Social media, the democratisation of knowledge and physiotherapy. Can they play nice together?

Is it too much to ask for software developers to agree on one standard storage format for commonly accessed data?  Why does every browser that I use have it’s own bookmarking system, rather than one location separated out from the actual programme that all programmes can then access.

For example, Firefox keeps it’s bookmarks at …/.mozilla/firefox/…default/… (different for each OS), Flock does the same in it’s own location, and so does Chromium.  Why not have one bookmark storage standard that gets kept in /home/michael/.bookmarks?  Every browser can then access the same place and so will all have the same History and Bookmarks, no matter which browser I’m using.  The same is applicable for RSS feeds.  Why can’t every application use a storage container that’s kept in /home/michael/.rss?  I’m hazy on the details, but I thought that this was the sort of thing that XML was designed for?

The Akonadi framework on KDE is going to go some way to address this problem, but only within the KDE desktop, and only for the (personal information management) PIM applications.  Am I missing something here?  If you know of a way to share resources across applications, please point me in the right direction.

• ERN – Networks, CCK09, Memory, Google, Britannica, Location, Immediacy http://bit.ly/1sWDBu #
• RT @jamesparks101: take a look at this wordle project http://tinyurl.com/n8bsxt #
• Wordle – Beautiful Word Clouds. Might be useful to determine relative weighting in a document e.g. a CV, or abstract http://bit.ly/NLWzM #
• @pixlr Been playing with Firefox plugin. Very nice, especially screen capture and express editor. Looking forward to offline availability in reply to pixlr #
• @pixlr I wasn’t aware that the processing takes place locally, that’s pretty cool. Can the software run in the browser when offline? in reply to pixlr #
• “Laconica is now StatusNet « StatusNet – Open Source microblogging service” from http://bit.ly/kh0v4 #
• New blog post: Public libraries on Mendeley http://bit.ly/wCjy7 #
• “Share recommended readings using Mendeley’s Public Collections | Mendeley Blog” #
• I just published Abstract – PhD Proposal (M Rowe) to Scribd http://bit.ly/2gLX0W #
• International Collaborative Undergraduate Student Project 2010 – Physiopedia http://bit.ly/1LqiEY #
• New blog post: International collaborative undergraduate student project http://bit.ly/fzw7M #
• I just published Abstract – Wikis and Collaborative Learning to Scribd http://bit.ly/u4OpW #

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Mendeley just included a feature I’ve been waiting for for a while now…public collections of articles that you can manage from within the desktop client.  You can subscribe to the feed or embed code into your site to keep up to date with relevant articles of whatever public libraries you’re interested in.  This is potentially very useful for teachers who have reading lists that students need to be aware of.

In the spirit of a transparent research process, I’ve created and made public the library I’ll be using for my systematic review of the literature for my thesis.  It’s very limited right now, as I’ve only created it for this post.  Over time and together with my research assistant, I’ll obviously be adding new articles regularly.

• @pixlr …assuming that everyone has a broadband connection in reply to pixlr #

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A little while ago I was wondering what platform I could use to aggregate my various online properties (Flickr, Delicious, Twitter, etc.) in a so-called “lifestream” and someone suggested that Friendfeed might be feasible. I looked into it for a while, but couldn’t commit to it because something didn’t feel right about using one service to point to all the other services.

With the recent Facebook acquisition of Friendfeed, I figured out what I didn’t like about using Friendfeed as a gateway, and that is that it’s not mine and never will be. It’s unlikely, but what if Facebook decided to kill Friendfeed? That in itself wouldn’t make a huge difference because Friendfeed would only be aggregating my content that is hosted elsewhere. But the principle is that building on a platform I don’t control just seems like a bad idea.

Which brings me to the blog…or at least, the self-hosted blog. With all the plugins available nowadays, it’s possible to incorporate virtually any content from most of the popular services, directly into the blog. I’ve had my Twitter and Flickr streams on /usr/physio for ages, and in the last few months have included additional content from Slideshare and Scribd. My blog is not going to go away anytime soon because I control the platform, down to the version of the software I run. No matter what services crop up that I decide to make use of, it’s only a matter of time before someone writes a plugin that I can use to incorporate that content into my site.

Of course there are issues with interaction on the blog, with most commenting systems incapable of integrating with each other (i.e. my Twitter feed is displayed on my blog, but any reader can only respond via Twitter, rather than directly from the blog…and the same goes with any other services that I’m using). But this problem would exist with any current “lifestreaming” platform.

So, is the blog going to make a comeback?