Today, I’ve just discovered that the Portable Antiquities Scheme, a voluntary scheme to record archaeological objects found by members of the public in England and Wales, have a blog and a whole slew of RSS feeds.
The PAS blog covers pretty much everything done by the Scheme, from technical notes about the website the the information contained withing the PAS database, to spotlighting particular finds of note. It’s an interesting read for techies and non-techies alike.
At the time of writing, the latest post covers the scheme’s usage of open source software. It’s nice to read something like this from a fellow heritage professional:
It should be recognised that IE sucks by now.
Yes!
I’m reading the post as I write this, I confess, and it’s just mentioned me as a “guru”. Well I never! Moreimportantly, it’s mentioned that the PAS will be implementing geotagging later in the summer, which is heartening, as I’ve been very keen to see this applied to in a heritage context. Well done, guys!
Link: Portable Antiquities Scheme blog
Michael Shanks is a well known archaeologist who specialises in theoretical approaches within archaeology. He is one of the growing number of archaeologists who really ‘get it’ when it comes to social media and the internet. Through his blog and various experiments he has grasped the concepts of participatory media by the horns and seen the possibilities and realities that communicative technologies can provide. If you’re reading this because you like archaeology, or you are interested in ‘Web 2.0′, I’d recommend a visit to his site.
To get to the point of this post, Michael and others have established Archaeolog:
Archaeolog is a collective weblog dealing in all things archaeological. It is open to the wider archaeological community and cognate fields from academics to field practitioners, from professors to students. We are inclusive and have no agenda other than to foster debate. We are community driven and we wish to provide a place for archaeology at large to be visible to the widest possible audience.
It’s great to see something like this. I’ve been promoting the use of blogs and social networking within archaeology for a few years now, and to be honest I’ve been a bit blind as to what has been happening in the USA. Expect a few more posts as I delve into some of the experiements in the wonderfully named “collaboratory” at Stanford University.
Archaeolog is committed to accelerating the debate. With the ability to comment it facilitates immediate feedback and discussion from a broad range of inquirers interested in exploring the archaeological sensibility at large.
And long may the debate continue, and may many be involved…
Tehmina (my gorgeous wife!) has started blogging. Tehm is an historian, museums specialist, and regular commenter on Past Thinking (normally correcting my slip-ups). She’s written books too! Expect her blog to be wonderfully written, and to cover topics such as “Life, history, beauty, oranges”.
According to her it’s “one small leap for one small woman” - so go forth and read!
I have just found out about Podzinger, a new service that utilises voice recognition technologies to index the actual audio content of podcasts. It essentially transcribes your podcast, which is amazing. Their search interface is simple and uncluttered, and search results allow you to listen to the podcast right on the page.
They are even offering a service where people can search your podcast from your website.
Podzinger’s speech recognition software is powered by BBN Technologies, who have apparently been in the game for 30 years.
PODZINGER looks inside podcasts, not just the metadata, letting you search podcasts in the same way that you search for anything else on the web.
I’ve just added the Archaeocast feed to Podzinger to see how well it copes with speech that has background noise. But from a quick scoot about searching for random things in random podcasts, it looks most promising.
Technorati Tags: blogging, podcasting, podzinger, voicerecognition, search
del.icio.us have introduced a new tool entitled “tagrolls” which enable you to easily display a tag cloud of your links on your own website. Here are mine:
Continue reading ‘del.icio.us Tagrolls’
First the renaming of my blog, and now the moving of my RSS URL. Whatever next?! Well, my feed now includes my latest photos on Flickr and my del.icio.us links as a daily digest.
My RSS feed is now http://feeds.feedburner.com/PastThinking, courtesy of FeedBurner. Please update your newsreader!
Up until now, this weblog has been called simply “goskar.com”. The main reason for this was that I couldn’t think of a good name for it, and I didn’t think that it really mattered.
Since I’m now getting a reasonable amount of traffic (about 3000 sessions per month), I thought that it deserves a more imaginative name. As many people know, I’m an archaeologist, and these posts are my thoughts and opinions - and at the risk of sounding cheesy, the name “Past Thinking” seems rather apt.
I hope that people will continue to enjoy “Past Thinking”!
Cheers,
Tom
I have been wanting to incorporate my Flickr photos on this blog for some time now, but have never found a satisfactory way of doing this so far. There’s always been lots of under-the-bonnet fiddling to do, and as I’m not using Apache on Linux, most of the methods I’ve tried haven’t worked out (that’s also why I don’t have nice friendly URIs for my posts).
Today, however, I came across a wonderful plugin called FAlbum by Elijah Cornell. It works wonderfully, and you can see how well it integrates by visiting my new photo page. Installing it was simple and configuration is done within the WordPress admin interface.
Thanks Elijah!
Technorati Tags: flickr, wordpress
Google have just launched their beta blog search tool.
It seems to work quite efficiently, listing at the time of writing, this blog as the 4th result on a search for the word “archaeology”. My previous post, on archaeology podcasts, talked about the Wessex Archaeology events blog, which is as of 2pm today, is the top hit on the same keyword.
It will be interesting to see how quickly the Google Blog Search will index posts - and it will be equally interesting to see how Technorati react. Technorati generally manages to crawl this site within about 10 minutes of posting.
The Google Blog search does currently not have the ability to search tags at present, nor does it offer the personalised service provided by Technorati (custom feeds for tags and keywords, claiming a blog etc).
Will we be pinging Google in the near future, as an update service? It’ll be an interesting one to watch…
This time several years ago, I was stuck in an internet rut. I had a fairly fixed number of websites which I would visit daily, but, through habit, rarely step outside of that loop. I had a personal website, which I first created in 1996, but I rarely had any interest in it from the outside world - it was a personal excercise to learn new technologies. Like my web browsing, it too stagnated. I changed the look of it because I was bored, or keen to try out a new design, but the content rarely grew to more than a list of links. I would certainly never try to write something like this on it - for starters it was unlikely that anyone would find it to read it.
Static sites, stagnant sites
In the year 2000, when I begain my masters degree in archaeological computing (and coupled with a connection to SuperJaNET - the high speed academic network), I began to experiment a little more with web publishing, and found that the projects I was working on were worthy of a mention on the net. I revamped my website yet again, and began to put 3D renders of some work on there, and a few descriptions of what I was up to and some of the techniques I was working on. But I had no traffic. Manual search engine submission didn’t seem to work, links from some friends (equally obscure) websites, didn’t bring many visitors. It made me wonder what the point of it was, especially as I was hand coding everything, and was a considerable time investment.
Continue reading ‘The Power of Blog’
