Please welcome our newest ebiquity lab member, Mr. Capresso, recently arrived from Portugal. His sleek, stainless steel thermal vacuum carafe with drip-free pouring spout is said keep coffee hot for up to 4 hours. Even on his first day in the lab he has found ways to contribute to several research projects. Capresso is currently being supported by a generous grant from Google’s Adsense department. Olá Capresso.

Baltimore Sun’s Troy McCullough talks about Pranam Kolari’s work on detecting splogs in his column on Sunday, 15 January 2006. The column also has an associated podcast.

Fighting spam sites – latest battle in the blog wars
On Blogs: Troy McCullough, Jan 15, 2006

It seems that everyone has a blog these days – a spot that others can visit to find out what they have to say about something or nothing in particular. Some blogs are widely valued fonts of specialized wisdom, but many are viewed as uninteresting expressions of personal ego. The difficulty of sorting the good blogs from the bad can be a frustrating challenge – one that is seen as a serious threat to what has been viewed as a vital feature of the Internet.

Now, three University of Maryland, Baltimore County researchers have made a far more disturbing conclusion about blogs. After analyzing millions of blog posts, they have determined that the blogosphere is drowning in spam, the pejorative nickname given to unsolicited Internet advertising. Using data collected by weblogs.com, a prominent blog tracking service, doctoral student Pranam Kolari and professors Tim Finin and Anupam Joshi analyzed 40 million blog updates submitted from 14 million blogs.
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We’ve moved the ebiquity site (and many of our other sites) from blackbox to EB1 — a rack-mounted Sun Fire X2100 running Linux. Poor old Blackbox was underpowered and its fan kept failing. An emergency fan transplant from an even older organ donor helped keep it going, but we all agreed that it should be allowed to retire with dignity. Transition to the new Sun box went surprisingly smoothly, thanks to the hard work of a number of lab members and alumni. EB1 lives in the main machine room in the ECS building. We’ve also added EB2, a Sun Fire V20z, that is being used to host Swoogle’s databases and crawlers. If we are happy with these machines, we plan to get several more to add to our rack in the machine room.

Friends of the Ebiquity group and readers of the Ebiquity blog are welcome join the LinkedIn networking group Friends of CSEE@UMBC.

Go to this URL to join the group:
https://www.linkedin.com/e/gis/896/6BE1922AFF24/

What Is LinkedIn?

LinkedIn is an online network of more than 4.2 million experienced professionals from around the world, representing 130 industries.

When you join, you create a profile that summarizes your professional accomplishments. Your profile helps you find and be found by former colleagues, clients, and partners. You can add more connections by inviting trusted contacts to join LinkedIn and connect to you.

What Is LinkedIn for Group?

https://www.linkedin.com/static?key=groups_info

Gvisit.com offers a clever service that shows the locations of your web site’s recent visitors using Google Maps. After registering your site, you put a bit of javascript on each page you want to track. Your map shows the last 20 or 100 unique visitors, depending on whether you are using the free or paid version. Here’s the Ebiquity visitors map we did for EBWEB, our ebiquity site.

Google Maps EZ is a free resource for embedding a Google map on a web page without writing any Javascript or learning Google’s map API. It uses standard HTML syntax with a few special keywords in a way that allows search engines to index the map contents. I tried it out to make this custom map for visitors to UMBC. Please suggest some other places to put on the map. I can attest to it being easy. And fun.

I’ve been thinking of how we could use Flickr to publish our photos in a useful and interesting way. The ebiquity web site has, of course, it’s own facility, for uploading, storing and annotating photos (thanks Filip). But there are some advantages to using Flickr. Flickr is very popular so using it might increase our visibility and allow us to connect to more people. For example, searching Technorati for blog posts tagged with ‘pervasive computing’ shows the most recent public Flickr photos with that tag (if there were any!). Flickr also has some useful features like tags, notes, comments, groups, easy interface, etc. and is likely to continue to add innovations as the Web evolves.

Our Ebiquity photo site has some interesting, research oriented features like being able to add arbitrary annotations that are rendered and published as RDF. And, of course, we have complete control over it, allowing us to implement and experiment with new ideas for tagging, semantic web annotations, etc. It’s a valuable testbed, one that most people and groups don’t have.

So, can we have the best of both?

One idea is to use EBWEB as the primary source for our photos, but to add code to automatically upload new photos to the ebqiuity Flickr site. The code would also add appropriate titles, tags and comments and include in the comments a link to the OWL metadata. Flickr limits the HTML one can put in comments, so we can’t do anything fancy like embed rdf or use microformats.

But, maybe there are other ways we can use Flickr. If any ebsters (ebites?, ebiquiters?) want to play around with the ebiquity Flickr site, let me know and I’ll email you the site username and password.

We’ve upgraded EBB to WordPress 1.5.1.3. The posting interface is similar, but there are some changes. If you encounter any problems, email finin@umbc.edu. We’ve added text ads in an attempt to get rich. Or at least make enough money to keep the ebiquity lab’s coffee fund solvent. If anyone’s moral sense is greatly offended let me know. Coffee drinkers get two votes, btw.

Dr. Cynthia Sims Parr is joining the ebiquity lab to work on the Spire project. Dr. Parr is a Research Associate at the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS ) an the Human-Computer Interaction Lab (HCIL) at the University of Maryland, College Park.

Dr. Parr received BS in biology from Cornell University and an MS and PhD from University of Michigan, where she studied social behavior and vocal communication in American crows. She studied molecular systematics and behavioral ecology of magpies during a postdoctoral fellowship at Seoul National University in Seoul, Korea. She served as the Content Development Director for the Animal Diversity Web project at the University of Michigan she uses web technology to help instructors at many institutions teach about animal ecology and evolution. At the University of Maryland she has worked on a number of projects using advanced computer technologies to support research and education in the Biological sciences.

Two of our AIX boxes were compromised this week, including the machine that runs most of Swoogle’s services. So, Swoogle and a few of our other research systems will be off line until sometime next week. We’re reorganizing our systems and putting more of them behind the campus firewall, leaving only the interfaces outside the firewall. This isn’t the first time we’ve had such incidents and it won’t be the last. I’m resigned that it will just be this way until the end of time — a constant struggle between the system builders and the crackers. It’s kind of depressing, and maybe that’s why humans tend to believe in an ultimate, apocalyptic day of reckoning — Armageddon, Ragnarok, Yawmid Din, Acharit Hayami — in which Good will finally triumph over Evil. I wonder what the Internet version of this would be like — I hope it’s not a darker version, like Night of the Living Dead. Anyway, look for Swoogle to be up next week.