So I’m finally caught up on my blog reading. After being on vacation for five days, I had over 500 unread entries. Read some, marked most as read even though I hadn’t. This problem is going to only get worse as I find more interesting blogs to read.
What I want is for my news reader to suggest to me which of my unread entries I am most likely to be interested in. The question is, how to rank all the unranked entries?
My friend Matt blogged ReMail, a research prototype email client from the IBM Watson Research Center. Matt’s right that many of these features of ReMail are already in Outlook 2003 (List Seperators, Annotations, Threads, Collections). But what makes ReMail really cool is their visualizations. “The visualizations in Remail were designed to help people see connections between messages and people that would otherwise be invisible.” I’m going to need to read more about Thread Arcs.
This cool visualization reminds me of a research talk I got to see by Alison Lee from IBM Watson Research on campus a couple of weeks ago. Among other things, she showed off eTree: “A Browse and Query Interface for Online Communities”. Basically, its a tool for visualizing the activity of a web discussion forum (such as the ASP.NET Forums). In this idiom, each branch of the tree is a forum and each leaf on the tree is a thread. “Hot” threads become flowers on the branch. Older posts are dark green while newer posts are lighter. Members of the community are rendered as circles around the outside of the tree – selecting a user highlights the threads they have participated in.
What’s really exciting is that researchers are starting to look at blogging. I know lots of people were interested in the Wallop project from the MS Research Social Computing Group that was highlighted @ PDC. I want to see this technology make it into blogger tools.
I’m back from vacation and I just had to deploy a small dasBlog update that I hacked up while I was on the plane and my wife and son were sleeping. Clemens posted on the GDN workspace about registering your own macro classes. The theme that my wife wanted for her weblog comes with a variety of different sayings for the top of the page (My Journal, Welcome, Listen To My Cheery Chirpings, etc). I thought it would be cool if the image rotated or changed every time you came to the site. So I built my own custom macro class that overrides the radio.macros.imageUrl macro. Now, if you pass in a series of images seperated by vertical pipes (i.e. “image1.gif|image2.gif|image3.gif”), it will split out into an array of image urls and pick one at random. Pretty cool. Anyone want to see the code?
I hear Jim Blizzard is having another Portland Nerd Dinner. I wanted to go meet Rory in person, maybe see Scott (who I haven’t seen since KL last year) and continue a conversation I was having with Chris last week on campus. Not going to make it this time. I could use the holidays as an excuse, but the truth is that I’ve got an early morning all-hands division meeting to see Return of the King and I’d like to get more than three hours of sleep.
It may not be original anymore, but I set up a weblog for my wife Julianne. She’s always sending email out to all our friends with updates about our son, her job and other general goings-on, so I thought writing a weblog would be a good way for her to keep everyone up to date. She picked the name TechieWife in order to inspire the wives of techno-geeks everywhere. 😄
I noticed she got the address of my weblog wrong in her inaugural entry. What’s funny is that my friend Chris Church (no weblog yet) is so lazy that he bought devhawk.com and set it to redirect to devhawk.net. Now he can use IE’s ctrl-enter shortcut key to get to my weblog.