How do you feel?

EN: An awesome interactive visualization of the feelings in the blogosphere can be found on We feel fine. Blogs are used as a data source by being parsed for expressions of feelings.

[Via O'Reilly Radar]

Update: Just found a fitting cartoon for this. ;)

The Über-database for scientific publications

EN: ... ScientificCommons which is online since September 2006 wants to become exactly that:

The major aim of the project is to develop the world's largest communication medium for scientific knowledge products which is freely accessible to the public.

For this ScientificCommons is integrating data from many (to date 841) repositories. The interface is simple and web-2.0ish. Help content and a news page are missing so far and often pages cannot be found. So it is still quite beta but let's keep an eye on it.

[via open...]

The better environmental genomics

EN: Environmental Microbiology asked nine specialists of the field to have a view into the crystal ball [1]. Single-cell genomics was mentioned more than once. I hope the authors are right and this technology will be used for more environmental sequencing projects in the future. The combination of microfluid separation systems (or other similar technologies) and single-cell sequencing is a much clearer approach than the sequencing of randomly selected sequences like usually done in metagenomics. Knowing that sequences coming from the same or a different organism is helpful information in the data analysis. The (automatic) selection of cells before sequencing could solve the problem that usually only dominating species can be analyzed effectively. I am crossing fingers for more appealing datasets.

[1] Environmental Microbiology, 2007 Jan, 9(1), 1-11

Second Life client becomes open source

EN: Linden Lab announced that the Second Life client source code will be soon available under an open source license. I played around a little bit with Second Life and we used it for our Wine-and-Cheese-session in our online symposium. At that time the system struggled with stability problems but in general it was a funny experience. I have enough First Live so don't spend much time there but think for certain purposes this virtual world can be not only entertaining but quite useful ... maybe for a second online symposium or something similar. The hope of having Having an open source client in the near future makes it definitely more attractive to me.

Update: The source code is now available under the GPL and can be downloaded from here.

Jabber - open instant messaging

The 23C3 offered a lot of excellent and inspiring talks and the official recording will hopefully be online soon. One talk (german) about Jabber/XMPP reminded me on a Chaos Radio broadcast (german, too) about the same topic that I heard recently. As it seems that not too many people know about Jabber/XMPP I would like to propagate it here.

The Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) is mainly for instant messaging but but has much more potential as it is an open standard and a design that makes it easy to extended it.

I started to use Jabber years ago but most people I wanted to chat with had already other (proprietary) instant massaging solution like ICQ. So they did not want to register to another IM service (actually this is much easier in Jabber). Luckily Google uses now XMPP for Google Talk. This means everybody with a Google mail account can use and be contacted via a jabber client and the amount of jabber users is increased the dramatically.

Among other functions it is possible to use XMPP for VoIP (Jingle) and or RSS-like notifying (PubSub). There are a lot of clients for many platforms. As it is easy to extent and libraries for nearly every programming language are available you might be able to hack another useful service with XMPP.

If you like instant messaging give Jabber a try. For a quick introduction have a look the Wikipedia page about Jabber and find more information on the Jabber homepage.