondering what MetaFilter users listen to?) (via waxy)

(Via MetaFilter).