Dario Taraborelli has a terrific post looking at the strengths of weaknesses of social software when stacked up against scientific peer review. He finds lots of uses, especially since traditional peer review doesn’t scale, although he doesn’t think social software will replace it.

Overall, the systems Dario looks at are better at flagging items as interesting than at vouchsafing their credibility, although his proposal for “a wiki-like system coupled with anonymous rating of user contributions,” would head in that direction. [Tags: science peer_review knowledge everything_is_miscellaneous ]

If you were waiting for your comment to be approved, I apologize. I didn’t realize I’d set all comments to be moderated, so it was only by accident that I discovered I had a queue. Sorry!

Also: D’oh!

EngineeringVillage.org has about 32 million records available, including 10.7 million from the Compendex (Computerized Engineering Index) that has data going back to 1884, 9.5 million records from the Inspec Archives that goes back to 1896, 2.2 milllion government technical records in the NTIS collection, and 9.5 million patent abstracts.

How can you possibly navigate 32 million records? Searching requires second-guessing authors, and with that many records, it’s bound to miss more than it finds. So, EV uses a combination of full text searching and faceted navigation.

For example, if you’re looking for anti-gravity devices, begin by doing a text search on “gravity.” You’ll get 202,162 results. In the righthand frame, you are shown eight areas (facets) — source, author, affiliation, country, document type, year, etc. — each with a list of the occupants of that particular branch. So, under Affiliation, you can see that the Jet Propulsion Lab has 326 records that contain the word “gravity,” while NASA’s Goddard Center only has 155; this by itself is valuable information. Check the NASA box, and now you you can further refine the 234 results by deciding only to see those articles published in the US, and then the ones on solid state physics. We’re now down to 11 articles. But we can always go back and remove the restriction to only articles published by NASA. It’s tree browsing where we get to construct the tree.

Now EngineeringVillage has added user-created tags. Tags can be declared as public, institutional, or belonging to a user-defined group. Very cool. (It would be especially helpful if, say, the US Patent Office were to suck in the tags applied to patents.)

The tag cloud shows that the top tags at the moment — early days for the tagging feature — are “Thermal management,” “sathya,” “Unsaturated soils,” “Wireless sensor networks,” “Photonic crystals,” and “Room temperature,” which suggests that users are working on growing photonic crystals at room temperature for use in wireless sensor networks, to enable the Sathya Sai Organization at long last to achieve world domination.

In an email, Rafael Sidi, VP of product engineering at Elsevier Engineering Information says that the faceted system was built in house using the FAST search engine.

BTW, I think Rafael makes the right response to Steve Rubel’s idea that “It’s very difficult to survive as a paid service in a Long Tail environment. One reason is that it’s now easier to discover free, open source alternatives.” Rafael replies that services like EngineeringVillage add “value to the content that we publish (indexing, writing abstracts), creating better searching features and providing analytical tools (intelligence).” The Long Tail enables the creation of such deep value that only some of that value can be addressed by Open Source solutions (long may they wave).

(Disclosure: Steve Rubel works for Edelman PR, to whom I consult, and I recently did some videoblogging for FastSearch.)

[Tags: faceted_classification search tagging folksonomy patents everything_is_miscellaneous long_tail ]

Reuters has started a site devoted exclusively to Africa. Each country has its own page. And there at the top left of each page is a feed of the most recent posts from Global Voices. Reuters is a funder of GV, and this is a very cool integration of the mainstream media and our global voices.

It makes me inordinately happy. [Tags: global Voices africa news media msm reuters everything_is_miscellaneous ]

Tim Spalding has a terrific post analyzing why his LibraryThing has ten times the number of book tags as Amazon. [Tags: amazon librarything libraries tags tagging everything_is_miscellaneous folksonomy]

No, it’s not a place where you can get free digital downloads. Rather, it’s software for creating your own storefront for selling your music, documents, used Powerpoints, whatever. It’s from the Web’s favorite musician, BradSucks, and uses Amazon’s incredibly cheap S3 storage service. BradSucks’ store is DRM-free, of course.

You can see it in action here. Or you can download BradSuck’s software here, so you can install it on your own site. (And while you’re checking out BradSucks’ store, you can listen to his music for free, and then go buy a copy of his album.) [Tags: bradsucks music drm retail amazon ecommerce everything_is_miscellaneous ]

Scouta lets you bookmark and recommend videos at sites like YouTube, helping you find people with the same interests. It also lets you create groups and share what you’ve found with them. It has a “karma and kudos” system that notices when you recommend and share stuff. I’ve been using it in alpha (Disclosure: I’m some type of unoffical advisor, I think) with my family and the Berkman Center as groups. It’s useful despite some rough edges. I like and trust the guys who built it. [Tags: scouta media everything_is_miscellaneous videos youtube]

From an article about DonorsChoose.org by Jonathan Alter in Slate:

So for example, this week a teacher in Richton, Mo., posted a request for a $392 camcorder for her kids to act out stories they’re reading; a teacher in New York City asked for a rug on which to read stories to kindergarteners ($474); and a teacher in a 100 percent low-income school in Los Angeles wants a $414 telescope to teach astronomy to her students. Donors scroll through the hundreds of proposals (searchable by region, subject, level of school poverty, etc.) and fund them in whole or in part with a couple of clicks. If there’s no market for the proposal, it doesn’t get funded, though most eventually do. DonorsChoose handles all of the discounted purchasing from vendors, so no money goes directly to the teacher.

[Tags: charity web2.0 everything_is_miscellaneous ]

It’s a little thing, but the headline in Friday’s USA Today about the head of Marriott hotels, Bill Marriott, Jr., starting a blog was “Send a note to Marriott.” Not read but talk. Yup. [Tags: blogs marriott hotels travel everything_is_miscellaneous ]

In the comfortless elbow of the Vietnam Memorial in DC, I asked the veteran stationed there how the names were arranged. He explained that starting from the middle, where we were standing, the names are listed in the order in which they fell, stretching to the right, and then picking up again at the entry way to the wall.

But, I said, stretches are alphabetized, some so long that initially I thought the entire wall was arranged A-Z.

They’re listed alphabetically, replied the vet, when there were multiple deaths on one day.

[Tags: vietnam war alphabetization taxnomy washington_dc iraq everything_is_miscellaneous ]