Kris Laukens

With new teaching duties I discovered Apple's Keynote presentation software a while ago. Compared to my experiences with Powerpoint, I found Keynote to be a fast, user-friendly and efficient tool to create good-looking presentations. It has all the typical features that you would expect from presentation software, but after having created a few hundred slides I am looking for one feature that appears to be missing: a tool to create a slide library.

I would love to see a way to import all the slides that I ever created for different presentations into one slide library, a central repository for Keynote slides. I googled around for a potential addon or a feature that I was potentially unaware of. On the Apple forums someone asked a similar question, but only a workaround was suggested, not a true solution. For Powerpoint there is apparently a way to maintain slides in a central repository using a Microsoft Office SharePoint server. Seems like a rather heavy-weight solution to me. Probably Apple could come up with a more compact solution?

Some ideas for basic features:

• easily import slides from existing presentations
• tag slides with keywords, organize slides into folders
• assign a certain "weight" to slides according to importance
• a friendly search and filter function
• slide "versioning": keep track of changes
• tight integration with Keynote: make the library accessible and browsable through the inspector or a different sidebar

A few more advanced feature requests:

• multiple presenter notes for each slide, so you can write up different notes for different audiences / languages
• enable selection of older versions of a slide when building a new presentation
• tag slides with a duration estimate, so you immediately have an idea about the total duration of a new presentation
• collaborative slide editing, with user-specific permissions
• a tool to search for similar slides
• a tool to consolidate multiple (almost) identical slides into one
• a Powerpoint slide import function
• make certain regions of a slide "variable": e.g. containing a slide number, chapter title and so on, depending on the presentation that it is imported in

If you have other ideas or if you are aware of existing solutions, feel free to comment...

Just discovered a quite hilariously misplaced contextual ad in an online article from Belgian newspaper "De Morgen".

The article discusses the fact that the well conserved mummy of pharao Tutankhamun is now on display to the public. The second ad on the right promotes face wrinkle treatment by trained anti-aging specialists. I guess this guy knows something about aging... Reloading the page produces more funny and related results.

Find more inappropriate ad placements on the copywriting blog.

Relationships between web documents are historically defined by hyperlinks. Search engines learn about the importance of webpages by analysing the number of incoming hyperlinks, taking into account the existing importance of the linking pages. Webmasters quickly learned that hyperlink are important, that hyperlinks are worth money and
that hyperlinks can be used to manipulate search engines. In response, search engines started to offer webmasters a new tag attribute called "nofollow", to label hyperlinks that should not carry value. More recently, search engines even started to penalize websites on which paid links are not labeled with 'nofollow'.

The idea is simple. With the introduction of the nofollow tag, hyperlinks became black or white. The hyperlink pool got split into a "traffic only" and a "traffic + value" subset. Traffic is something you can buy, and contitutes not by coincidence the business model of the large search engine companies that pushed the "nofollow" adoption. The value is something that a document should deserve. Selling "value-carying" links is now considered manipulation and a black hat technique.

Many high weight user contributed websites consequently started using nofollow by default to avoid link spam. Wikipedia was one of the first, and who knows, DMOZ could be next. If the search engines have to discount hyperlinks from these relatively high quality and widely controlled resources, they are probably throwing away a lot of information. Besides getting rid of manipulative text links, much of the better quality document weighth information will be removed from their ranking algorithms. This may for example have a strong impact on Google page rank distribution. How long ago did Google distribute a visible page rank update?

We can speculate that this may evolve into one or a combination of three scenario's.

- Search engines have to rely even more on other information, such as actual usage data (from toolbars, analytics logs, ...).

- Search engines will not always not follow nofollow. Or: not all nofollow links will be discounted.

- A more nuanced / fine-grained set of attributes will be introduced to describe the value and features of hyperlinks.

None of these scenario's will ever solve the problem of search engine manipulation. They are just part of a process of co-evolution between the actors in the field.

I am interested in website development for quite some time and evaluated a number of open source content management systems in the past. Until I discovered Drupal. A little while ago a drupaller pointed me to this years Drupal conference in Barcelona, and I do not regret my decision to go there. During the roughly one year and a half that I am playing with Drupal I made a reasonably smooth transition from newbie to somewhere between the so called "I suck" and the "I kick ass" threshold in the drupal learning curve: I know a bit of template modifications and front page modification, understand most of taxonomy, menus and navigation. I discovered the power of CCK and views, and know how powerful they are in combination with the panels module. Time for me to cross the latter boundary, and DrupalCon Barcelona was the trigger that I needed to go further, dive into module development and hopefully contribute here and there.

So I like to share some of my thoughts about a few of the talks.

• The first session that I attended was about the New York Observer web site. An interesting demonstration of how Drupal can be used to develop powerful newspaper sites with a great layout and clear user interface.
• I followed the session on using Drupal with external data sources with great interest. Ken Rickard discussed how Drupal natively supports multiple database connections. He demonstrated this with a little module. I am loudly thinking about ways to build some kind of views on top of some of our molecular databases. He further showed how Drupal can interface with external xml sources and with Yahoo pipes. I think these are great opportunities for new drupal application niches.
• Panels 2.0 is supercool, in particular for non-designers like me. It now supports arguments, information from third party modules and special relationships like nodereference, book relations and taxonomy. Earl Miles demonstrated some fabulous new features and showed some highly entertaining stuff, such as the minipanels that you can try out here.
• An eye opener was the Social networks talk by Stéphane Corlosquet, which made a dive into the semantic web. The way we infer relationships between documents on the web based on links will drastically change once we are able to define the "meaning" of these relationships. Stéphane discussed how these meanings are defined by specific vocabularies in RDF files. Interlinking of multiple web communities using standards like SIOC (semantically Interlinked Communities), combined with standards like open ID (now supported by Drupal) is probably the solution to the ever growing number of (walled) communities / islands on the web, and give the power to control personal data back to the user. A great introduction to a field in which Drupal may have a strong future.
• Drupal for educators and academics gave a great overview of applications and platforms for the academic world. I do believe there are some major requirements in this niche for which Drupal is perfectly suited. I experimented with quite a few of these and will maybe post some of my experiences in the future.
• Peter Van Dijck talked about information architecture and internationalization. There are more differences between different world regions than the language, and it is important to take them into account when organizing information for a global audience. Good to realize for example that even categories should generally not be globally identical.
• Dries gave his talk about "the state of drupal", which was largely based on a survey among drupal users. He touched some important issues such as the fact that there is a need to put additional energy in marketing and improving usability.

So far my short wrap-up. There were many more great talks but there are other sources to read about them.

I don't think I will ever be an avid blogger and I don't have the intention to share with the world whatever happens in my daily life . But sometimes there is a need to write down ideas and experiences. A litte while ago I decided to register this domain and create some space.

Here are some of my interests, some of which I am definitely going to write about in the future:

• I am a researcher in the fields of computational systems biology / bioinformatics, and in the application of machine learning techniques in these areas.
• Sharing science with a broad audience is important.
• I play fiddle in a band, although the project is put on-hold for a while.
• In some of my spare time I like experimenting with web development and related aspects, and I am an enthusiastic Drupal user.
• Interdisciplinary thinking and stealing concepts from other fields is a great way to expand your scope and possibilities.

Don't expect any truth or reality here. And I will never keep the discipline to blog on a regular basis. But if you like to read my writings now and then you could subscribe to the rss feed.

Herewith I declare this website and blog opened ...