Since one thing Technorati likes when ranking blogs is a count of incoming links in the past six months, here is a mass ping for all of the sites in my Google Reader OPML file. In lieu of cash, my thanks to all the sites I follow daily through RSS is a ping.
The Dissociative Identity of Social Psychology
My sociology minor kick-started a four-course track over the next two years with an Introduction to Social Psychology course. My first attempt to synthesize the reading was painfully slow and uncertain. The fractured history of social psychology, though, may be very relevant to my main course of study: Informatics. Will there one day soon be a data informatics that slightly differs from a sociological informatics and computer science informatics, all equally relevant but not communicating in ways beneficial to the questions they try to answer?
Card Sort via Web
Most ideas are a Google search away from finding someone else who already thought of it enough to build a tool to share. At the start of the summer, I was thinking it would be great to have an interactive card sorting tool that would allow me to solicit input on grouping, prioritizing and categorization from people I would have to travel hundreds of miles to see. Thanks to a mid-summer tip from Tyler, enter OptimalSort.
Invitation to Web 2.0
For anyone who is interested in trying out Pownce, Freebase, or Spock, I have several invites available for each. Post a comment or contact me off blog to request one. This offer is open to any BlogSchmog reader, but specifically it is aimed at Bloomington IT and School of Informatics folk who want to explore a year-long development project to benefit the local community.
TextMap
Steven Skiena (Stony Brook) is a geneticist and mathematician. He is also the creator of a suite of algorithmic tools that includes TextMap, an analytical site examining recent news stories to build a network of entities.
Cashing in
Created by Dane Carlson a couple years ago, the blog value calculator will look up a blog URL and apply some fancy math to the Technorati stats to produce an estimated dollar value for that site. BlogSchmog isn’t going to set any traffic records or merit inquiries from Google acquisitions any time soon, but it is interesting that the same digital space is valued so differently depending on how it is referenced.
CommunitySchmunity
Introducing … CommunitySchmunity. This tab is essentially the same list blogroll we had before, reconfigured with some MyBlogLog and Meebo room widgets and an RSS feed reader. After fighting my semester schedule for time, I finally made good on iterating my 6-month-old idea to consolidate local Bloomington area bloggers into one site.