Author Archives: David

Cloaking Defined

Posted on by David

andersja’s blog provides a definition of cloaking:

a server-side hack that allows the webserver to serve different content to search engine spiders and visitors; for example while the visitor sees a whiz-bang flash animation, a search engine may see a plain vanilla HTML chucked full of crosslinks, keywords, meta- and header-tags — just the way they (the search engines) like it.

He points out that this approach is somewhat risky in that you might get yourself kicked out of the search engine if they discover you are trying to game it with content other than what you show to your human readers.

The other thing: how frustrating for a site to have very usable and accessible content but they only make it available to bots!

Rick Klau Starts a Klog Pilot

Posted on by David

From tins ::: Rick Klau’s weblog:

We’re kicking off a k-log initiative at my company tomorrow. I’ve identified a dozen people to serve as guinea pigs. IT installs the software tomorrow, and they’ll take a few days to get familiar with the software. Rather than bombard them with any formal training right away, I want them to be comfortable with what’s on the screen – at least that way they’ll figure out what questions they want to ask.

Good luck with the trial! I’m looking forward to reading about how it goes for them.

DTD Example for Scholarly Journals

Posted on by David

article.dtd is an XML document type definition for use with scientific and scholarly articles.

I’ve been investigating xml for publishing scholarly journals off-and-on over the past year and this was a recent find. It seems like our organization is getting close to the point where we will be able to begin moving to xml as a long-term storage format for our academic journal content. This will open up worlds of opportunity for us in the re-use and publishing of that content.

RSS Job Feeds

Posted on by David

Travis Owens is taking a crack at developing an RSS job feed module.

Update:
Here is an RSS job feed for the Turning Stone Casino created by Travis (without the proposed module). This is the first operational rss job feed that I have seen.

Providing an RSS job feed makes a lot of sense for employers that typically have lots of job openings. People interested in working at the company can subscribe and watch for one that matches what their abilities. Good for current employees too.

Travis also developed this headlines news feed for IndianCountry.com.

Posted in XML

The Power of Facets

Posted on by David

(Originally posted on the XFML Yahoo! Group.)

The true power of faceted metadata, imho, is that you can triangulate on resources by searching with terms from multiple facets.

Let’s assume I have a thesaurus of communication disorders. One facet might be “Disorders”. By picking a term within Disorders, say ‘Dysphagia’, I can identify resoruces related to that particular disorder. However, what if I was only interested in that disorder as it affects newborn children? I could use an “Age” facet and add the ‘Newborn’ term from that facet to my search criteria. That will then help me narrow further. Let’s add a “Geography” facet and select ‘North America’. Now we have results for ‘Newborns’ in ‘North America’ that have ‘Dysphagia’. This requires accurate indexing of material to be effective.

That is what I think the biggest advantage of faceted metadata rather than just a list of keywords. The Flamenco project is a good example of how it might look in a deployed web site.

MIT OpenCourseWare Open

Posted on by David

The MIT OpenCourseWare web site debuted this morning.

I think this is great for MIT and hope more universities follow suit. Prospective students to the univesity can get an excellent idea of just what the courses are about, colleagues can critique each other’s course structure or borrow resources and methods, and the Internet public can use them as a resource and refernce that is strongly branded as MIT.

But might they not get as many students if they give away all this information? Why become a formal university student when you can get the knowledge on their web site? Well, you can only truly get the knowledge by interacting with the professor and other studnets via the course. Also, a degree from MIT still looks better than ‘I read all the MIT course notes online’.

MIT wants butts in lecture seats and lab rooms to generate revenue. Giving away this course information will draw more students than they might have had otherwise while improving their teaching and research.

Why KM Now

Posted on by David

From thought?horizon (via McGee):

I think knowledge management’s prominence has deeper roots in an individual’s need to learn at this point in history. People are finding they need to become more reliant and old ways don’t serve them any more. We are no longer content to take what the boss gives us and seek greater choice. We are starting to see the need to learn again and that is best done in a community. Knowledge sharing/management is a community based activity.

This illustrates the great opportunity that professional societies and associations have right now: to reengage their memberships by facilitating learning and knowledge sharing among the members.

As the rest of the post above goes on to say, this is nothing new. See the quote below from Principles of Association Management, by Henry Ernstthal:

Professional societies can trace their roots back to the late Renaissance, when scientific societies were formed to collect and disseminate knowledge. The earliest of these societies, the Academia Secretorum Naturai of Naples, was organized in 1560. (page 5)

Associations are a manifestation of the desire to share knowledge among individuals within a profession or discipline.