Weekly PhD Report 51-52

• Spent time writing a part for a paper "An Overview of Learning Object Repositories" with Argiris Tzikopoulos, Nikos Manouselis. Argis has made a survey on 59 repositories, and I was asked to help writing a part of it. I wish to send you this paper for comments later this week.
• Worked on a proposal for a book chapter which would be called "Towards Interoperable Social Recommendation: Storing, Sharing, and Reusing Evaluations of Learning Objects". The idea would contribute to Jehad&all's Log specifications. This would also be used for recommendation purposes. See the attachment for more information.
• currently reading lots of papers related to this, see: http://www.furl.net/members/vuorikari/LOR and
  http://www.furl.net/members/vuorikari/recommendation
• Played around with swicki, see: http://riina1-swicki.eurekster.com/
  • Swickis are community search engines that learn from users
    
    
• Checked out http://digg.com, the new hot tool for the community to review news. This is an interesting post about Digg and some other relevant social software.
  http://thomashawk.com/2006/01/digg-delicious-kaboodle-and-wink.html
• The kick in Digg is that when you submit a link there, it will be Dugg [imperfect] by other news readers. As soon as one post starts getting Diggs on it, i.e. it is read by many other who think it's relevant, it will climb higher up on the relevance ranking list, thus appear on the front page of the Digg.
  
• Worked on Ning.com application on social recommendation with Julien, Ben and Bram. We were not able to make it search Ariadne yet, but should be feasible soon.
• The issues seems to be that we added our, well, Julien's own SOAP library to make the connection. However, the Amazon services module in Ning is pure PHP running in the Playground, as are the modules that use other web services (such as Flickr and Gmail). they said "You should be able to make external HTTP requests from Ning just fine, whether using curl or PEAR's HTTP::Client (both of which we support)." Hmmm...