The always innovative George Mason University Center for History and New Media has released a new plug-in:  Anthologize.   Which is a platform/plug-in that allows the use of a WordPress 3.0 site as a book publishing tool.  The plug-in is still in a 0.4, alpha stage release, but I figured “what the heck” it is worth a try.  After installing and activating the plug-in you start by creating a Project – this is the book.  The Project has parts – sort of like chapters.  And in each part the interface makes it easy to filter your listing of posts by tag or category to quickly narrow down your listing of posts (if you’ve been organized in your tagging and categorization!).  You can even import content from external sources via an RSS import.  After you have everything organized the export functions creates a nicely formatted PDF or other format – it even includes a table of contents. 

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Brown University switched students to Google Apps for education a little over a year a ago, and recently completed a similar transition for faculty and staff.  In the interviews with CIO Michael Pickett one primary reason for the switch is requests from staff for collaboration tools, and a common platform with students.  In traditional education structures there often are silos for student systems and business systems.  Why the artificial divide? And who made the initial decision?  According to Pickett student behavior led the charge.  The majority of students were already using Gmail – what better way to ‘listen’ to users than to observe their behavior and be guided by those choices.  Another shift from traditional IT top-down decision making.  And integrated video chat? No more schlepping cross-campus for F2F meetings?  Sign me up!

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I attended a day-long workshop yesterday on Google analytics, run by LunaMetrics. For those of you who may not know, Google analytics is one of their free services that let’s web site owners gather website visitor statistics which can be used to provide more effective sites.  It was a great workshop, and I’ll be incorporating the ideas into some web-application re-writing I have planned for the summer. 

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“This is a point of confusion for many of our customers.”  So began a tech support response that was the latest in a string of messages.  The good news is that this was the message that actually helped me solve the problem.  The bad news is that came at the end of almost a day and a half of frustration and confusion on my part.  I searched the help system.  I consulted knowledgeable colleagues (and got them confused and frustrated too.)  This was for an initial setup of a new system, so I expected there to be some annoying setup issues.  But I’m left wondering “If so many customers have the same issues, how about altering things so we don’t all experience this problem.”

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A physical object these days, from a car to a camera, is more defined by software than hardware.  For instance the gas pedal in your car is not actually attached to the engine.  In the old days is was attached to a cable that controlled a valve in the carburetor – push is hard and the valve let in more gas and the engine ran faster.  How it functioned was defined by the hardware components and their mechanical adjustments.  Today your gas pedal controls a switch that feeds information into a computer which based on its programmed responses will tell different parts of the engine to react based on your input.   It is possible to change the programming to make your car super gas-efficient or a race-ready speed rocket – still within the larger limits of the engine and other components, but there can be a considerable range of software variability possible.  Other hardware has the same issues – for instance the shutter button on your camera isn’t actually attached to the camera shutter – again it triggers a stream of software cause and effect.

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Google has done it again, and created a cool service to make the web better.  In this case it is an API that gives access to a range of text fonts.  Many of you may not know this, but traditionally web page design is limited to a handful of fonts. Read the rest of this entry »