Comments on: Ask and ye may receive, don’t ask and ye surely will not

By: fanklihfkjd@yahoo.com

fanklihfkjd@yahoo.com — Thu, 16 Dec 2010 01:56:55 +0000

Good writing, beautiful pictures, wow, it is wonderful,wonderful, we will always support you!rolex2u

By: Ask! « UCOSP

Ask! « UCOSP — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 13:28:48 +0000

[...] by Greg Wilson on 2009/09/21 A week ago, Jon Udell put up a post on his blog titled, “Ask and ye may receive, don’t ask and ye surely will not.” Yes, there is such a thing as pestering, but in our experience, students are far more likely [...]

By: Jon Udell

Jon Udell — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 18:28:58 +0000

Consider MySpace. It’s become the place for musicians to hang their shingles. Musicians care very much about promoting themselves not only on MySpace but elsewhere. Exporting a calendar feed would make MySpace more useful for that purpose.

Note also that the style I’m promoting is all about links back to authoritative sources. In this case, that source would be MySpace. Every event exported through the feed into other contexts would be an invitation to visit the band’s MySpace page to sample the music and evaluate whether to attend the event.

By: Randy

Randy — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 17:35:35 +0000

Jon,
BRAVO – i loathe scrappers, and use them regularly because so many programs don’t offer structured data. I wrote my first scrapper in 1988, and had to regularly update it as the source morphed. what a waste of time!

good luck in your attempt to get these features available through the big websites. Walk in the shoes of Facebook and ask yourself – Why do i want someone else to re-purpose data in a manner that makes it possible for them to NOT view my site? they loose the eyeballs and disappear behind your app. I like the intent i just don’t see how it is in their interest to cooperate. My great hope is that I am simply wrong!

peace.
randy

By: Ian Barnes

Ian Barnes — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 06:03:59 +0000

I haven’t been following this thread particularly closely, so perhaps what I’m going to suggest is already on the agenda… Anyway, if you do go ahead with the scrapers, I think it would be worth considering the Zotero model: rather than writing lots of page scrapers yourselves or trying to come up with something incredibly clever and general that will probably turn out to be quite fragile and hard to maintain, instead use the wisdom of the crowd and create a framework (plugins, plugin templates, etc.) that makes it as easy as possible for reasonably tech-savvy users to extend the service by adding new scrapers for their favourite sites.

By: Malcolm Tredinnick

Malcolm Tredinnick — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 02:21:53 +0000

Greg Wilson’s work with groups at UTorronto deserves every mention it can get. He seems to be leading a group of educators who are doing a real service to their students, giving them guided experience at real software development, including interaction with the outside world. I’m not that surprised to see it was that group who picked it up. Greg is setting an impressive standard and I’m a big fan.