Yesterday morning I saw Derek Powazek present on crowdsourcing -- user-generated content and collaborative communities. While he covered a lot of material that (users will do unexpected things, don't exploit people, design for the "selfish user"), there was one anecdote I thought especially relevant for FromThePage. A publishing house had polled a targeted group of people to … [Read more...] about Collaborative Transcription as Crowdsourcing
Meet me at SXSWi 2008
I'll be at South by Southwest Interactive this weekend. If any of my readers are also attending, please drop me a message or leave a comment. I'd love to meet up. … [Read more...] about Meet me at SXSWi 2008
Google Reads Fraktur
Yesterday, German blogger Archivalia reported that the quality of Fraktur OCR at Google Books has improved. There are still some problems, but they're on the same order of those found in books printed in Antiqua. Compare the text-only and page-image versions of Geschichte der teutschen Landwirthschaft (1800) with the text and image versions of Antigua Altnordisches Leben … [Read more...] about Google Reads Fraktur
Progress Report: Four N steps to deployment
I've completed one of the four steps I outlined below: my Rails app is now living in a SubVersion repository hosted somewhere further than 4 feet from where I'm typing this. However, I've had to add a few more steps to the deployment process. These included: Attempting to install Trac Installing MySql on DreamHost Installing SubVersion on DreamHost Successfully … [Read more...] about Progress Report: Four N steps to deployment
Name Update: FromThePage.com
I've finally picked a name. Despite its attractiveness, "Renan" proved unpronounceable. No wonder my ancestors said "REE-nan": it's at least four phonemes away from a native English word, and nobody who was shown the software was able to pronounce its title. FromThePage is the new name. It not as lovely as some of the ones that came out of a brainstorming session (like … [Read more...] about Name Update: FromThePage.com