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John James Marshall thesis.pdf - OpenAIR @ RGU - Robert Gordon ...

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discussed the ‘free revealing’ of proprietary information and the means by which<br />

free revealers can benefit in terms of their professional reputation and network<br />

of contacts. Inspired by this, on 1 st December, 2005 the researcher launched a<br />

research blog 46 . The researcher chose to use Blogger (owned and operated by<br />

Google) because it is set up to work over a web browser and is free (there are<br />

many other blogging platforms available).<br />

The researcher has made use of various third-party applications that have been<br />

embedded in the blog’s sidebar (a column adjacent to the main content of the<br />

site) as links and ‘widgets’ 47 . The researcher has been making use of the webbased<br />

news aggregator Bloglines (there are many other aggregators available).<br />

This is an application for browsing blogs and other documents via RSS (Really<br />

Simple Syndication). RSS is a format to publish frequently updated content<br />

such as blog entries in an automated manner. This has allowed the researcher to<br />

subscribe to sites that regularly publish information that is pertinent to this<br />

research project. These were identified throughout the research process.<br />

Within the Bloglines application the researcher can view several ‘feeds’ (the<br />

researcher is currently subscribed to twenty-two separate sources) without<br />

having to click on multiple sites.<br />

The researcher has also made use of social book marking web service del.icio.us<br />

(there are many other social book marking sites available) for storing, and<br />

discovering links added by other users. Users of this service store links to web<br />

pages they find useful. These link lists are publicly accessible and other people<br />

with similar interests can view the links by categories or keywords. These links<br />

can be searched and are ranked by the number of users which have book<br />

marked them.<br />

3.2 A critical review of designed objects<br />

The use of computer-based design and fabrication technologies across a range of<br />

contexts raises at least one prominent problem that hinders discussion across<br />

subject domains. That is how to establish parity between evaluative concepts<br />

46 http://designedobjects.blogspot.com/<br />

47 “A web widget is a portable chunk of code that can be installed and executed within any separate HTML-based<br />

web page by an end user without requiring additional compilation.”<br />

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_widget<br />

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