This is a nice summary of issues related to the storage time for archived CDs, from a C-Net community forum. Here’s the question, and see the link for the answer:

I recently read an article by a data storage expert who claimed that burned CD-Rs and CD-RWs can be expected to last only two to five years and not a whole lot more. I personally have commercially pressed CDs from the 1980s that still play fine, but I have begun to notice that some of my burned CD-Rs are beginning to skip, or not start (player shows "no disc").…  What are the best storage methods for the discs that will make them last longest?

1/27/06 How long do burned CD-Rs and CD-RWs last? - CNET Community Newsletter: Q&A Forums.

‘Giving effective presentations’, a 23 minute audio PowerPoint presentation, is now posted on Ourmedia, a free and (supposedly) permanent archive of online content. It covers the following topics:

• Finding out what your audience wants to hear
• The changing role of live presentations
• Defining the objectives of your presentation
• Defining the audience
• Developing your own style
• Customizing your presentation to various audiences – academic, policy and general public
• Using graphics wisely
• Getting comfortable with mistakes

The presentation was originally recorded in 2004 for the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, based on a seminar I gave to CIAR’s New Investigators Network.  

I posted it on Ourmedia for two reasons – to see whether audio slide presentations can be easily transferred to a video format (answer: not easily enough), and to store it in a stable location so I don’t have to keep transferring the file each time I move to a new web host. Unfortunately, Ourmedia doesn’t seem to assign persistent URLs or Digital Object Identifiers to their content. That means that it will be very difficult to track down artifacts when the URLs change, as they certainly will.

I have also posted the presentation to Google Video and will update the information here when it is ready for public access. and it's available here.  The slides look horrible - almost too blurry to read - and the interface for uploading media is pretty bad.

 

Robin Good covered Near-Time this week, a new service that combines blog and wiki features. “Private Weblogs, team pages, group calendars and shared files are integrated in a hosted, secure collaborative environment. Near-Time content can be personal, group-based or published to the world.” Cost is free for a simple site, with more complex sites beginning at $5/month US.

Robin also reviewed VSee, a new Windows-only videoconferencing client that delivers high quality at low internet speeds, and includes application sharing. Another promising videoconferencing client is Wigiwigi, but it’s in alpha stage right now, so I’m not even going to link to it yet. I’m signing on to the site daily to check for a version that is stable and user-friendly enough to recommend. Both of these conferencing tools have framerates that are good enough to lip-synch. Most internet-based videocon clients show jerky motion and blurred facial expressions, or take too much computer processing and internet bandwidth for public use. These look great, though pricing hasn’t been set on either of them yet. In particular, they might be used for sign language communication or video interpreting.

 

 

“Virtual reality is now available to artists for about $3,000. This is the kind of watershed moment that video art enjoyed in 1965, when portable video recording equipment became available at mass-market prices.

“Software to create this art can also be secured free of charge from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where researchers at the Integrated Systems Laboratory under the direction of Hank Kaczmarski have created a portable virtual reality set-up developed specifically for artists. The open-source technology, known as Syzygy, is downloadable at www.isl.uiuc.edu. Others are also accessible through the University of Indiana's "John-e-box" system (www.avl.iu.edu) and at Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria (www.aec.at).” From In Love With Reality Truly, Madly, Virtually - New York Times.

This type of virtual reality focuses on visual simulations. Another type of virtual reality focuses on real social interactions within a virtual world, and is being acted out in Second Life, a 3D web-based environment that is built by players. In an earlier post, I reported that a medical doctor created a Second Life simulation of visual and aural hallucinations based on the descriptions of schizophrenics.

Second Life is a promising source of research in behavioural economics, democratic processes (see ‘Democracy: The Videogame’) and other social interactions.

Online job boards like Monster and HotJobs are hugely popular, but the New York Times estimates that “only 3 percent to 5 percent of job seekers find employment through the sites”, as well as being expensive for employers. Individual companies increasingly post jobs on their corporate web sites, but it’s time consuming to go through dozens or hundreds of separate sites.

JobCentral is a ‘cooperative, employer-owned employment search engine’ that is providing an alternative to the Monsters of the web. It posts jobs from the member employers, and is about to grow into a major player.

“JobCentral, Indeed, SimplyHired and Google Base, a database recently introduced by the search engine company … are teaming up to create a national labor exchange at JobCentral.com. The site, which has about 340,000 jobs posted, will incorporate jobs found by its partners and provide the technology to let those sites link to its information.”From More Jobs Being Found Online, but That Doesn't Mean It's Easy - New York Times.

Two new services aim to simplify the process of scheduling meetings.

MeetWithApproval.com is a free web-based scheduler that lets you send out invitations with any number of possible meeting dates. Participants select the times they can attend, and the service can confirm the best time automatically.

The responses are saved on the web so you know who has confirmed.

I imagine that future versions will offer paid subscriptions so that you can save contacts, customize the messages, and save scheduled meetings in a private archive. But even this barebones free version can save a lot of time.

NNN (National Notification Network) is much more complex, powerful and expensive. As described in eweek, an NNN user who wants to ask any multiple-choice question, including what times are best for a meeting, "can simply list the possible answers and dispatch the query to a new or pre-existing list. There's no need to know, or care, whether any given person actually gets the message via e-mail or cellular text message or voice-synthesized phone call."

NNN can be used for emergency notifications, such as school closures or natural disasters, as well as for normal polling. It looks very cool.