Jarosław Dobrzański’s blog
Recently I’ve been reading “High Performance Web Sites” (look at amazon).
I think it’s a good book who can be recommended to all who do even little bit of front end development. The book describes 15 rules (regarding CSS, JavaScript, etc.) that should be followed in order to deliver high performance web sites. It’s rather short (c.a. 150 pages) and easy to read, but the suggestions described by the author can be helpful while you work.
I used to listen to Pandora, but that has been impossible for some time because it’s been suspended in Poland (and some other countries). Let me quote Pandora’s authors:
We are deeply, deeply sorry to say that due to licensing constraints, we can no longer allow access to Pandora for most listeners located outside of the U.S.
At the same time I listened to last.fm but for some reason (why?) I stopped. Recently I re-discovered that service and I’m really excited about it! For those who haven’t used it, it’s a social network that allows to listen music you like (what you declare and tracks with similar genre that you may like), learn your friends’ music tastes, find information about music events that take place near the place you leave, discover new artists/tracks, etc. You can listen music either via a web browser or using special player (the player is more efficient and handy). This player can also register (scrobble) what you listen on your PC from CDs or mp3 files and updates your music profile. Eventually, you can listen what you like wherever you go provided you have Internet connection.
If you’d like to see what I’ve been listening to recently, look below at my “Top albums music quilt”:
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Recently, I’ve encountered doof, a new Web 2.0 service, kind of “new one”… The authors promote it with the slogan: “Have fun playing games and competing in tournaments, pesonalising your profile and expressing yourself”. Then, what actually doof is?
First of all, doof is a fancy website with astonishing flash design (see above). User can adapt the screen according to their needs. Then, users can choose from a wide range of games, including a number of retro ones and classics. Users are given a space to communicate by sending mails, instant messages, virtual gifts. Also, they can create a photo album that can be synchronized with Facebook. Thanks to news feeds, people know what’s going on in their doofish world, who played a game recently, who received a gift, etc. One can give feedback for the authors, suggest possible improvements and failings.
All in all, the authors had a great idea and they succeeded in creating a brand new, very fresh and marvellous Web 2.0 service. I believe that despite doof is games-oriented, it can meet tastes of not only keen gamers, but also people who just like to have fun seeing others and interacting on their social network.
You can read more about doof in doof blog.
I’ve just read an article about popularity of Web 2.0 and social networks in general all around the world. Quite nice article to me.
Basing on what the information passes there, in Poland we don’t have any popular social networking websites. To some extend it’s correct - if Poles use social networking websites, these are mostly Polish services, mostly unknown for people from abroad. Below, there is a list of the most popular (to me):
More and more Poles are blogging these days. I believe, the most popular blogging platforms in Poland are: blog.pl, Blox, Bloog.pl and blog.onet.pl. Also, Blogger and WordPress are frequently used.
Anyway, it’s good to know Poland is not a black hole on the World’s Internet map 
If you think the abovementioned lists lack from any services, please let me know. We can populate this ranking together.
I use two online social services: LinkedIn (en) and GoldenLine (pl). My activities there mostly include adding people I know or work with to my connection lists. I think it’s a good idea to keep such list of friends; you never know, when you need to contact somebody you knew in the past. Also, one beautiful day, you may get a contact from a head-hunter
Recently, I’ve updated my profiles on both those services. You can view them:
(LinkedIn)
(GoldenLine)
In less than two weeks I’ living DERI. I’m going back home in Poland. Amogn others, I’ll defend my Master’s Thesis.
Before leaving, we (myself, Filip Czaja and WĹadysĹaw Bultrowicz) are supposed to present the result of our work. We gave the presentation today.
First, Filip introduced ourselves and showed the context of our work:
Continue reading ‘Summary of our work in DERI’
Web 2.0-styled buttons are quite popular these days. In fact, they look fine. Actually, I love them 
Today, I learned you don’t have to do it on your own with graphic software. I’ve found www.mycoolbutton.com - Web 2.0 buttons generator. It allows you to create a button in four steps:
Finally, with a few clicks you create a button and download it as a png file.
Today we submitted yet another article; this time for The 6th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC ‘07) that will take place in Busan, Korea, from November 11 to 15 (Thursday), 2007. I was the main author of the paper; i wrote it together with Sebastian R. Kruk, Tadhg Nagle, Edward Curry, and Adam Gzella. Its title is “IKHarvester - Informal eLearning with Semantic Web Harvesting”.
There is the abstract of the article:
Only recently, researchers and practitioners alike have begun to fully understand the potential of eLearning and have concentrated on new tools and technologies for creating, capturing and distributing knowledge. Focusing on the area of informal learning, this paper describes this emerging domain and assesses current semantic and Web 2.0 tools used in this field. Contributing to the body of research, the limitations of both sets of technologies are documented highlighting areas of definite improvement. Finally, semantic web harvesting technology as a solution is explored in the form of the IKHarvester tool.
There’s the direct link to the article.
As you’ve probably noticed, quite a few posts on my blog are directly related to eLearning, the Semantic Web, and Web 2.0. Yet, “Social Semantic Information Sources for eLearning” is the topic of my Master’s Thesis. This is the main area for the research I do in the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI).
I’ve already mentioned of two my (and others) articles related to that topic:
If you want to get a general idea of what that all is about, you can view my slideshow - “E-Learning on the Social Semantic Information Sources” on slideshare, or below. I have presented it on one of SemInf group, from eLearning cluster, (I belong to both) weekly meeting.
If there’s no presentation embeded, you can view it on slideshare
Some time ago, myself together with Sebastian R. Kruk, Adam Gzella, Bill McDaniel, and Tomasz Woroniecki wrote an article for EC-TEL 2007 - Second European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning that will take place in Semptember in Creete, Greece.
The title of the article is “E-Learning on the Social Semantic Information Sources”. In general, it relates to eLearning, Semantic Web, and Web 2.0. We propose a way of utilizing social tools for eLearning purposes.
Here you have the abstract:
“E-Learning on the Social Semantic Information Sources”
E-Learning grows on the fertile soil of the Internet technologies; it fails, however, to reach their full potential. With new, emerging technologies of the second generation Internet there is even more to be captured and adopted: knowledge sharing with blogs, wikis, and social bookmarking services. In this article we argue that those technologies can be adapted to improve user experience in e-Learning; we present an online social bookmarking system called social semantic collaborative filtering. SSCF supports SIOC metadata which ultimately transforms it in to a browser of blogs, fora, and other community sites. We show how a digital library system, such as JeromeDL, utilizing this technology can be used in the e-Learning process, which takes advantage of recent research in the Internet.
There is the direct link to the article.
We succeeded and the paper was submission for the conference was accepted. Now, who’s going to Greece? ;>
Anyway, another paper is on the way…
Me online:
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