[WEB4LIB] WAG the Dog PHP Web Localizer

[Eric Hellman]

The ideas that Ross, Peter and Art  have been exploring are very 
important for us all to study very closely.

There are two approaches to the same ends being explored in their 
work, the "bookmarklet" and the "plugin", and while the differences 
are subtle, they are also very profound.

I'll write more when I have time, but I think the main lesson from 
the largely unsuccessful first generation of bookmarklets and 
plugins- 6 years ago already! - was that the paramount issues for 
acceptance will be ones of user privacy, trust and security, not only 
for the service provider, but also for the extension mechanism and 
platform itself.

Thanks again to Ross et al. for some very interesting homework assignments.

Eric



At 3:06 PM -0800 1/27/05, Ross Singer wrote:
>[Pardon the crosslistings]
>Hi all,
>
>I have just released the first version of the Web Localizer to the WAG
>the Dog Sourceforge site.
>
>This is a slightly more sophisticated extension of Peter Binkley's and
>Art Rhyno's Google Scholar/OpenURL Firefox extension/bookmarklet.
>
>An explanation (and demo) of what it does and will hopefully do in the
>future can be found here:
>http://rsinger.library.gatech.edu/localizer/localizer.html
>
>You can download it here:
>http://sourceforge.net/projects/gslocal/
>
>More information about WAG the Dog can be found here:
>http://gslocal.sourceforge.net/
>
>Feel free to try it out and let me know what you think.  There are
>currently only two "plugins" that it uses, a very generic one that
>rewrites links of any page you are at to go through your local proxy and
>a more specific one for Google Scholar.
>
>The latter should make it easy to create similar plugins for other
>sites, like Scirus or Questia.com or any site that has a fairly standard
>way of presenting content.
>
>Thanks,
>-Ross Singer.


-- 

Eric Hellman, President                            Openly Informatics, Inc.
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