Breaking sequential media presentation

Interactivity still leads a miserable existence within web videos. Nevertheless YouTube only supports basic interactions, namely switching videos by activating hyperlinks, remarkable examples can be found. Although advanced temporal link patterns can not put into practice existing tools seem to be sufficient to break the sequential presentation of continuous media.
The genre already spreads into sub genres ranging from simple video controlled jukeboxes and games over the well known interactive story telling within fictional films to new forms of advertisements, which will become ubiquitous in the near future.

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Beyond Tag Clouds: TagArcs for WordPress Tag Visualization

Tag clouds are very useful to visualize the most frequently used tags on a website, e.g. a blog. This is done by steering attention through emphasized words whose font size, color or position stands out. But nothing can be found out about temporal relation of a tag’s posts. For me this became evidently on my own tag cloud (see left) which still rates ‘Lima‘ at the leading position whereas the related articles are more then three years old.
More unfortunately is the missing relation to other tags. While one tag is really highlighted the user can not figure out anything about related tags who may appear concurrently.
In order to push semantic visualization I am going to introduce TagArcs as meaningful and eye catching way to outline relationships between tags and posts.


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BibTex Citation Management within MediaWiki

A couple of days ago I started an experiment to use a Wiki system to organize my research project about building a pattern language. For this purpose its essential to cite other peoples work as its common in scientific articles. In other contexts like writing with Latex or managing papers with Mendeley the BibTex data format showed up as very useful to manage and reuse a whole lot of citations. The question was how to include a BibTex citation manager into a Wiki sytsem?
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