- On Bookmarking: Dogears and Marginalia — asking the question “how do you bookmark in real life?”. I’m interested because I have recently begun obsessively collecting the good quotes and references from books I read, thanks to Amazon Kindle app’s highlights. (via titine on Delicious)
- Systems for Open Electronic Lab Notebooks — question from a very respected scientist (Jonathan Eisen, king of the phylogenetic tree and “phylogenomics” on Twitter) about tools and software for open lab notebooks. Turns out it’s by no means a solved problem, so a good hacker working with such a lab could do some good things for science.
- Starbucks, Wifi, Paid Content (ReadWriteWeb) — Starbucks announced free wifi, from which customers can access content they’d otherwise have to pay for (e.g., WSJ). Interesting to me for several reasons: libraries also offer access to information you’d otherwise not have access to; and Starbucks are turning the physical store into a virtual one as well.
- Writing Great Documentation (Jacob Kaplan-Moss) — it’s all true, read it and write.
"documentation" entries
Promoting and documenting a small software project: VoIP Drupal update
Part of a series about efforts by VoIP Drupal collaborators to find the right media and tools with which to promote a small, little known software project.
Documentation strategy for a small software project: launching VoIP Drupal introductions
VoIP Drupal is a window onto the promises and challenges faced by a new open source project, including its documentation. A meeting at at MIT this week worked out some long-term plans for firming up VoIP Drupal's documentation and other training materials.
Wrap-up from FLOSS Manuals book sprint at Google
Mixtures of grassroots content generation and unique expertise have existed, and more models will be found. Understanding the points of commonality between the systems will help us develop such models.
FLOSS Manuals books published after three-day sprint
Joining the pilgrimage that all institutions are making toward wider data use, FLOSS Manuals is exposing more and more of the writing process.
Day two of FLOSS Manuals book sprint at Google Summer of Code summit
As a relatively conventional book, the KDE manual was probably a little easier to write (but also probably less fun) than the more high-level approaches taken by some other teams that were trying to demonstrate to potential customers that their projects were worth adopting.
Day one of FLOSS Manuals book sprint at Google Summer of Code summit
Four teams at Google launched into endeavors that will lead, less than 72 hours from now, to complete books on four open source projects.
FLOSS Manuals sprint starts at Google Summer of Code summit
Four free software projects have each sent three to five volunteers to write books about the projects this week. Along the way we'll all learn about the group writing process and the particular use of book sprints to make documentation for free software.
Four short links: 15 June 2010
Bookmarking, Open Notebook Science, Starbucks, and Documentation
Worldwide Lexicon: matching up technologies and culture to end the language barrier
Essays by Brian McConnell of
World Wide Lexicon
and Ethan Zuckerman
of
Global Voices
describe the technical and cultural sides of developing communities of
volunteer translators.
World Wide Lexicon Toolbar changes the reading experience for the other 99% of web pages
World Wide Lexicon Toolbar meets my criterion for a piece of critical infrastructure: after two days with it I can't get along without it, and I plan to avoid any
browser that doesn't have it installed.