Some interesting attempts at clustering or building maps of web search results (tip of the blog hat to EduResources). I cannot say I have found either of these more intuitive, but they are interesting.

Mooter is beta, but not bad. It sports a Google-like search engine (though there is no information or explanation what “mooter” is or does). A search result displays your query in the center of a map, with clusters of related terms around it, and clicking on the cluster essentially yields a Google-like list of results, though now a cluster is more refined than your original search.

For example I ran a query on “learning object” (It looks like you can copy/paste the URLs of search results, but this seems to fail due to a session variable) and you get this “map”

Back in November 2003, when I was wasting a lot of time dealing with blog spam, I wrote blogged the approach I took to close comments for this site after an entry had been up for 30 days. In a nutshell, I have a timed job calling a PHP script that rummages through the MT database and closes comments for entries that are more than 30 days old.

It worked great.

Except yesterday that it was doing this not just for this blog, but all the other blogs hosted on the server. Not quite what everybody may want, though we heard nary a complaint.

But I found out when Bob Stepno wrote asking, Is that real or phony blog spam in demo blog?

While following links about the NMC conference, I found my way to your previous Breeze thing about RSS… not a bad tool, it seems, and a nice presentation that I’ll point some friends to.

However, if you’re going to link to fictitious blogs (e.g., http://jade.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/boris/), please put a note to that effect on the blogs themselves so that real humans don’t waste their time posting comments trying to interact with the “authors.” (All readers might not get to the disclaimer/credits at the end of the presentation. They might even google themselves into the blog itself.)

Meanwhile, I don’t know if this blog-comment-spam is authentic or also a “demo”… but it’s amusing either way. Yikes, “phony spam” — what a concept!
http://jade.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/boris/archives/000010.html

And sure enough, Boris’ old entry was littered with porn comments and nude people links, likely sneaking in under the radar before we put up the blacklist and closed the comments. Strangely enough, the blog spam cockroaches descended on the post titled “Cool Gizmo”.

Then I started looking around the database and noticed that every entry had its comments value set for closed.

The fix was easy, modify the PHP script so it acted only on one blog. Since I was rzor sharp on my mySQL queries from banging out the last bits of the online dance registration site, this was cake.

This will likely be a first and last blog entry referencing politics. I might be judged as apathetic, but I do my research quietly, make my decisions, and vote, without foaming at the mouth or making it an obsession. However, after some hasty mulling, I decided to share my summary of the political scene. We […]

Today should be an international holiday, the 100th anniversary of the birth of Theodor Geisel.

Yawn? Better we should have said, the 100th anniversary of the birth of Dr. Suess, that’s right today is the Suessentennial. Who cannot connect with a favorite child hood read? Therefore a re-iteration of an earlier post on this dog’s favorite Suess book (scratch your heads hard to figure out this one!)….

Today was the deadline for the first week’s assignments in the online “Web-Based Teaching and Learning” course I am co-teaching. Just like students, the assignments are coming in with deadline skidmarks, but they are coming in, We had nearly 100 messages in the welcome/ intros and some good discussion about principles of online learning.