10 Classics from Cognitive Science: "The editorial board of Cognitive Science has identified several classic articles that appeared in our journal over the last couple of decades." Yum.
Nested facets
A structural element of classification systems that I have never seen discussed explicitly has been hovering in my mind for years, and suddenly became kinda clear to me, so I'm writing this down ;) Sometimes really simple things can take a long time to sink in with me.
Many times, you'll have an overall taxonomy (say, "products") (whatever structure it has, faceted or not), and then, once you reach a certain point within that taxonomy (say, "digital cameras"), you suddenly are offered additional taxonomies to refine your choice (say, "lens type"). These additional taxonomies aren't just nodes within the higher taxonomy, they are additional facets, NOT part of the taxonomy you were browsing so far.
Try browsing epinions.com as an example, or have a look at this diagram:
These kind of nested facets are clearly being used and useful in real life, but I haven't seen their structural or other properties being discussed explicitly anywhere. They are not part of XFML, for example, nor are they part of Travis' Facetmap, afaik.
Maybe they are too obvious to be discussed, but some awareness of the existence and usefulness of nested facets (I'll just call them that, seems to work) would mean there would be more chance of them being built into the standards and tools that define the restrictions within which we often work. So who has worked with nested facets? Any tools that explicitly support them? Any comments on their properties?
- What can I do with an anthropology degree?: "Get as much experience as you can as an undergraduate."
Anthropology majors can capitalize on the growing global marketplace: "Archaeological digs, exciting though they may be, don't exactly qualify as a family-friendly job. Museum work, by all accounts, is tough to come by. And you're not particularly inclined to become a "lifer" on campus, chasing a Ph.D and an academic post.
[...]
"The bachelor's degree, however, does provide suitable background for many different kinds of entry-level jobs, such as research assistant, administrative aide, or management and sales trainee."
- What can an anthropology degree do for you?: "Cultural anthropologists are equipped to work in a variety of fields. In the business world, they can be found in public relations and advertising positions. In the academic world, cultural anthropologists can work as museum educators. Cultural anthropologists with an emphasis on medical anthropology also find jobs in community health. "
- Finding a job in anthropology.
...
I am very impressed with the HP SpeechBot search engine. It searches audio and video content, but get this: it turns audio into text (transcripts based on speech recognition) and searches those transcripts.
"hp has indexed over 10,000 hours of content that you can search." Shows are updated daily. The design of the result is also quite brilliant:
Here's a thought I had yesterday on the train. Since video is hard to search (though there are many projects: Webseek at Colombia University, Altavista video search, SingingFish, Virage, Compaq's Speechbot, ...), classification may become more important with video than with the text-web.
Google's image search (and most video search technologies) search on the text surrounding the video/image.
So here's another idea: if I can link within a videostream (discussed here earlier), I can then annotate and make that content available to Google. So maybe my classification idea sucks - searchability may come from discussing video, not from classifying video. Discussing is, after all, more natural than classifying.
Just wanted to point out that my GuideToEthnography : Recent Changes has a working RSS feed. Enjoy!
Following up on my Racial and Ethnic classifications as an example of classification challenges, livia has this interesting screenshot.
Moblogs By Textamerica: videoblogs from mobile cameras.
Organic Style Love Your Lawn (via WorldChanging): "The secret to having a great lawn without chemicals is Dutch clover. For the past 50 years, clover has been considered a noxious lawn weed, but before that it was an important component in fine lawns—and for good reason. Clover is drought-tolerant, virtually immune to diseases, and distasteful to common turf insects. And it generates its own food by fixing nitrogen in the soil.
So how did this lawn superstar get such a bad rap? Blame the broadleaf herbicides introduced after World War II. Used to kill weeds such as dandelions and plantains, the chemicals also destroyed the clover that was used in many lawn mixes of the time (leaving ugly bare patches in their wake). Today, virtually all seed companies omit clover from their mixes."
HubLog: MP3 to M3U or SMIL playlist A bookmarklet that harvests MP3 links on a page.
BlogAudio - Jon Udell: "Jon Udell has been "quoting" audio and video snippets on the web for some time.
It is presently a very difficult process, but Jon's approach does not need a server to capture any media. He just hyperlinks to a media file and gives it start and end points." Good overview by Bob Doyle.
CMS Videos: more videos and technical notes from Bob Doyle.
Audio and Video from IA Summit 2004. I met Bob Doyle during the latest IA summit when he was videotaping. Great guy, great work. There are some interesting technical notes at the bottom of the page.
Paolo Valdemarin Weblog: "the idea of doing an interview with iChat and post it to the web is great in its simplicity." Easy is good. We're getting to a level where things truly are easy.
I added some new companies to Companies That Do Ethnography. Feel free to add yours if you offer true ethnography services.
urlgreyhot : Video of Lorenzo at the BMA fountain Michael started videoblogging :)
Jim Moore's cybernetics, politics, emergence, etc. :: "This afternoon DaveWiner and I were talking and he told me about his coinage of the term "Personal Television Networks"--PTNs."
Knowspam.net: How knowspam.net works: looks interesting. A lot of people contact me out of the blue though, I wonder how many of them this will scare away?
pOWL - Semantic Web Development Plattform: a PHP and web-based ontology editor.
Video about shipping 100s of computers to ecuador (Real Video). Good video, personal story in interview format. I like it, and I'm figuring out how to link. If you click CTRL-I in Real Player, you get a popup with the URL.
Autometa RPXP: I don't pretend to entirely understand this, but this might make it possible (right now) to link to a certain point within a video stream.
Like an RSS feed for video
Alan from demandmedia.net has a SMIL powered videofeed. The good part is: it addresses the scanning problem (video is hard to scan).
It works like a TV channel with a forward button: if you get tired of a particular video, just click the next >| button and you are taken to the next video within seconds. I like how he uses SMIL to add some text above the videos within Realplayer.
It's kinda like an RSS feed for video, but it's called a playlist because the words "videofeed" should probably be reserved for RSS with enclosed video (or not?): 
DemandMedia SMIL Playlist
(PS: feel free to copy this button if you like it.)
The third video right now is a short history of the internet. Kinda cool. Jay just told me that every time you click the link you get a random selection, so forget that "third video right now" comment.
My commute goes through some great industrial landscapes around Newark. The shot below is from the train window - 106K. Didn't take long to optimize or upload - I used my default settings.