* Guided By Voices: Tractor Rape Chain (5.0 mb) | The Goldheart Mountaintop Queen Directory (2.5 mb) | I Am A Scientist (3.5 mb) | Peep-Hole (2.0 mb) | You’re Not An Airplane (1.0 mb) From Bee Thousand : Scat Records : Scat35
Back in my senior year of high school, I started dabbling more in the indie music realm, started reading smaller music magazines in search of other music and started to try and expand my horizons. I remember reading about this band Guided By Voices recording this completely amazing album, Bee Thousand. So, I decided to check them out at the local record mart (this one allowed free listens). I wish that I could say that I was cool enough to totally appreciate the band on first listen. Unfortunately that wasn’t the case.
My first listen to Bee Thousand resulted in total and utter confusion. I mean, here were a load of half-finished, barely recorded, nonsensical songs that I just didn’t understand. I guess I just wasn’t ready to grasp the genius that is Guided By Voices. I also wish that I could say that I quickly realized the errors of my ways, but it really wasn’t until a year or so later that I, at the urging of some friends, finally gave it a real listen. And to my surprise, I totally loved it.
Guided By Voices got it right back in 1994. Bee Thousand is the band’s definitive moment, the point when the ringing Who-isms of Pollard’s youth– filtered through four-tracks and his own post-punk, X-Men, stream-of-consciousness quirks– finally matured beyond the atonal growing pains of Vampire on Titus and Propeller. The distinction was slight but unmistakable– like learning to harness all the jaw-dropping, stadium-quaking power of Propeller’s triumphant exclamation (”I’m much greater than you think!”) without all the run-up or refining the unworked defiance of “Exit Flagger”. On Bee Thousand, GBV mastered all those fragments of greatness and assembled an entire album from them. (from Eric Carr)
This is a completely amazing album that’s quite possibly one of the defining artifacts of the lo-fi revolution. The songs, are absolute pop gems that shine with their brilliance.
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Listen to what previous Expo Attendees have to say...
Download this press release as an Adobe PDF document.
The Business Podcasting Expo is an Online Audio/Visual Business Conference with seminars including ADHD Challenges for Entrepreneurs, Quickbook Training, Outlook Tips, and Installing WordPress. The BizPodExpo also offers introductory classes on Podcasting, and how to increase your search engine ranking using this audio/video social media. There will be thousands of dollars worth of giveaways and prizes, and a Data DVD of all recorded seminars is included with full Admission. The event is sponsored by Co-Op World and PodcastDirectories4Sale.com
(PRWEB) January 15, 2007 -- The Online Business & Podcasting Expo will be held January 19-21, 2007. All that is needed to attend is an internet connection and speakers, and a microphone for verbal interaction. All of the audio/visual seminar classes and networking events are recorded on data DVD for shipment to full admission attendees. Three seminars will be open to the public, including: - "ADD/ADHD - How Entrepreneurs Can Overcome It", by Barry Bettman, Professional Certified Coach specializing in ADD and Autism, - "Navigating New Media: What It Is and How It Can Transform Your Business", by John C. Havens, Podcasting Guide for About.com, and - "Business Podcasting", by Small Biz Pod's Alex Bellinger. Samples of other business seminars include Beginning and Advanced Quickbooks Training, Outlook Training, Getting the Most Out of Your Tax Deductions, WordPress Installation and Usage, Networking, and How to Build a PR Platform. Podcasting seminars will include Introduction to Podcasting, Introduction to WavePad and Mixpad, Introduction to Audacity, Why Video Podcast, Beginning Video Podcasting, and Podcasting to Increase Your Search Engine Ranking. Every full admission attendee will receive a Website Consultation from the Perspective of the Media from Annie Jennings, Recording/Editing/Mixing Software, Podcatching Software, a multi-media Podcasting Handbook, and a Data DVD of all recorded sessions. Other giveaways include Sharepoint Video Tutorial Bundles from Andrea Kalli, Lifetime Licenses of Pamela Pro for Skype from Dick Schiferli, Books, MP3 Players, Audio Books, a Branded Podcatcher, and more. The Expo is sponsored by PodcastDirectories4Sale.com, the only Podcast Directory Software created by Podcasters. Several niche market Podcast Directories opening this month include the Business Resources Podcast Directory, Women's Health and Fitness Podcast Directory, Musicians Podcast Directory, Technology Podcast Directory, and Small Business Podcast Directory. The Family Friendly Podcast Directory has moved to a new site to utilize this new Directory Software. All Podcasters are invited to submit their podcasts to the appropriate niche Directory. For more information about the Online Business & Podcasting Conference, go to http://www.BizPodExpo.com, or contact Expo Organizer, Penny Haynes. ###
It is easier than ever to create your own Internet radio station and stream your music, thoughts or discussions live over the web. Not so very long ago you would have faced either incredible equipment expenses and music licensing fees, or the continuous threat of having the authorities shut your pirate radio station down, seizing your music collection in for the bargain.
Photo credit: Brosa
That no longer needs to be the case - whether you decide to create a talk-only station, join a network with pre-paid music licensing, or showcase your own or others Creative Commons licensed music, there are plentiful opportunities to reach out to a global audience in the world of online radio.
Where traditional radio broadcasting only traveled as far as the radio waves would let it, with your own Internet-based niche radio station you can reach audiences anywhere on the planet. The only possible limit on your popularity is the quality of your content. But how do you get that content out of your home and streaming across the Internet?
In this mini-guide I guide you through several alternative routes you could take, including:Desktop applications that will set you on your way to broadcasting from your bedroom or office
Existing networks that will cover all of your music licensing worries, protecting you from potential copyright infringement issues
Peer-to-peer solutions that distribute the bandwidth needed to broadcast among your listeners
Furthermore, I give examples of some great sources of copyright-free material for those who want to broadcast music without worrying about royalties to be paid or having to license commercial tracks from the recording industry majors.
So if you want to set the airwaves alight with your charismatic banter, teach the world a thing or two about great taste in music, or engage a global audience in live, no-holds-barred discussion, you came to the right place.
Here are the details:
Online radio networks
The following networks supply a broadcasting infrastructure for you to make use of and in the case of music-based shows will cover what might otherwise turn out to be huge music licensing fees. As such, these services allow you to play copyrighted music without incurring extra fees, within your online radio shows.
One of the main advantages of creating your radio station through these existing networks is the fact that you are able to use their streaming technologies to reach a large audience, rather than having to rely on your own bandwidth.
Live 365
http://www.live365.com/broadcast/
Live365 is a network of over 10,000 online radio stations, which are free to listen to. Broadcasters pay a monthly fee for the hosting of their mp3 files and use of the Live365 infrastructure, which includes the following features:Live streaming capability: Yes (basic account excluded)
Pre-recorded streaming capability: Yes
Embed player in own website: Yes, in pro accounts
Directory of online radio stations: Yes
Music licensing: Yes, fu ll details at Live365 website.
Monetization: Yes. Rewards program gives broadcasters a portion of revenues made from users signing up to a preferred membership program. Professional accounts can add advertising to their ad-free broadcasts and keep 100% of the revenues.
Pricing: Pricing ranges from $9.95 per month for a basic account, to $84.95 per month for advanced features. A full list of price plans is available at the Live365 website.
Mercora
http://www.mercora.com
Mercora is an interesting take on online radio broadcasting, given that DJs, and all users, can tune in to the music from one another's hard drives by means of peer-to-peer technology. At any given time, five files from users' mp3 collection are made available for all to listen to, and would-be DJs can create playlists for other users to listen to.
While this is not a great solution for those with a compelling desire to talk and announce the next record, if you are simply looking to share your music over the Internet with other listeners, Mercora is an interesting solution. Robin Good reviewed the latest in the Mercora line-up, Radio 2.0. Features include:Live streaming capability: Yes (mp3 tracks only)
Embed player in own website: No, but has an IM client
Music licensing: Yes
Monetization: No
Pricing: Mercora is free to use
Talkshoe
http://www.talkshoe.com
If you're looking to skip the music and launch yourself as a talk radio host, Talkshoe is a viable platform for doing so online. Talkshoe lets you create your own talk show, using your telephone or VoIP client, and invite listeners to join you. With the ability to control and moderate when your listeners speak on the show, and a live text chat accompanying the discussion, you have everything you need to delivery talk radio shows from the comfort of your front room. Features include:Live streaming capability: Yes
Pre-recorded streaming capability: Yes - as all shows can be recorded, users can download or stream your show archive
Embed player in own website: No
Music licensing: No
Monetization: Yes, as a host in the Talkshoe hosting program you can make money from your talk show episodes
Pricing: Talkshoe is currently free to use
Direct streaming
The following tools allow you to bypass the online radio networks by giving you the tools to stream your content directly to other users. The downside of this approach is in having to use your own bandwidth to serve up content, effectively limiting the amount of listeners you can have at any one time. Furthermore, you cannot legally play copyrighted music or content without purchasing the relative licenses to do so, which can generally prove to be quite costly.
On the bright side, there are thousands of copyright-free songs you can use by visiting the sites listed below in the sourcing copyright-free material section of this mini-guide.
SAM Broadcaster
http://www.spacialaudio.c om/products/sambroadcaster/
SAM Broadcaster is a popular, feature-rich solution to online radio broadcasting, with advanced features including crossfading, a gap killer, beat matching, volume normalization and a 5-band compressor/limiter. Key among its features are:Advanced playlist rotation logic and scheduling, so that you can leave your station running and still ensure a great blend of tracks for your listeners
Advanced streaming encoders: including aacPlusv2, MP3, mp3PRO, WM9 and Ogg - playing on Winamp, Windows Media Player, Live365, MusicMatch, and more
Real-time statistics that let you know how many listeners are connected to your radio station at any moment
SAM interfaces with your website and allows automated song requests. Your audience sees artist, title, album, cover art, and other information on the songs played
Pricing: $279.00
Platform: Windows only
Pirate Radio
http://www.pirateradio.com/
Pirate Radio is a budget alternative to SAM Broadcaster, offering less features for a considerably lower price. The principle is the same however, giving you an effective way to stream your music and commentary directly from your desktop. Key features include:The program plays MP3, .wav, and CD audio files
It also supports microphones and external input (line in)
The platform has its own online and player-based station directory
Furthermore with the playerless Java-streaming Clipstream format you can embed your station directly into your web page
Pricing: $29.95 + $10.00 shipping and handling
SHOUTcast
http://www.shoutcast.com/
For those with a little more patience, it is possible to create a simple music streaming solution using the free SHOUTcast platform. This isn't the easiest way of going about getting your radio station online, but if you follow the instructions in the helpful SHOUTcast forum, it is relatively painless to get up and running. Features include:The ability to feature your station in a directory of thousands at SHOUTcast.com
Streaming of your playlists from the popular Winamp media player
The ability to choose the bitrate you broadcast at
Pricing: Free
Peer-to-peer solutions
Peer-to-peer solutions solve the bandwidth problem by distributing data among your station listeners, with each one simultaneously sending and receiving information. This gives you the reach of the network solutions with the freedom of the direct streaming alternatives.
Possible downsides are the dependence upon others Internet connections to effectively transmit your show - if there is a weak link in the chain, this can effect the overall quality. Furthermore, these open source, free alternatives require a greater amount of technical know-how and initial setting up. Luckily there is advice online as to how to get set up with your own peer-to-peer broadcasting solution.
Peercast
http://www.peercast.org/
Peercast is a peer-to-peer broadcasting solution that will facilitate the online sharing of your radio broadcast without draining your bandwidth. PeerCast offers considerable savings for broadcasters because they do not have to provide bandwidth for all of their listeners. A single 56K modem can be used to broadcast a radio station to the entire network. Features include:It offers anonymity for broadcasters because there is no easy way to trace back to the original stream, it is even possible to broadcast directly to a single client located in a different country and have that provide the source for the entire network
PeerCast can also serve streams directly to any media player. This means that it can be used in place of a Shoutcast/Icecast server to provide both direct and P2P streaming at the same time
It works in much the same way as other P2P file-sharing clients except that instead of downloading files, the users download streams. These streams are then exchanged in real-time with other users. No data is stored locally on any machine connected to the network
Support for MP3, OGG Theora and Vorbis, WMA, WMV and NSV formats
Pricing: Completely free
Platforms: Windows, Linux, Mac OSX
Icecast
http://www.icecast.org/
Icecast.org is another peer-to-peer broadcasting solution that uses the same fundamental approach to distributing your streaming content as Peercast. As such you can broadcast from a reasonably poor Internet connection and still reach a large audience. If you have the time and patience to get Icecast set up, it is a capable platform and includes the following features:Compatibility with the SHOUTcast platform
The ability to either read audio data from disk, such as from Ogg Vorbis files, or sample live audio from a sound card and encode it on the fly
Extensive third-party support for media players and DJ software
Platforms: Linux, Windows
Sourcing copyright-safe material
The following resources provide a great way of finding fresh and inspired music for your radio show, whilst avoiding the issue of having to pay licensing fees. The content available has been licensed under the Creative Commons, and as such allows you greater or lesser degrees of freedom to use it. You can find out more about the different licenses used at the Creative Commons website.
Creative Commons website features an extensive cross-media search that can be whittled down to a particular medium. This is a great way of finding audio content for your broadcasts
Internet Archive has a huge collection of public domain and Creative Commons licensed audio, including the excellent Net Labels, which features hordes of albums from virtual record labels
Legal Torrents has a great selection of music that you can download legally and use in your broadcasts
Musopen provides public domain classical recordings provided by volunteers
CCMixter is a creative commons remix community, and has hundreds of remixable music works for you to make use of
The Freesound project is an excellent source of Creative Commons licensed sound effects, should you wish to use some in your broadcast
Common Content is a great source of Creative Commons licensed media, including an extensive audio section
Additional resources
If you would like to learn more about creating your own online radio station, you might want to take a look at the following links:About: Radio article on how to create your own online radio station
Further useful About: Radio links on online radio broadcasting
WDVL article on building an Internet radio station
Popular Science guide to setting up an Internet radio station
Written by Michael Pick for Master New Media and originally published as: "How To Create Your Web Radio Station: A Mini-Guide"
On this week’s Make Use Of podcast I am talking to Karl Gechlik, a Make Use Of writer and the guy behind Ask The Admin. We managed to cover subjects such as Windows Vista, LocatePC, Google Maps and blog commenting.
If you look underneath the show notes on this page, you will see a little media player where you can listen to the podcast right here on the site. Or if you prefer, you can right-click on the “audio MP3″ logo and save the MP3 file to your computer for listening on your MP3 player or iPod.
We now have the podcast in iTunes so don’t forget to sub scribe to the podcast if you have an iPod, or in another podcatcher if you have a different MP3 player.
After listening, please submit your comments below on this page or you can also send me an e-mail with a question, comment, criticism or suggestion, and I’ll also be accepting audio comments, so go ahead and send your MP3 to the same address.
More from MakeUseOf.com …
- MakeUseOf Directory : Read about up-to 5 truly useful web apps on a daily basis. - MakeUseOf ‘Geeky Fun’: - Fun Geeky Pics, Cartoons and Videos.
bleeeep bleeeep
It’s midnight and your children are safe and asleep. But there’s a phone on Woot.
And it’s ringing. Something’s happening in the world of discount electronics.
Your purchase will decide which phone is ringing. Whether it’s one with 5.8GHz Digital Spread Spectrum transmission and color displays on the four handsets, one that’s tested and ready to use in a dangerous world.
It’s midnight and your children are safe and asleep. What phone do you want to answer?
“I’m the VTech i6789/6790 5.8Ghz Digital 4-Handset Cordless Phone, and I approved this message.”
Warranty: 90 Day VTech
Features:
In the box:
The last couple of weeks has seen a ton of exciting features being developed by the community including a polling plugin, a new plugin and tutorial for creating photo galleries as well as an alternate wysiwyg editor. A short conference call with the MTOS community was also hosted last week with discussion around the development of Movable Type 4.2 - especially highlighting the large role the community has played!
Welcome to Movable Type Monday!
Poll Position: Late last week, prominent community member Dan Wolfgang of Eat Drink Sleep Movable Type and uiNNovations released Poll Position, a brand new plugin that allows you to easily add polls (and soon, surveys!) to your Movable Type blogs. The plugin seamlessly integrates with Movable Type’s interface, allowing you to create an unlimited number of polls and responses, styling them any which way and uses Google Charts to display the results beautifully. Poll Position is available in a free and licensed version, the latter (named “Poll Position: Champion” also offers a poll custom field type allowing you to simply add polls to entries!) A live demo of the plugin in action is also available. Fantastic work Dan!
Asset Gallery: A new plugin by yours truly creates a new custom field type that allows you to create collections of assets (or files) for entries. A great example of this is photo galleries for your entries which are displayed beautifully within the app using a CoverFlow-esque interface. Asset Gallery, however, isn’t limited to just images and supports non-photo uploads too including Word documents, PDFs and video files! A great example of Asset Gallery in action is on the Movable Type Plugin Directory itself, Asset Gallery powers the screenshot galleries you find on plugin profile pages.
Photo Galleries with jQuery and Assets: Billy Mabray wrote a great article on creating a slick photo gallery using Movable Type’s powerful built-in asset manager and jQuery - to give you beautiful slide-show like animation and interaction. It looks like a simple, elegant solution and Billy’s tutorial guides you, step-by-step, through the process! Check out the live demo for a preview of what a few lines of code can accomplish, great work Billy!
Getting Started with Movable Type: Movable Type was recently featured on the front page of the venerable Webmonkey with a guide to Get Started with Movable Type. The guide concisely explains the differences between the open source and commercial versions, how to install Movable Type and provides an introduction to Movable Type’s HTML-esque templating language. The guide also recommends some plugins to install, including the popular Action Streams
Identi.ca Update Stream: Last week John Eckman released a new action stream plugin that aggregates your content from the Identi.ca microblogging service
TinyMCE WYSIWYG Editor: One of the great things about Movable Type is its flexibility. For example, the entry editor can easily be replace through a plugin. A host of such plugins exist bringing the popular FCKEditor and YUI Rich Text Editor to Movable Type. Last week, alfasado added TinyMCE to the list of Movable Type compatible editors with his open source plugin.
Every other week, Six Apart hosts a conference call with the Movable Type community. Notes and a podcast recording of last weeks call are available. It was a shorter call than usual but discussion centered on community involvement with the official Movable Type development process and the community’s involvement with the latest release was highlighted - a prodigious list given the open source project is only six months old!
International members of the Movable Type community are also brainstorming ways they can participate in the conference calls too which currently is based in the United States due to the conference call provider. If you’d like to dial in for the next call (scheduled for the 23rd), the dial-in information follows, everyone is welcome!
Elena-Andreea Liţă, şef departament ştiri la Agora Media a avut amabilitatea de a-mi adresa cateva intrebari referitoare la utilizarea sistemelor Open Source, a resurselor educationale deschise in invatamantul romanesc si la deschiderea mediului eLearnTS de la Timsoft spre acestea.
Cu o zi inainte de Software Freedom Day, interviul a aparut sub titlul Open Source in Romanian Education in sectiunea European Projects - Interviews din Checkpoint eLearning, un cunoscut portal european de eLearning.
Timisoara (RO), September 2007 – (by Elena Lita) Open Source, a term proposed in 1998, refers to a set of principles and practices that promote the access to the process of planning and implementing various products and resources. The term is primarily used in relation to software. A wider term is FLOSS (or FOSS) - Free Libre Open Source Software. Carmen Holotescu, an instructor at the Automation and Computer Science Faculty - Politehnica University of Timisoara, the coordinator of the eLearning firm Timsoft, and the author of two eLearning guides speaks about the use of Open Source in Education. 1. Why should OS be used for educational purposes? Carmen Holotescu: The main benefits of open source software as concluded by UNESCO’s International Institute for Educational Planning are adaptable functionality, lower overall costs, vendor independence (increases choice, competition and transparency), adherence to open standards, the software’s position as a public good, interoperability, and security. The recommendations of the EU for educational policies are to avoid lifelong vendor lock-in in educational systems by teaching students skills rather than specific applications and by encouraging participation in FLOSS-like communities. This adds value to the skills learnt by students, such as a positive attitude towards information technology that favours the ability to create and actively participate and collaborate rather than just consume. In Romania, the interest and the use of open source software by teachers, pupils, and students is very important, but most initiatives are personal. Many Linux and LAMP users are active in user groups, building online communities with online support and discussions forums, but also with periodic face-to-face meetings. Romanian Linux distributions were developed by teams formed by young students. A lot of workshops and conferences in which actors from educational system participate take place, such as Linux and Virtual Learning Environments at University Vasile Goldis Arad (, which has convened five times editions), Linux Open Alternative Days - LOAD , or the International Conference eLiberatica organized by Romanian Open Source Initiative. 2. Is OER a viable alternative at this moment? Carmen Holotescu: Open source software is based on and uses open formats, and for this, it is used to create Open Educational Resources (OER). In Europe and worldwide, there many projects have been developed that deal with OER that are the subject of numerous debates, studies, policies, and educational priorities. The term Open Educational Resources was adopted at the UNESCO Forum in 2002, following the analysis of the impact that the Open Courseware projects have had on higher education. The Open Educational Resources include materials (content) for teaching and learning: open courseware and open content projects, free courses, learning objects directories, and educational journals. The OER are generally characterised by the following attributes:
Information technologies make it possible for educators to access and exchange online resources. Until a few years ago, most of the materials created were protected, the authentification of the users’ identities being needed. Nowadays, most of the resources are created and posted freely on the Web using the collaborative systems available via Web 2.0. Just like the FLOSS enables the users to reuse or modify the software, the OER allow users to adapt the materials and systems to self-instructional and other learning environments. But ultimately, the OER imply a fundamental change in the educational process, favouring the focus on the student. 3. Is there any connection between eLearnTS and the OS movement? Carmen Holotescu: The eLearnTS is an online environment developed by Timsoft that can be configured for online courses, for training in companies, for online communities, or as a collaborative platform for distributed teams. In our company, we use it to deliver IT, management, training the eTrainers, online courses for universities, firms, or for individual learners, and as collaborative platforms for our European projects. No matter what the subject of a course is, the learning community formed by the participants and the facilitator builds a pool of useful resources for future reflections, too: RSS feeds; blogs of the facilitator, participants, and other practitioners; wikis with topics related to the course; collections using collaborative bookmarking systems; and localization of other open resources. The platform is based on open technologies - LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP), and collaborative exercises realized by the participants frequently use Web 2.0 tools. We consider that each online course, each new learning experience in which somebody takes part, should be integrated into the continuous learning process in which the person is involved.
Grub distributed crawling technology is now being tested for use to to build Wikia after being acquired from Looksmart. This news came via comments from Wikia/Wikipedia co-founder, Jimmy Wales on Thursday.
Distributed crawling? Well, the concept has been around for web search for more than seven years. After a client is placed on your computer and during down time, you’re computer will be one of many to crawl the web to build the overall database. See also the SETI@Home project.
More on that in a moment.
It’s important to point out that advertising on the Wikia site will be delivered via a white-label ad serving platform from LookSmart.
This announcement was made two weeks ago.
It will handle both display and text-based ads and Wikia be the first organization to use LookSmart’s technology for the management/serving of display ad units utilizing CMP-based pricing.
“We did a lot of due diligence to find a flexible and intuitive ad serving technology that nets the highest revenue and yield,” said Gil Penchina, CEO of Wikia. “We discovered in the process that LookSmart’s platform and services not only provide dynamic optimization of both our advertisers and backfill networks, but the white label aspect of it fits perfectly with our brand strategy.”
Now, back to the Grub crawling story.
Grub technology (the company’s exec summary from 2001) was acquired by Looksmart in January, 2003) and is now in early testing for the Wikia project. LookSmart stopped using the technology in 2005 as mentioned in the annual report from April, 2006:
We discontinued the use and support of the Grub distributed crawling technology in 2005 in order to reallocate development and support resources to other revenue-generating initiatives in search technology.
Via a recent News.com item:
It’s [Grub] meant to operate through open protocol and community collaborative added functions combined with the wiki.
+ Learn More About Grub ||| Monitor the Grub Wiki
History “Help Grub Search the Past” by Chris Sherman, April 2003 & LookSmart bets on distributed computing by Stefanie Olsen, News.com See Also: Chris with more on Grub/Wikia in this Search Engine Land item posted the other day.
Blasts from the Past Grub FAQ (12/09/2000). ||| Grub executive summary (April 2001)
Grub Home Pages (Back to 2000) December 6, 2000 ||| January 30, 2003 ||| June 14, 2004
See Also: A Few Other Open Source Crawling Tools
+ Nutch Nutch is used several places including the massive U.S government web harvests containing terabytes of data. Another example is at UtilitySearch.info.
+ Heritrix
Heritrix is the Internet Archive’s open-source, extensible, web-scale, archival-quality web crawler.
+ Avi Rappaport’s essential SearchTools.com site lists many other open source crawlers and search engines.
Reading Numerous projects are or have been tackling web search by building distributed and P2P tools + Emerging Semantic Communities in Peer Web Search
+ Scalable Hybrid Search on Distributed Databases + “Challenges in Distributed Information Retrieval” (PDF), From Yahoo Research
+ MINERVA: Collaborative P2P Search
+ Chora: Expert-based P2P Web Search
+ ODISSEA: A Peer-to-Peer Architecture for Scalable Web Search and Information Retrieval
+ Distributed Search in P2P Networks - Internet Computing, IEEE (PDF)
+ Evaluation of Peer Based Web Search
+ Webcast: Social Web Search (Part 2) ||| Slides Held at Indiana University
Abstract: This talk will present two research projects under way in the Network and agents Network (NaN), which study ways of leveraging online social behavior for better Web search. GiveALink.org is a social bookmarking site where users donate their personal bookmarks. A search and recommendation engine is built from a similarity network derived from the hierarchical structure of bookmarks, aggregated across users. 6S is a distributed Web search engine based on an ad adaptive peer network. By learning about each other, peers can route queries through the network to efficiently reach knowledgeable nodes. The resulting peer network structures itself as a small world that uncovers semantic communities and outperforms centralized search engines.
See Also: Learn More and Demo Here
Want your own song? Win the Weblog Tools Collection WordPress Plugin Competition! WordPress 2.6 Beta released for testing. First looks at the new features coming in WordPress 2.6. WordCamp UK changes locations. Batcache strikes. Plugin menus on the Administration Panels discussed. Is your WordPress Theme naked without a print stylesheet? We’ve got WordPress tips, WordPress news, and more WordPress than ever!
WordPress 2.6 Beta Released: For the WordPress beta testers, Ryan Boren announced the release of WordPress 2.6 Beta 1 for testing. The release is slated for July 7 with a July 14 possibility, depending upon how testing and fixes go, which is a month earlier than has been reported. I’ve reported on many of the new features in past WordPress Wednesday News on the Blog Herald. Here are some of the first reports coming in:
WordPress Plugin Competition: Weblog Tools Collections announces that Kym Huynh, a songwriter, has just donated a new prize to the growing collection, a song written for the winning recipient and professionally recorded. The Weblog Tools Collection’s WordPress Plugin Competition for WordPress 2.5+ continues to grow with new prizes and Plugins. Here are the Plugin entries listed on the Plugin Competition Blog so far:
WordPress and Google Summer of Code Update: Lloyd Budd reports on WordPress Google Summer of Code and how the team is improving WordPress to make it faster, better, and adding new features including new importing features, improved code, code documentation, and more.
BlogSecurity’s Next Generation Security Tester: BlogSecurify announces the launch of Launch BlogSecurify Next Generation!”>BlogSecurify Next Generation, the new modular, expanded version of the WP-scanner WordPress Plugin which tests your blog for security issues and vulnerabilities.
WordPress Blogs Hacked: If you have not updated your WordPress blog, your blog maybe at risk from hackers due to security vulnerabilities in older versions of WordPress. Update now. Here are more articles dealing with WordPress security issues:
WordPress Podcast: Episode 42: Our favorite Plugins, Ask Matt, WordPress Theme Design is out from the WordPress Podcast and features a new segment by Matt Mullenweg answering questions about WordPress news and issues, discussion of new WordPress Plugins in the Weblog Tools Collection Plugin Competition, WordPress Themes, and more on their favorite WordPress Plugins. They are also seeing your top ten favorite WordPress Plugins for an upcoming episode.
WP Weekly Podcast: Episode 21 of the WP Weekly Podcast was canceled due to technical difficulties, but hopefully it will be back up and running next week.
WordCast Podcast: WordCast started a while ago, and eventually found their stride to becoming a bit of an irreverent but fun look at the news from the WordPress Community. Podcast hosts Beth Skinner, Kym Huynh and Dave Moyer have interviewed a variety of WordPress experts and pros and feature a variety of interesting WordPress news and tips each week. Recent episodes include:
WordPress News and Tips from Canada: If you haven’t found the new Planet WordPress Canada aggregator, you are missing out on some interesting WordPress tips and information coming from the north. Here are some recent highlights:
Last Week’s WordPress Wednesday News: Can’t get enough WordPress news and tips? There is so much news coming out about the latest version, so you can catch up with the past news in last week’s WordPress Wednesday New: Planet WordPress Canada, WordPress Plugins Contest, Crazyhorse, BuddyPress Default Theme, Blog Hacked, Sitemaps, and More.
WordCamp UK Changes Locations: Only a few weeks away, WordCamp UK has had a last minute change of venue to The Studio in Birmingham. Check out WordCamp UK for more details and maps.
WordPress Meetup or WordCamp Near You? If you are putting together a WordPress event, please email me so I can publicize it here. If there is a WordCamp near you, go. If you are interested in setting up a WordCamp, stay tuned for news and information on to bring a WordCamp event near you.
Here are some WordPress-related dates and events to put on your calendar as found on the WordPress Roadmap and the WordPress Meetup Group Listings (subject to change).
