I Really Don’t Know

Cheap Wii Multitouch

Low-Cost Multi-touch Whiteboard using the Wiimote is a great piece of innovation using the motion tracking camera in the wiimote to provide cheap tracking for a multi-touch display.

Read Write Wrangle with Talis

Read/Write Web have been digging into us in a bit more detail.

The piece is a pretty good overview and it’s great to see how much they’ve understood about us and the culture we’re trying to build and maintain.

Project Cenote, a concept car Nad and I built some time ago gets a mention, described as having an “aesthetically pleasing interface” – with hindsight I think there just maybe a bit too much chrome going on ;-)

The author, Zach Beauvais, seems to be finding the idea that we are two things difficult. He’s not the first. We’re both a vertical software provider in the library market in the UK and a horizontal platform provider for anyone who want to play with Semantic Web data anywhere in the world. We have some of the best people in both of those arenas working for us – which actually makes it very easy to balance those two aspects internally.

It’s incredibly pleasing to see this kind of review of us – it feels spot on, we try to be open and relaxed and do the very best we can. Hopefully we’ll see more of this kind of coverage as more people get to know us.

YouTube – Royksopp – Remind Me

YouTube – Royksopp – Remind Me:

Fantastic music video with constantly changing information visualisations.

found via: Boodleheimer

Open Data Commons License

At work we’ve just announced some great news. The Open Data Commons license is out – in collaboration with Creative Commons and others.

The new home for the license is at http://www.opendatacommons.org/ and the new licenses are available there for comment.

The only downside is that the full name of the license ended up as the Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication and Licence ODC PDDL which will inevitably end up being called the pee-diddle.

Should the President Use E-mail?

Should the President Use E-mail?

That’s the question posed by Freakonomics a few days ago, but not for the reasons you might suspect.

Apparently email is a good format for delivering bad news. That seems interesting, apparently the dropping of many social cues allows people to receive information in a less defensive attitude. That may well be, but my mother always said

If you’ve got something nice to say write it down, if it’s not so nice say it to their face.

Of course, she also said

If you haven’t got anything nice to say don’t say anything at all.

And if we’re on the subject of things parents tell their children you should check out today’s xkcd…

Going back to the question of Presidents receiving bad news, I’m not sure my mom’s second piece of advice would go down so well.

Podcasting Library Software Manifesto

http://blogs.talis.com/panlibus/archives/2007/12/the_library_20_1.php

A few of us got together to chuck around Roy’s Library Software Manifesto.

Tags: library software manifesto