Jon is homing in on a beautiful approach to adding semantics to plain old XHTML elements, for searching and styling. It turns out you can specify multiple class elements like class="personquote Jon". In this example, you can apply styles separately for personquote and for Jon. Sweet.
For my reading/watching list: Future Salon : The revolution will not be televised. It will be streamed.
If blogs are conversations, then aggregators like the excellent Bloglines should look for FOAF files and display a picture and the name of the writer(s) (if they can find it) with a feed. I'd like to see who's talking, and a name+picture makes it easier to do that.
(Bloglines could then add a function to see who this blogger knows and let me subscribe to feeds those people produce.)
I updated my feed to be called "Peter Van Dijck's Guide to Ease". Now I just have to add a picture. I always resisted having pictures of me floating around on the web (try to find one), but I think maybe I should give in.
Moderation continues to be a tricky art: craigblog: Flagging issues on craigslist: "Hey, we're trying hard to turn over a lot of control over craigslist to the community. That's proving to be a very democratic, effective, and fast way to run things."
(via Catalogablog) Controlling your Language - Links to Metadata Vocabularies: a long list of links to CV's and such, with explanations on how and why to use them.
Flash demo: interesting approach to providing dense information on a real-life map.
Wired News: Iran's Most Wanted: Filmmakers: "Mantini, who works 60-hour weeks at a brick factory, spends weekends and holidays making movies. Each film is totally handcrafted. And each is completely illegal."
Ten Mistakes Writers Don't See (But Can Easily Fix When They Do) Gotta keep those in mind. A particularly nice example of flat writing: "He wanted to know but couldn't understand what she had to say, so he waited until she was ready to tell him before asking what she meant."
Language Log: schild en vriend: "Those suspected of being Walloons or Frenchmen who could speak Dutch were asked to say schild en vriend "shield and friend", an expression regarded as particularly difficult for those who were not native speakers. Those who did not pronounce it correctly were determined to be the enemy and killed."
Indeed. And the test has stood the test of time. Native French speakers still can't pronounce "schild en vriend" correctly. Neither can native Spanish or English speakers.
To categorize or not: "My aim is to create a "loose" categorization of the services growing up around "social networking" guidelines, and not necessarily all "social software" offerings."
Jon Udell is doing some experimentation with attributes to add more semantics to common HTML elements. He's using these attributes to do searches and generate "dynamic categories".
Automatic Organization for Digital Photographs with Geographic Coordinates (PDF, via Catalogablog): "We describe PhotoCompas, a system that utilizes the time and location information embedded in digital photographs to automatically organize a personal photo collection. PhotoCompas produces browseable location and event hierarchies for the collection. This organization is created using algorithms that interleave time and location to produce an organization that mimics the way people think about their photo collections. In addition, our algorithm annotates the generated hierarchy with geographical names. We tested our approach on several real-world collections and verifed that the results are meaningful and useful for the collection owners."
I'm looking for examples of websites that raise awareness on certain issues (refugees for example), and analysis or research on that. Thanks.
Categorization of people you know is turning out to be a challenge for social network websites.
See Orkut
Follies and Clear...
precise and problematic: "The precision shows up in the digital choices were given: Is Phil your friend or not? If he is, is he one-star, two-star or three-star sexy? Choices you are not given
include: (i) Sort of sexy. (ii) Could be sexy if he dressed better.
(iii) If I were a woman, I think Id find him sort of sexy if I went for that type and if he dressed better. So, exactly how many stars does that work out to?"
A nice categorization challenge: how do you categorize the people you want to add to a social networking service?
Here's my take: for most sites, the basic connection should mean that you know who this person is. Not "Friend" but "People I know". Doc Searls seems to think the same.
Further categories would really depend on the site. If I had the time (or someone paid me) I'd work out a categorization framework. But there are taxes to do.
I've always wondered how well Google's translation approach works. They use volunteers to translate their pages in various languages. I checked out the new Dutch toolbar page today, and found some dodgy translations. Not exactyly wrong, but not particularly nice either. Here are a few edits. The English translations are my translations - I couldn't find the relevant English page (maybe it's been changed meanwhile).
- "Meer mogelijkheden van Google" (More possibilities with Google): "Meer mogelijkheden met Google"
- "de installatie vergt slechts enkele seconden" (the installation only takes a few seconds): "de installatie duurt slechts enkele seconden"
There are more edits I could make, but those fall in the realm of good writing. When you translate stuff, good writing often gets lost. I've seen the same in translations between Spanish and English. The translator should really be a writer as well.
World66 looks cool. It's kinda like a huge wiki for travel, but more structured. And they know how to attract people like me: I've visited 22 countries in the world so far (red in the image below). A lot more to go.
Dave on the Dean campaign: "For a fraction of the cost of a state campaign, they could have deployed an information system for voters that would have made history. We'd be raving about how the Internet has made it possible to be a responsible voter for the first time. $40 million isn't a big drop in an ocean of television ads, but in the space of public information systems it's a virtually infinite amount of money."
One interaction problem with having users assign categories is: how do you get them to select the category? If the categories are stable and the user has more or less learned them, James' Autofill can come in handy. It also allows you to define new categories on the fly.
Nice.
(via Boing BoingThings): "An anonymous reader sez, "The BBC made a unique deal with Real Networks which disposes of their spyware tactics. Basically, if a user clicks on a link to download Real Player from a BBC website, the referrer script sends them to a page where they can download an expiry-free, spyware-free and nuicance-free version of the player. It's because the BBC have such a stringent public service remit, that it was offensive to charge people a license fee for BBC content, then make them pay all over again for the facility to view/listen to it."
So you can download an adware-free, expiry-free version of Realplayer at the BBC.
Statistics on the amount of words people use in searches. Nothing unusual.
Nice to see a good technical writer being recognized: Simon Willison started a blog on client side scripting at Sitepoint, and is being paid for it. Similarly, Mark Pilgrim started writing for O'Reilly a while back - it looks like good technical writers are being discovered through their blogs.
Interesting: Mitshubishi play a commercial on TV that ends in the middle of the action. Then they send you to www.seewhathappens.com.
Something feels all wrong with the way these social network sites work. (I only joined LinkedIn). I'm not sure what. The interesting part is: you can probably find out what it is by reading the right blogs. I don't think they've nailed it yet, but they probably will be the first to to so. A few years back, I developed user requirements for a coupon site (yep) by looking at lots of epinions reviews of other sites like it. The exercise was very useful - the reviews were obviously written by vocal and interested users, and I came up with a lot of good stuff the market research had missed.
Banterist: Nipplegate: The Index
Life With Alacrity: Looking at Wiki Nice overview of various wiki products.
(via Catalogablog): "We're surrounded by free factual information, but there's a bill in Congress that would lock it all up. The Database and Collections of Information Misappropriation Act (DCIMA, H.R. 3261) extends extremely broad copyright-like protections to collections of factual data - data like the price of a TV, the temperature in Arizona or infomation collected during scientific research. DCIMA would allow companies to sue anyone who interferes with their ability to profit from data that they collect. In other words, academic researchers, public libraries, Internet innovators and other database users would have to pay up if someone else claimed to have assembled the data first. This is not only unecessary, it's bad policy.
Make your voice heard with the EFF Action Center."
How to manage smart people: via Simon's blogmarks, which I'm finding strangely enjoyable.
BBC - writersroom - Writing for the BBC: "The idea has to be one that genuinely excites you, and that you have some genuine reason for writing: it touches on your own obsessions or experience. If someone asks why you want to write the idea and your only response is "because it hasn't been done," the chances are it will be a piece of uninspired tosh."
Thesaurus Protocol: "The ADL Thesaurus Protocol is a lightweight, stateless, XML- and HTTP-based protocol for accessing thesauri: structured, controlled vocabularies of words and phrases that represent conceptual categories. The protocol is based on the Z39.19 thesaurus model and supports downloading, querying, and navigating thesauri."
Old but I'd missed this: Matt Mower's: the difference between XFML and XTM.
Gapminder: a site with lots of data visualizations about Word development, income and such.
Whole Earth: Places to Intervene in a System: "Numbers are last on my list of leverage points. Diddling with details, arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Probably ninety-five percent of our attention goes to numbers, but there's not a lot of power in them." (via Worldchanging)
I tried out Six Degrees a while ago and was dissapointed. Now I understand why. Sixdegrees "provides one click access to everything on your computer". Because it organizes things by Project, People and Emails, I wanted to use it to keep track of the people I got to know through these weak links we call email and weblogs. It's not very good at that, so I was dissapointed. I have no problems organizing my stuff on my computer and finding files, so SixDegrees didn't do much for me.
So now I'm waiting for someone to do a good desktop app to organize the people I know. I don't particularly want social software (as it's being defined). I don't care too much about who knows who, I just want some app to help me understand who I know. Probably won't happen.
Index for Credaro Bibiography: "Queen, drama 56, 178, 322" (via Librarian.net)
del.icio.us: "Delicious is a social bookmarks manager. Using simple bookmarklets, you can add bookmarks to your list and categorize them."
Zaczek has created an XSLT template that turns an XFML file into a browsable HTML page. Funky!
The only small cars in the US seem to be the Beetles - if I'm looking for a very cheap (< $2000) car that's SMALL, where should I look?
Michael is working on Family Travelog as a personal project.
Egosurfing: Related Info for: poorbuthappy.com/: 473 sites linking to it, "Very Fast (97% of sits are slower)". It's got all sorts of info about your site, including links to the WayBackMachine, traffic graphs (here is BoxesandArrows' traffic). They even have people who visit this site also visit ....
Yahoo! Research Labs. I'd never seen this site before.
Flower Power Takes on Land Mines: "A Danish biotech company develops a genetically modified flower that changes color when the plant is close to a land mine. The genetically modified weed has been coded to change color when its roots come in contact with nitrogen dioxide evaporating from explosives buried in soil. [...] Within three to six weeks from being sowed over land mine- infested areas, the small plant, a Thale Cress, will turn a warning red when close to a land mine. "
Search Engine Relationship Chart - SEOToolSet by Bruce Clay, LLC: "Avoid using dashes and underscores in URL names - using three or more can prove to result in being dropped from the index." Not sure if this came from Google themselves?
Job posting: "Works as a member of the information architecture team, defining requirements and designing the user interface for complex web applications and sites. Assist in interviewing clients and potential users to define needs and requirements for Church Web sites." (Via SIGA-L list)
This ad for an IA at the church of LDS (lds.org) was especially funny at my job, Logical Design Solutions (lds.com).
LibDB: HomePage: "This is the development wiki of LibDB, an open-sourced Perl/MySQL library and asset management system based on and inspired by the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (pdf), triples from the semantic web, and "the end-user doesn't, and shouldn't, need to know this stuff". In English, this means that you'll be able to smartly and easily catalog your movies, books, magazines, comics, etc. into your own computerized "personal library".
Still in the early planning stages.
You have to wonder what the response rates to "Orfder your Vyiagbra and Suupier Vikagpra saefely and securbely onliyne" are like.
whichbook.net is a faceted bookbrowser using facets that contain ranges (not categories), like happy-sad, long-short, easy-demanding. Once it chooses books for you, it also lets you check if you can borrow them in a library closeby. Nice.
The Linguist's Search Engine permits linguists to do searches they could not easily do on Google or Altavista -- for example, searches involving syntactic structure, non-contiguous constructions, and the like. (via Languagelog)
Jon Udell: How dynamic categories work: some interesting experimentation with dynamically filled (not dynamically generated) categories: "What is special is a search that combines the sort of standard metadata captured by any content management system with what we might call "inline metadata" that emerges from the content itself."