Suivez mon regard

Pour ceux qui veulent voir les pages Web que je visite, le meilleur plan c’est de suivre mes flux sur Spurl.net, disponibles en formats RSS et en Atom. Spurl est loin d’être parfait comme système mais c’est une façon de combiner «signet social» et archivage de pages Web. C’est aussi la version paresseuse du nanobloguage à la Twitter et Jaiku. Ces temps-ci, je spurle pas mal tout ce que je trouve le moindrement intéressant, comme pages Web. Je blogue certaines de ces pages, mais je me sens pas trop obligé de faire un billet pour chaque nouvelle qui attire mon attention.

Espérons que je vais pouvoir intégrer mes habitudes de spurlage avec la prochaine version de Flock.

Envoyé à l’aide de Qumana

TIU: Spurl

Tools I Use: Spurl.net 1.0 - Free online bookmarks with so much more…

Been using Spurl for a while now. Far from perfect but very useful. To me, it brings together the functionalities of Del.icio.us (and other “social bookmarking” services) with those of the Scrapbook Firefox extension. Like Delicious, it allows you to tag and share bookmarks. Like Scrapbook, it keeps a copy of the bookmarked page.

At this point, I got the habit of spurling just anything that I find interesting on the Web. In some cases, I also blog on the bookmarked item. But I don’t necessarily feel a need to put everything in my “to-blog” list. I don’t even tag my bookmarks.

The upshot of my spurling habits is that anyone who wants to know what I’m reading on the Web can just look at my Spurl RSS feed (or Atom feed). In this case, Spurl serves one of the purposes people are using Twitter and other nanoblogging tools for. Yeah, I know it’s not the same thing at all. But, to me, spurling is the lazyperson’s version of nanoblogging.

Now, once the Flock browser does “spell as you type” and Spurl does del.icio.us syncs, I could just use keystrokes to spurl pages I visit.

Hey! Who do you call “lazy?”

Acknowledging Africa’s Innovative Spirit

Good news! (Though a bit late. Got the link through a thoughtful pitch by a Radio Open Source commentator.)

Next month’s TEDGlobal conference will be in Tanzania!

TED | TED Conferences | TEDGlobal 2007 | Program

Not only do I really enjoy the TED Conference presentations (available as podcasts and streamed videos) but I think the organisers grok something important about the world in which we live. TED Conferences actually go much beyond the fields of “Technology, Entertainment, and Design” that gave them their name.

Of course, TED still follows a U.S.-centric model, inspired by commercial neo-liberalism and innovation with direct practical results. But as these things go, TED participants are “thinking outside the box” more actively than many of their colleagues.

Beer and Science

The weekly SciAm Podcast Science Talk had an interview with UCDavis beer science professor Charles Bamforth. The interview was mostly concerned with Bamforth’s 2003 book on beer and science. Many of the things discussed on the program are common knowledge for most beer geeks but it’s still fun to have science media cover some part of the beer world.

As explained in this interview, beer is a much more complex beverage than wine. In North America, many people seem to associate wine with sophistication and beer with college drinking. The interview does fairly little to debunk these associations but does give some idea of how interesting beer can be from a scientific perspective.

Diversité culturelle et création média

Reçu par courriel, l’annonce d’un concours de Radio-Canada International appelé Métissé serré. Les principaux thèmes sont des personnages intéressants provenant de «communautés culturelles» ou des histoires liées à l’immigration.

Bien content que RCI puisse s’intéresser à ces questions.

Pour participer, il faut soumettre une capsule audio ou un court métrage de trois à huit minutes avant le 30 juin 2007 (le 29 juin à 23h59). Les participants doivent avoir entre 18 et 35 ans en date du concours. Le règlement est assez clair, y compris les questions de propriété intellectuelle.