I recently installed the Wordpress Plugin called “wpTouch“. This plugin adds a mobile version of the wordpress site for iphone user agents.

The result looks like this:

Note: By the way, the newer Wordpress Versions come with a built-in plugin installation routine, that makes it really easy to install plugin. As administrator you only have to search for the plugins name, and then after finding it, click on install and type in your ftp data. That is all. The update process is the same.

I tried out comparisons like “night,day” and “apple,microsoft”. A funny one was the comparison between “bush,obama”. Look at the screenshot below or jsut try out the tool for yourself : TwitterSpectrum

The tool was created by J.Clark who also published articles on data mining, statistical analysis and visualization and created other visualization tools. For further information you may scan his weblog.

Google now offers a Public Data Explorer. This is another progressing Google Labs Project that looks quite usable yet. The datasets include, among others, minimum wage in europe, world development indicators etc.

Such public data visualizations are good examples of what can be achieved by information visualization. Such as, this small and easy created visual comparision of Agricultural land between the World and Austria lets users quickly examine that Austria’s agriculture is decreasing while the world’s one is still rising.

But have a look for yourself and create your own visualizations.

User Experience & Interaction Design are two of the most important issues when facing the current use of our World Wide Web. Though, most scientists and developers forget, that the Semantic Web and therefore also the Internet-Data’s Understanding is strongly connected with UE.

Within my future thoughts and projects I will be approaching the Semantic Web from more of a Interaction-Design or respectively user-focussed perspective. So obviously there are many interesting viewpoints to be taken into account when dealin with this wide-ranging issue.

The first question I stated was what are the different ways to look at this topic; here is a short answer to it:

Notes:

To begin with, I would like to use this post to note down a very incomplete listof professionals, conferences, symposia and institutes (which I may update from time to time), that are besides the obwvious ones, dealing with this topic somehow:

• iSchools iConference
• Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) – Sympoisum on Creative Intelligent Systems
• UC Berkeley School of Information
• Semantic Web User Interaction (SWUI)
• InfoVis C. – A data code compute resource
• A Timeline Visualization of Information History
• Information Aesthetics – Where form follows data – Blog
• DataVisualization.ch – Blog
• many many more

Catchphrases, Quotes & other thoughts:

concept of … highly adaptable … up-scaling views …

“Students shall choose projects with high societal payoffs, researchers have to employ the updated science 2.0 strategies, developers have to focus on genuine user needs”

Eventually, one of our best hopes for the future is that a large and connected group of people can change the world!”

Concept: Let us think of what should be achieved by 2020 and do something about it!

If you do not know yet what is possible to dynamically visualize with JavaScript, habe a look at this nice online-demo-collection (Google Chrome optimized). For example, one demo is a Starfield simulation and the Google Gravity demo.

Dear readers,

thank you for reading my blog and I hope you did not wonder why I did not write for a longer time! Due to some work schedules and a sports-accident, I did not finish any blogpost about sports- and webscience-research-news. However, today I write again and would like to introduce two kind of funny terms I thought about while I was describing the difference between Wikipedia and Google to my father:

Most of us are “digital aborigins” and not “digital immigrants” as my parents for instance are. Therefore some terms are quite obvious clearer for us than maybe some relatives and/or aquaintances or even friends. There we may sometimes take sth. for granted but forget, that this knowledge is not as explicit as we thought it to be.

Therefore I would just like to remind you again of thinking sometimes in another perspective and thinking how others would perceive a situation. Some things will straighten out.

Some further readings:

• UI Design on Wikipedia
• GUI Bloopers (Book about user interface design “bloopers”: from dvarious information spaces, explaining how intelligent, well-intentioned professionals made these dreadful mistakes…)
• Only for the more into the SW people: Semantic Web User Interaction (SWUI)

About two weeks ago, a new XHTML Document Type Recommendation has been released by the W3C, namely the XHTML™ Basic 1.1 – W3C Recommendation 29 July 2008.

It is designed for Web clients that do not support the full set of XHTML features; for example, Web clients such as mobile phones, PDAs, pagers, and settop boxes. The document type is rich enough for content authoring.

Because of the reason that many of my bugfixes concerning “wrong”, – my page looks weird, please help me- visualizations” within Web Browsers are due to “bad XHTML”, I start again this call:
Please keep in mind, XHTML documents begin with important elements which tell the different web browsers how to interpret the document/site and how to validate it for conformance etc.

Just to inspire you to really using correct XHTML structure, making use of the most appropriate document type definition and follow the W3C recommendations, let me note down a metaphor-quote from an ashtray’s sign:

Please do not put paper in here!
This is an ashtray.
This is where fire goes.
Thanks.

Furthermore you may look at the metaphor-picture on the right.
And finally linking to some weird stuff about “like seriously…”.
Last but not least, if someone might not know exactly how to: Converting to XHTML: Simple Rules, Easy Guidelines. – And for the controversial part: Where Our Standards Went Wrong.

See also this article about principles to keep your code clean.

Today I updated my Website to the Wordpress Version 2.6. I recommend doing so, because there are not only quite a lot of security bugfixes but also several admin interface changes that look and work great! If interested, have a look on the brief video tour of 2.6:

Watch out for an easter egg in this version too.

Today I read about Google Summer of Code (GSoC) for this year (2008). In a nutshell, this is a program which brings students and mentors within the area of Open Source Development together, worldwide.

As for the last years, Google is investing millions of dollars to finance open source development projects of all diiferent kinds; – and this year, 21 Drupal project fellowships have been selected to be granted. So what is Drupal?

“Drupal” is not only a publishing content management system but also a steadily evolving base for web-platforms with a big community as driving power. The core is advancing rapidly, so OpenId and new import/export possibilities, many semantic and social network features are becoming part of both the core api as well as system-modules, which can be easily plugged in / integrated later on…

Here you can look up the list of financed Drupal projects within the Google Summer of Code 2008.