Language Learning via Podcasts

There are some great podcasts out there and I have just come across the idea of pocasts books (podiobooks), but have you tried learning a language? Well, now you can in stages though some pretty good podcasts:

French: FrenchPodClass.com
Italian: LearnItalianPod.com
Japanese: JapanesePod101.com

There must be more, but it's a good start.

For general podcast stuff I find podcastpickle.com pretty useful.

Visualizing Personal Networks

There is a useful article posted yesterday on the New York Times Technology section on "Software to Look for Experts Among Your Friends".

This is a really interesting way to explore the kind of networking afforded by web applications like OpenBC, LinkedIn, Ecademy, MySpace, Passado, Orkut, iWiW, or one of the many other Social and Business networking service providers.

There is also potential to exploit the Friend of a Friend (FOAF) markup language within companies. A way to manage and develop your value network (or Guanxi as the Chinese call it) as well as establish the knowedge flow within business and personal relationships.

Clearly a beneficial Knowledge Management tool, particularly in deciding the composition of Project Groups.

I consider this a better and more secure route than using services such as Plaxo linked to your private address book, though if you are a dedicated Outlook user then something like Cortege may suite your needs.

What we really need is a service that offers:

1. method to easily collect and aggregate "people content", far beyond what Plaxo offers
2. help the user to visualize their network and help to make intelligent cross-connections between people who share certain interests,memberships, employees etc..
3. let the user manage and classify, automated or manually, in accordance to what he wants to achieve, like "show me all people who are translators in my area and set up an automatic request for their language skills so I can arrange a dinner";
4. help the user to share information and files instantly, with their peers, friends or other "people clouds" were defined in steps 1-3.
5. to do this in a visual and intuitive way.

This will require combining sematic webs, social networking, mind mapping and folksonomies.

Almond Milk

If you have cereal for breakfast you should try almond milk as an alternative to the bovine lactate (that's cows' milk I'm talking about). This was popular in the middle ages and is still common in the near and middle east - particularly where refrigeration is not available.

Add the almonds to the water (in a jar or container) and leave overnight in the fridge Then blend the almonds and water, during which you add the Maple syrup and Vanilla essence.

For a delicious smoothie, add frozen fruit as you blend.

n.b. If you are not using Organic almonds, then drain the water first and add the same quantity of fresh water before blending.

Tailored Search Engines

I've had quite a bit of experience with Lucene over the last few years, so I'm pleased to see this and its related projects are maturing.

Over the last week I've been putting together a web based search engine using Nutch, of which Version 9 was released last month. Performance wise, I'm noticing a big difference, though I note there are quite a few of the tools I was use to using that have name changes and plenty of deprecated comments for old scripts I have to update.

I know there are quite a few free tailored search engine offers out there, inclusing Google's Custom Search Engine, but I have tried these and not been that happy. Even if Google are now offering a Business Edition which starts at $100 per Year.

Anyway, in preparation for developing the search engine I went back and browsed some classic advice on optimisation such as Anna Patterson's 'Why Writing Your Own Search Engine is Hard' and Mike Cafarella
and Doug Cutting's article, "Nutch: Open Source Web Search'. There's plenty of other stuff out there on Crawling the Web in general.

As part of this I did consider other possibilities such as A9's (aka Amazon's) OpenSearch paid for service, but as a search engine I want a bit more control than their index. Perhaps somewhere down the line using their elastic cloud web-service for what I'm doing with Lucene and Nutch may be the answer to scaling. For now I'm just honing the focus.

Aside from this the Carrot2 project that adds clustering to Nutch and Lucene looks useful.

Of all these projects and developments though the most interesting is the news that the Taste (collaborative filtering for Java) donated their code to the Apache Mahout project (part of the Lucene group).

Variations on a phrase

How about using Google to search for novel variations on a well known phrase or expression?

It's easy. Put your expression in quote marks: "Who moved my cheese"

Replace the word you want to vary with a star '*': "Who moved my *"

Make things more interesting by rejecting all the original phrases using the '-' negative: "Who moved my *" -cheese

Enter the phrase in google: "Who moved my *" -cheese