Integration of Simile Timeplot into ScientificCommons

Simile Timeplot and Simile Timeline from MIT SIMILE project Semantic Interoperability of Metadata and Information in unLike Environments are handy libraries to visualize time depending data.
ScientificCommons.org gathers now for more than 2 years data from several hundred repositories worldwide. That means that there is plenty of data for time series visualization. I just started to add graphs for the publication activity of each repository on the repository summary page. Here are some example pages:

• http://en.scientificcommons.org/repository/e-lis
• http://en.scientificcommons.org/repository/qut__eprints_archive

Reference

• http://simile.mit.edu/timeplot/

Zanox Campus

My former colleague here at the University St. Gallen - Thomas Nicolai - is now working for the Zanox AG and responsible for their web services strategy and operation. As part of his job he is involved in the Zanox Campus. With the Campus Zanox tries to leverage and promote it's own web services. The Campus is a place, where Zanox tries to foster new ideas and new business models, that use the web services and which help monetize the web. Therefore Zanox has started an 1'000'000 EUR Web Services contest. Individuals and startups are welcome to create a business model that uses the Zanox web services. At the end of October the top ten candidates will be given the chance to present their business model to a jury in a short presentation. The contest is supported by a series of events like the recent TechCrunch Meetup in Berlin event and the coming Israel Innovation Day: Media on June 16th and the runner-up Israel Berlin Entrepreneurs Night @ zanox GAP CAMPUS.

Reference

• http://www.zanox.com/en/campus/

20 Magazines for free

Apple's iPhone user's have access to more content due to a partnership of Apple and Zinio. The trick is that those digital magazines are only made available to iPhone users by checking the User Agent of the browser. All you need to do is to change the User Agent in your browser to the Phone that is used by the iPhone and then access the magazine, which include Technology Review, Macworld, Lonely Planet and ... Playboy and Penthouse.
Firefox users can install the User Agent Switcher add-on and configure it with the following User Agent:

Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/4A102 Safari/419 (United States)

If you have done this, just visit the Zinio iPhone page: http://imgs.zinio.com/iphone/

Reference

• http://www.ghacks.net/2008/05/27/read-20-digital-magazines-for-free/

Steve Jobs as product portfolio

This is a very nice idea. Using the products to generate a portait..

Reference

• http://www.etoday.ru/2008/03/stevejobs-portrait-mosaic.php

Adobe Photoshop Express released

Adobe announced a new version of Photoshop, but this time as a web application. Photoshop Express is a Flash - Flex application that allows basic editing options. It is not intended for professional users, but for the easy manipulation of images for mainstream consumers. It can directly access images on Facebook, Photobucket and Picasa and upload and manipulate images on these services, which makes the beta very appealing for users of these platforms. You can now easily upload images to facebook and edit them online without ever needing any other software. It's only 17 features, which are mainly filters intended for tuning and effects, but I think they are suitable for quick and dirty manipulations. Additionally to upload the images to other services Photoshop Express itself offers 2 GB online storage, where images can be uploaded and shared with others as albums and slideshows. An interesting side note is, that the platform is intended as a show case for Adobe's Flash/Flex framework, which Adobe is heavily trying to push out.

Reference

• http://www.photoshop.com/express/