I am currently finishing up my research on community libraries in Indonesia, and one of the interesting aspects is how they name themselves - very few choose to call themselves libraries, with Taman Bacaan (reading garden) being the most common, but far from only appellation. I thus wanted to find some statistics, and decided to […]

I’ve posted some great Amharic dance videos earlier, and today I came across Ethiotube.net, a Youtube clone started in February this year and describe themselves in this way:
Founded in February 2007, EthioTube is the leader in Ethiopian online video, and the premier destination to watch and share original videos related to Ethiopia worldwide through a […]

Hybrid models
The new tools available for connecting us and sharing text, video and audio has made it possible to put online many of the interactions and events that used to require moving many people physically to the same place. There are many ways of attempting to do this, more or less successfully. I think hybrid […]

Google Books vs OCA
We’ve heard a lot about Google Books, whether it’s Google’s grand plans or them getting sued by publishers, as well as various complaints about quality control (see this First Monday article). There have also been discussions about the terms of use (many books that are clearly in the public domain show up […]

I have had a weird on and off relationship with Ruby for the last few years, since I learnt it one very long night in Hangzhou a few years ago. I played with it on and off during the first year in Toronto, doing tutorials and thinking about neat apps, but never really coming up […]

I love Wikipedia (despite the occasional problems, unreasonableness, problems of governance and growing pains). One of the reasons I’ve always enjoyed contributing is that you are guaranteed an audience. Writing on this blog, for example, I never really know if anyone is reading. I can see my website statistics, but they are notoriously fickle - […]

When I was dabbling in QBasic and Visual Basic a decade ago, I never thought about using version control. Later, I learnt about CVS and SVN and thought it was a neat way of enabling lot’s of people to collaborate online. I used it so I could access cutting edge open source software, but never […]

This is something I have really been waiting for! PhotoDropper is a plugin for WordPress that enables you to seemlessly search for CC licensed pictures in Flickr and other databases, and with a click insert the picture into your blog, complete with the photo credit. I have always found it a pain to have to […]

I’ve always loved dictionaries, and especially the mouse-over ones - I did a brief screencast of Wenlin, and hacked up my own little Indonesian dictionary when learning Indonesian. Currently I am learning Hindi, so of course I had to go out and investigate the tools available. Turns out that there’s not that much. Shabdkosh is […]

I am playing around with my old scripts for repacking Wikipedia for offline access, and ran it on the Norwegian database to see if they were still working. I realized that they had changed the way they saved filenames on the disk, which broke my program. I thought I’d post the solution (which took me […]