Tagsurf: discussion software ("forum") that uses tags instead of threads. Interesting experiment.

Alright, computer science majors, help needed:

A simple clustering algorythm; objects have tags assigned to them. How do I figure out which tags are "relate", in other words, if given a tag, which other tags have been used to tag the same movies?

It needs to be efficient in MySQL, and the tables look like this:

objects (id, ...)
tags2objects (tagid, objectid)
tags (id, ...)

(1.2M Quicktime). I was trying to compare two cameras by filming simultaneously and then editing it together, but having different movie formats in my Vegas editing program really messed up the rendering: it ended up taking hours and hours. So I ended up with this little piece of crappy movie that doesn't really let you compare the quality of the two cameras very much. Right.

The cameras I was comparing are the Mustek DV 4000 ($120) and the Canon Powershot SD 100 ($190 at Amazon).

The Canon is much better for videoblogging: better picture, better sound, and much better build quality. It will last a lot longer, and is not that much more expensive either. Disadvantages of the Canon: you can only film for about 30 secs on max resolution, a few minutes on the mid resolution (which is what I always use). It doesn't adjust light to changing conditions, so if you move to a dark hallway while filming things come out very dark.

The Mustek:

The Canon:

Google Maps is really, really impressive. Too bad it seems to be US only.

(Quicktime, 1.5M) I was trying to compare two cameras, but when I started editing it things went wrong, rendering two different formats in one movie took hours, and I ended up with this useless crap. Oh well :)

(11M, Quicktime). We were walking and talking about walking.

Since I can't get my external harddrives to work correctly with my laptop, I am using a different backup method now: FTP. I use SyncBack (free) to set up daily backups to a webserver I run. I'll report back about how well this works. So far so good, I've started backing stuff up.

I'm quite happy using OpenOffice, except for its presentation program. Powerpoint is just so much better. So I want to buy Powerpoint. It's 200 US$, can I get it somewhere cheaper? It seems such a drag to buy Powerpoint, I just want to get the key and pay. Microsoft has a free trial, but they send a CD - you can't download it! I don't want to wait for a CD! It's already installed on my Dell laptop, I just want the product key.

I have 50 Gmail invites so if you want one just leave a comment. It won't show up straight away (moderation), but I'll get it.

Something I have learned: in the USA, if you get an overdraft notice or something, just call your bank and ask them to remove the penalty charge, and they'll almost ALWAYS remove it. Just ask, and give a reason they can enter in their computer system, like "I was out of the country" or something. It almost always seems to work.

My Hoboken vlogtour: I walked around Hoboken and gave a tour. Click the animated gif to see the movie (Quicktime, 83M)

Peter Van Dijck's Guide to Ease �

I still have the same problem with my harddrive. I would pay someone to tell me how to fix this.

Basically, I have 2 external firewire harddrives, and they work fine on one compute, but with my laptop (using a firewire card), they 'break' if I write more than a few MEgs to them (like in a backup). It happens again and again. I have SP2 installed, which is supposed to fix the problem. More details in the link. I would really love some help! I depend on my laptop and I need to back up my files, and dragging them in one by one just doesn't cut it.

A really good and easy guide on which free software to use to get your Windows machine protected: 2BrightSparks.com | Resources | Safe Computing

Ask Jeeves is apparently buying Bloglines. Let's hope they don't fuck it up - I use Bloglines ALL the time, and I'd hate having to go somewhere else.

Lucas Gonze found a bug in Google.

Jakob wrote Tagwebs, Flickr, and the Human Brain (by Jakob Lodwick): "If I could tag my tags, then I would tag the word "Victoria" with "female".

The article is brilliantly illustrated, check it out.

More on i18n folksonomies: ButtUgly
And that means that tags will become "language polluted." Take a look at the Technorati tag for "Macintosh", for example. Many of the blog entries are in Japanese. If you look at Orkut, many of the parts of it suddenly became "owned" by Brasilians, which essentially drove away English speakers."

I disagree: the internet didn't become language-polluted. What will happen is that tag "namespaces" will develop, somewhat mirroring languages, but also other social groups like interest groups, specialist communities, ... All these will develop their own tagspaces.

See also my post Folksonomies in Japanese.

folksonomy | taxonomy | i18n | metadata | taxonomy

I'm looking for a PHP/MySQL programmer for some freelance work on database optimization. If you LEFT OUTER JOIN in your sleep, email me at peter van dijck at the google email domain (you know, gmail). There might be some ongoing freelance work there, it all depends on how things work out.

This is a small project for now, but a fun one - I'm a demanding client but a really good one: you won't have to do much of that client "management" stuff (that's what they all say though!)

What equipment do you recommend to record interviews? I need:

- be able to record interviews.
- attach a mike if needed.
- record from phone conversations if needed.
- be able to get the interview on my computer easily.

A combination of equipment (a taperecorder with some digital thingie) is also ok. I want to pay < US$ 100, but get lots of storage (over, say, 10 hours) and good quality.

I have an iPod mini but the Belkin recording devide isn't compatible with the mini.

MultiLingual Computing, Inc.: MultiLingual Computing & Technology, Article Detail: "Considerations for building multilingual Semantic Web sites and applications": language ranges and language tag fallback are not supported by RDF, and other interesting stories :)

Lou Rosenfeld's enterprise IA seminars are excellent. His new banner made me laugh out loud, illustrating how he is blowing up the "silos" of information in the enterprise:

Google AdWords API beta

Is Technorati gaming Google?

Update: Technorati DOES recognize links to other sites for tags, it's just not apparent if you don't check their help page. So you can pretty much ignore what I wrote here. I'd still like it if they made it clearer upfront.

Technorati's new tag feature is brilliant, however, they're trying to game Google. I love Technorati but this is such an obvious scam that it makes me mad.

On every tag page, they tell people that, "To contribute, just make a post to your blog about xx and include the link below. http://www.technorati.com/tag/x".

This means that, if you want your blogpost to show up on the Technorati page, the easiest way to do it is to add a link with that keyword to that Technorati page. Sounds like Google gaming to me. All the good keywords will suddenly have a really good Technorati page for them, and lots and lots of links to the page, using thta keyword, with relevant posts. In a way that's fine, it makes semantic sense on the web. In another way though, it's not fine, because there is NO reason why they link should go to them, if the rel attribute indicates it's a tag. They are excluding other tag namespaces.

What they should do instead, is accept ANY link that has the rel="tag" in it. That's how namespaces work, remember. Now they might already be doing that, but it's not clear from the tag pages. What they say on those pages, essentially, is: "We will put a link to your post on this page, if you put a link to this page, with this word, on your site." It's just dodgy, and I'd like them to change that.

Of course, I haven't really thought this through in any great detail, so I've probably missed something. Enlighten me!

(Can you tell I haven't had my coffee yet? The reason I became angry is that I found myself adding lots and lots of keyword links to Technorati in my posts, and I thought, wait a minute! This is fishy!)

Trackback spam is on the rise, this is probably a good time to turn off trackbacks for a few weeks. In Wordpress, go to Options > Discussion and uncheck the second checkbox, that says "Allow link notifications from other Weblogs (pingbacks and trackbacks.)".

I have left anonymous comments on, but I have kittens spaminator installed so it's not too bad. I also approve ALL comments before they go live (in Wordpress, on the same page, check "An administrator must approve the comment (regardless of any matches below)".

test from ecto

this is a test from ecto, the latest beta version.

MySQL question.

table tags (id, ...)
table video (id, ...)
table video2tags (videoid, tagsid, ...)

Given a number of tag id's, I am trying to select videos that are tagged with multiple tags.

SELECT video.id FROM video, video2tags WHERE (video.id = video2tags.videoid AND video2tags.tagsid = 89) AND (video.id = video2tags.videoid AND video2tags.tagsid = 88);

This doesn't seem to work. Any pointers would be really welcome!

&#124; The Register

Interview with a comment spammer: "Link spamming, with its abuse of common resources, turns out the most efficient, just as cutting down virgin Indonesian and Amazonian rain forest is the most efficient way for loggers there to get wood. If it raises the global temperature of the blogging community, well, that's life on planet internet, isn't it?"

I have more 4 Gmail invites, leave a comment if you want one (first come first served).

TextCat Language Guesser Demo: guesses the language of your query. I tried 10 queries, it got all of them wrong. Which goes to show how hard it is to deduct what language was used from just a few words.

Folksonomies in Japanese

OK, I need some help from people who speak Japanese.

This post is about folksonomies (tagging), and how it might be really hard in Japanese. This is mostly speculation at this point, please comment or email me if you speak Japanese.

On the Sigia-L list, Fiona Bradley writes: "I don't know Cantonese, but I have just started to learn Japanese and it's not necessarily that the definitions of emotions are different, just that they are a lot more complex than in English once you factor in politeness levels and directness. And then there's all the complications that arise from having many Kanji to choose from and many readings for each. If you're just assigning a single word to a photo for instance, with no other words to define context, that may make the system quite difficult to search.

Bear in mind I'm a total beginner and others may know a lot more about this sort of thing, and I could be completely wrong!

I do know a guy that has written a book on English idioms for Cantonese speakers because those parts of language are almost impossible to translate. I don't know if many folksonomy sites are using idiomatic tags but if they are, it's another level of difficulty."

folksonomy | taxonomy | i18n | metadata | taxonomy

On the Sigia-L list (the archive is broken), Billie Mandel writes:

"I studied Russian for a year or so at university, and what fascinated me most about it was the manifold ways of expressing the English verb "to go" - you can go once or multiple times, on foot or by vehicle, go directly there/back or permit yourself to meander on the way, and express all of this intent in one simple verb selection. So when a Russian speaker tells me "I'm going to the store," s/he has comparatively given me much more information than the comparable English speaker (native Russian speakers, please correct me if you disagree - this was my impression as a non-native learner).
[...]
These issues seem quite relevant to taxonomies that are meant for international audiences, or in a localization context. Usable structure for information and the level at which a given category is perceived could vary between languages, because of this kind of language-based cognitive difference (though I did once have this conversation with a linguist who thought this was absolute crap). Interesting to think about what it means in the context of bottom-up folksonomy - how this kind of one-to-many/vice versa map will develop in the chaotic universe of international web users."

I am considering organizing an information architecture workshop in Barcelona, and I'm looking for feedback.

Length.
A day should be good, maybe a Saturday?

Topics.
How about half a day of basics (taxonomies, cv's, ...), then half a day of advanced topics (facets, i18n ia, ...). Comments welcome!

Other questions.
- Should it be in English or Spanish?
- What would be a good location?
- Are there enough people interested in this in Barcelona?

What is a Socio-Technical System

What is Socio-Technical System? It is a word to recognize the fact that technology doesn't stand on its own, and can't be understood on its own, you also need to understand the social factors around it.

i d e a n t: A del.icio.us study: finally, an ethnographic approach to understanding folksonomies.

Hey, I just had an idea. You know we do the Lola y Bobo puppet show, right? Send in a script and a movie with you playing some other puppet, and I'll film the Lola y Bobo part, and then post it. Collaborative puppeteering! Send the video to petervandijck at gmail (the google mail) dot com.

Today's screencast is a demo of CCPublisher (Quicktime movie), a tool that lets you upload stuff to the internet archive.

del.icio.us tag stemmer: a tool for when you're starting to create algorythms for tags.

I changed the look of my blog, using the alexking.org: Software >Kubrick style by Hadley Wickham, adding my own image.

My first screencast is an explanation of Camtasia screencasting software. (Quicktime movie, 11M)

The Belkin digital camera link doesn't support iPod mini. Is there a way to store your pictures on your iPod mini while travelling?

Many-to-Many: Folksonomy is better for cultural values: A response to danah: "The entire alt. hierarchy in usenet came into being because there was a proposal to create rec.drugs, and there was concern that usenet, running in part over an NSF-funded network, would be shut down. The alt.* hierarchy was a compromise, to allow some face saving in suggesting that the *.drugs group was not 'official'. And of course, alt. (an early folksonomy, albeit highly compromised by usenet's hierarchical design) ballooned to many times the size of the 'official' usenet.)"

alex wright: "In The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco creates the cautionary figure of Salvatore, a fallen monk who "spoke all languages and no languages."

Many-to-Many: issues of culture in ethnoclassification/folksonomy. Good, some more attention for culture and classification. Includes a good link to Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society by Raymond Williams. Looks like an interesting book!

frassle is a bit like del.icio.us, but lets you add hierarchy.

Woohoo! My first functional internet archive-hosted video!

Raymond and me talking about political videoblogging. (Quicktime, 4.7 M)

Burningbird � Cheap Eats at the Semantic Web Caf�. Shelley on tags and folksonomies. Mmmm. I'm gonna be brief here: Shelley's point seems to be: "tags won't scale because they're too easy and don't contain enough semantic information" (flat namespace and all).

I don't think that's right. There is a LOT we can do to add semantics to tags: who created them, what namespace they come from (yes, most tags DO come from a namespace), algorythmical parsing of all kinds (related, ...), mapping to controlled vocabs (use Wordnet to find synonyms or something). Look at the amount of innovation that has been done with search algorythms. The same can happen with tags.

That said, I do believe tags are strongest when tagging content that doesn't contain text by and of itself (url's, images, movies).

trying ecto

so I upgraded to Wordpress 1.2.2 (from 1.2) and I'm trying Ecto again now... the tension! the excitement! The women!

ecto blog

I am trying ecto for Windows XP with my Wordpress 1.2 blog. It shows the categories of my blog in the ecto interface, so there is some communication with the Wordpress going on, but when I try to post a new post, I get:

"Server error: Response from server does not contain valid xml. "

Any tips? I tried searching for help but no luck.

The Maori versus Dewey

My series of posts on international information architecture:

1. Translating taxonomies and categories
2. Translating categories, translating terms
3. Translating the Dewey Decimal Classification system
4. Designing the relationship between content and locales
5. Emergent i18n effects in folksonomies
6. The Maori versus Dewey, and why limiting access can be culturally appropriate. (This post.)

While doing research on cultural differences in information needs, I came across the fascinating paper "Cross-cultural usability of the library metaphor" (Elke Duncker, 2002). It talks about how people from the Maori tribes have problems with libraries. There is a lot of good stuff in the paper, but the two things I want to talk about today are:

• How Dewey subjects headings really don't work for the Maori. (Really)
• How sometimes, limiting access can be culturally appropriate.

Let's get going. Have you seen the movie Whalerider? Those are the Maori, a Polynesian culture with an oral tradition. Libraries are common to all written cultures, but oral cultures have other ways to keep their stories: songs, story gatekeepers and such. The paper describes the Maori way:

Traditionally Maori knowledge has been transferred orally. For centuries, Maori knowledge and skills have been handed down from one selected person to the next. While no individual knew everything, all knowledge was available within the tribe or sub-tribe at any given time. The keeper of the knowledge was seen as a living repository of this knowledge. He or she was supposed to ‘look after the knowledge’ which meant to memorize it in great detail, to use it for the best of the tribe and to pass it on to the next person selected to look after it. Genealogies were the core of traditional Maori knowledge. Even today, Maori trace their ancestors back to a particular passenger of one of the canoes with which they came. This knowledge is tapu and not for public display.

The Maori that use libraries today are a bi-cultural elite: they grew up in Maori culture, but also had access to mainstream culture. Still, they have a lot of problems finding things in the libraries. One of the main problems is the Dewey classification system used to organize things. Melvin Dewey was a white westerner, and his classification system is well known for showing western biases. For example, here is the "Religion" subsection: 210 Natural theology 220 Bible 230 Christian Theology 240 Christian moral & devotional theology 250 Christian orders & local churches 260 Christian social theology 270 Christian church history 280 Christian denominations & sects 290 Other and comparative religions You can see how this taxonomy is somewhat western-centered, right? Just a little bit? Still, the Dewey system has survived, and is used in libraries throughout the world. Now, apart from it's obvious flaws, there are deeper, cultural problems with Dewey, or any classification system for that matter. It's roots are so ingrained in us that it's hard to see how someone might see the world in a fundamentally different way. The Maori worldview is very much centered around the tribal world, and the backbone of the Maori tribal world is genealogy (ancestry). If a Maori wants to find information about their culture, a really important way for them to search is by genealogy, all the way back to that original canoe. Unfortunately, Maori genealogy isn't represented in Dewey's classification system. From the paper:

Maori knowledge, when divided into subject areas based upon Anglo-American categories, becomes scattered across the library in a seemingly random way. Texts that belong together undergo an artificial division and end up in different places. Subsequently, it is difficult and tiresome to find them and bring them back together again. The following quote exemplifies that:

“I found that some of the cataloguing as far as themes [were concerned] wasn’t very good… I actually think that some of it should be focused in one area. So this is the collection pertaining to so and so, and I know that it doesn’t fit Dewey, but he is American. He aha?â€?

In other words, the Maori have their own way of classifying their knowledge. If you try to re-classify it into a western system, it looses most of the meaning and logic for a Maori. Suddenly, they can't find anything anymore. To address this problem, the maori subject headings committee was recently created to provide a new taxonomy that's going to appropriate for this culture. They have developed a Iwi Hapū Names List (reflecting the importance of genealogy in Maori culture this was their first achievement), and are now working on a Maori subject list. The second thing I wanted to talk about is how, sometimes, limiting access can be culturally appropriate. Most information architects don't like the idea of limiting access - we're all about findability, remember? Too often limiting access serves the powerful. In this case, it serves the relatively powerless. A really important concept in Maori culture is "tapu". From the paper:

The word is usually translated to ‘sacred’ and sometimes to ‘set apart’. The tribal meeting house is sacred, as is the tribal knowledge. People are set apart for being warriors or priests. There are many meanings and attendant conditions of tapu, which are difficult to understand, particularly for non-Maori. For our purpose it may suffice to understand that tapu foremost represents the power of the creator, but other gods endow things and people with tapu as well. Tapu can be good or bad. A whole system of sanctification and nullification keeps the various forms of tapu in balance and life workable. Representations of people are very tapu, as are tribal genealogy, knowledge and ritual items. It does not matter whether the representations take the form of texts, pictures or carvings. They are only allowed to be used in their sacred, tribal, dignified environment with the attendant rituals in place and are treated with the utmost respect.

"Western" libraries contain a lot of the information and artefacts of Maori culture, and this open access is extremly frustrating for many Maori. The internet (including, perhaps, this article) makes things even worse. It may be hard to appreciate this desire for closedness, but it is an integral part of Maori culture. I am not sure how to deal with this, a big part of me wants to say "the Maori should accept openness, because it helps them find things", but another part of me understands that this is, deeply, a part of their culture, and should be respected. So not many answers in this post, just some thoughts around how some cultures have truly different ways of organizing the world than the western culture has, and how closedness is also a part of some cultures. Now, Maori culture is, in a way, for webdesign purposes, an edge case. In that most of us don't design websites or information architectures for the Maori. There are a lot of cultures like this, but you could argue that, for practical purposes, most of the websites we build are for mostly written cultures, and I wonder if similar cultural differences come into play there. Any ideas? Follow up reading:

• Whakapapa as a Maori Mental Construct

taxonomy | i18n | metadata | classification | information architecture

The crazy thing with writing a book is that it only starts to have an effect on your life years after you write it. I was just informed that my information architecture book is being translated into Japanese - pretty cool!