plasticbag.org: ?If I was a
plasticbag.org: If I was a better geek, this article on XFML at diveintomark.org would be fascinating, illuminating and revelatory. Instead I stare at it in desperation, terror and confusion as the words change and resolve themselves in front of me to read, "Rhubarb rhubarb rhubarb rhubarb rhubarb". This is not the kind of thing I'm supposed to admit in public.
What I've been working on.:
What I've been working on.: "I want to build a service that allows individuals to monitor, on a daily or weekly basis, all official activity of their elected officials in Washington."
Quiver's QKS Classifier: "We wanted
Quiver's QKS Classifier: "We wanted to compare the results from a Quiver test with those of a manual process and a rules-based categorization tool. This article describes the results [...]". But the article is hidden behind a password. Frustration - they could at least give an overview of the conclusions!
Ben Hammersley wants to know
Ben Hammersley wants to know about your current taxonomy: "I'm interested in how you devised the taxonomy...is it just random words, in a flat structure, or is it based on a tree." Me too. Go to his blog and share!
Microsoft works to create back-up
Microsoft works to create back-up brain: "Researchers at Microsoft%u2019s laboratories in San Francisco are working on ways to create a %u2018back-up brain%u2019 that will record and catalogue every picture you take, document you write and conversation you record.
[...]
The researchers recognise, however, that the biggest challenge will come with deciding on how best to organise the material. They are currently working on developing a taxonomy that will accommodate the huge range of associations and relationships the material will require."
Content Inventory follow up: if
Content Inventory follow up: if you want to make a local copy of a site (really useful for working from home, on the train, or just having fast access), Offline Explorer is the best product I've found. It works through https, through a VPN, you name it, and the tech support is pretty good. And it's $50 per user.
At a discussion with a
At a discussion with a bunch of smart IA's a few days ago it was mentioned that IA's often have lots of ideas but aren't very good programmers (that's often why they became IA's - I know I did). So they can't experiment much in real life, and ideas stay in that fuzzy cool idea-without-real-life-feedback stage.
I have the same problem developing Taxomita: I have a beta going but my coding isn't top. So now I am experimenting with the old have-a-programmer-in-a-cheap-country approach. I will blog on my experiences, but Joel on Software is proving to be a great resource to set this up.
Other people keep doing a
Other people keep doing a better job of explaining XFML than I do:
Simon Willison: "Mark Pilgrim has discovered XFML. He provides an excellent description of the standard, but fails to mention XFML's most powerful ability; sharing metadata. (I believe Simon means connecting metadata) Here's how it works: (follows excellent and succinct description)
[...]
This is just the tip of the iceberg - apply the creative global mindset that is the blogging community and who knows what will happen :)"
*Market Research*: "'Market Research' is
*Market Research*: "'Market Research' is an ongoing project that captures footage by deploying smart cameras -- sensors, cameras and transmitters -- within products in the 'market'. The camera systems are triggered by the interactions of the user with the device -- systematically collecting 'evidence' of the actual conditions of use. Once captured, footage used to evaluate assumptions embedded in the design of the products and the conceptualization of the market."
Mark's clear explanation of XFML
Mark's clear explanation of XFML got people thinking. I realize now I never did a great job of explaining it.
asterisk*: Yet another interesting technology...XFML: "But I'll need to explore it more. That or have Brian, the Web producer of our team, who is great at researching this kind of thing, do the rest of the leg work for me."
Webgraphics: "Mark explains XFML in the clear, cohesive manner that makes his site one of the best."
Gimle: '[...] RDF for example is a very effective and powerful tool. The problem is that it's too effective and powerful for what I want.
The cool bit only struck me today as I was browsing Dive Into Mark.
XFML.
Classic lightbulb scenario.
The XFML format provides you with an easy way of creating conceptual categories and topics for your website and then associate your webpages with the various topics it touches upon." Clifton really gets it when discussing the topic linking capabilities of XFML: "That's what I'd call proper intertextual contextualisation. This is classic Yin kind of power. Introverted, the primary focus is to know yourself (marking your data up properly, thoroughly and with care, this part can't really be automated). Once that is done, the rest is easier and can be automated much more effectively than the content part."
Jonathan Delacour: "Wouldn't it be neat to have a central registry of Myers-Briggs Type Indicators for the inhabitants of our little corner of Blogaria? If you know your Myers-Briggs type, why not reveal it in a comment or send me an email? If you don't yet know your type, you can take the Typology Test. I could create a MySQL database that stored each blogger's name, URL, email address, and an entirely subjective description of their blogging style then create a PHP page to list the results. Perhaps Mark Pilgrim could summarize the hierarchical faceted metadata using XFML."
Marek: "Mark Pilgrim shares an xfmllib library for Python, and explains XFML in a way that a human can understand."
SmarterKids.com. Another shop using facets.
SmarterKids.com. Another shop using facets.
Simplicity vs. Innovation? But simplicity
Simplicity vs. Innovation? But simplicity is innovation!
Problems with internalizing/socializing classification systems
Even when a company creates a well thought out classification system, things often still go wrong. People put stuff in the wrong place, add a bunch of personal folders somewhere, and at the end of the day, a lot of stuff still can't be found because it's been misclassified or the classification system has been corrupted. Old style classification in real cabinets had the same problem: companies addressed this by making someone responsible for classifying all incoming documents, even though everyone had free access to take stuff out. How do we model a system so that things don't get misclassified into an (otherwise) nice classification system?
My view: categories get internalized only by using them, or even better, creating them yourself. When you create a category chances are you'll use it more or less correctly. When someone else creates one, the probablility of correct filing drops steeply. And the mental effort it takes to understand this categorization approach is big, especially because there are no direct rewards for you.
One approach that may work is distributed metadata. But that idea is in its infancy. So what do we do?
Amazon.com : Price "Too Low
Amazon.com : Price "Too Low to Display" Explained: "this discount is calculated in the Shopping Cart". Yeah right. Amazon is its usual nice self having a link to an explanation next to the marketing ploy "add to your shopping basket to see price", but why then do they give us a dodgy lie: "Is calculated in the shopping basket"? Why don't they just say it increases conversion rates - I'm cool with that.
John Robb's Radio Weblog: "The
John Robb's Radio Weblog: "The reason adding P2P to weblogs will happen (perhaps sooner than most people realize) is that it will make it possible to publish original audio and video without spending the big bucks to host it."
Jon's Radio: "THE GOOD NEWS
Jon's Radio: "THE GOOD NEWS is that Office 11 supports XML Schema. The bad news is that XML Schema has been described even by XML experts as "confusing," "impenetrable," "fuzzy," and "as user-friendly as a stick in the eye."'
The Scobleizer Weblog: "Linux copies
The Scobleizer Weblog: "Linux copies Microsoft which copied Apple which copied Xerox. I guess when you copy UI's too much they get ugly."
Mark Pilgrim's XFML Python library
Mark Pilgrim is writing a python library for XFML: dive into mark - xfmllib: "XFML is a new format for providing hierarchical faceted metadata. Think of it as a way of expressing all the different cross-sections of a site. I couldn't make heads or tails of it until a kind soul came along and mocked up an XFML representation of Dive Into Accessibility, my tutorial on web accessibility techniques. Then it all became clear.
[...]
You see, each tip in Dive Into Accessibility discusses a specific technique, the general design principles the technique embodies, the types of disabilities (expressed in the form of character sketches) that would benefit from its implementation, the web browsers involved, and (in some cases) specific instructions for implementing the tip in various publishing tools.
To express this in XFML, we first define six top-level facets: person, physical disability, technological disability, design principle, web browser, and publishing tool.
Within the person facet, we define topics: Jackie, Michael, Bill, Lillian, Marcus, and also Google, since many accessibility techniques directly impact search engine placement, and Google's spidering bot can be thought of as a blind reader (a really, really voracious reader).
[...]
Now feed it into a portal-making script and it looks like a portal. Or feed it into a search-engine-making script and it looks like a search engine. That's wicked cool."
The Pages of Now &
The Pages of Now & Forever - Star Control 2 : The Ur-Quan Masters: the story so far.
Jingle-Net is kind of cool,
Jingle-Net is kind of cool, but I want to be able to (with some help) write text myself that then gets sung by a real person. I'd pay $15 to $25 for that. Where are those investors when you need them?
Dive Into Accessibility in XFML
Mark added an XFML file to Dive Into Accessibility that describes the content metadata, which means you can now browse his excellent accessibility series in Facetmap by Person, technological disability, web browser, physical disability, design principle, publishing tool or any combination of these facets. Enjoy.
The map was done by Mark, first version by Albert de Klein following a crazy idea of mine.
I just had really bad
I just had really bad fries from a Belgian fry (or 'frie'?) place in NYC called "Frietkot". Avoid - they give Belgian fries a bad name.
An XFML feed generated by
An XFML feed generated by Bill Kearney's XFML tool for Radio of my play-around PeterV's Radio Weblog.
Creative Commons: "On 16 December,
Creative Commons: "On 16 December, Creative Commons machine-readable licenses will be available to the public free of charge."
Charles Nadeau: "Imagine a workgroup
Charles Nadeau: "Imagine a workgroup using Taxomita on their local server. As they browse the web, they can assign metadata to pages linked to their work and compare/aggregate the metadata they assign to the pages. Given a finite vocabulary of words, one can imagine a "democratic" metadata model: If everybody independently assign words from this vocabulary as metadata to pages, one could look at the words assigned to each page and decide that the word that come the more often is the group official metadata word for this given page."
oreilly.com: Content Syndication with RSS.
oreilly.com: Content Syndication with RSS.
BlogStreet: Who's in your Neighbourhood?
BlogStreet: Who's in your Neighbourhood? Nice.
XFML tool for Radio Userland.
Bill Kearney has written an XFML tool for Radio.
It exports a complete XFML map of your posted items. It automatically pulls out the category data as well as month, year and day info. Bill writes: "I've a few options on it that aren't enabled pending some further testing. I'm more than willing to listen to feedback on it."
To install, just close Radio, drop the file in your radio>tools folder and restart.
XFML mailing list: "The "linksTo"
XFML mailing list: "The "linksTo" facet is a little frivolous, but I was interested to see what kind of facets could be built from a weblog and what they might end up being useful for."
I like it. Extracting meaningful information from weblog posts and presenting it in easy-to-parse XFML.
Matt Mower is thinking out
Matt Mower is thinking out of the box: combining XFML with RSS 2.0.
Aeiwi is a search engine
Aeiwi is a search engine that uses a controlled vocabulary and a somewhat similar interface to the new breed of faceted classification interfaces.
Christina Wodtke: "When IA is
Christina Wodtke: "When IA is limited to controlled vocabularies and labels, I'm done being an IA. [...] Personally, I think we've specialized too fast."
A rare thing in the
A rare thing in the language battles: an intelligent and short comparison between Java and C# (via small values of cool)
Syndication News from Bill Kearney:
Syndication News from Bill Kearney: Do your part: Bandwidth problems with RSS: "[...] As in, stop hammering it by using it during an HTML page load. Or, don't default to an hourly interval for reading the feed. And by all means, don't default to something more frequent that hourly!"
National Geographic: Roper Geographic Survey
National Geographic: Roper Geographic Survey 2002 Highlights: 20/20 :) Some of the answers are too easy though - I got the numbe for Sweden wrong but the one I picked wasn't with the options, so I picked another one.
Blog Browsers: actually cool. Find
Blog Browsers: actually cool. Find the screenshot - I always find screenshots a lot easier when trying to understand why something may be cool.
Surf*Mind*Musings reports positively on InboxBuddy.
Surf*Mind*Musings reports positively on InboxBuddy. I still think it needs better branding.
Joshua Kaufman does another iteration
Joshua Kaufman does another iteration of the FOAF button (and it looks like a button this time).
Simon Willison: XFML has been
Simon Willison: XFML has been cropping up all over the place even despite the current lack of software. Inside scope: some really interesting XFML related scripts are about to become available, and I'm not just talking about Taxomita.
Via Simon Willison (whose blog
Via Simon Willison (whose blog I gravitate to again and again): PHPPatterns: programming patterns in PHP.
I renamed XFMLManager to Taxomita.
I renamed XFMLManager to Taxomita. I hope I can fix some small bugs this weekend.
A new syndication/xml/feed (metadata) button:
A new syndication/xml/feed (metadata) button: FOAF. I am not sure about this one: it doesn't look like a metadata button to me. Should we have Jakob-like rules for metadata buttons or not?
1. Metadata buttons indicate the name of the standard on the button (not the name of the format like XML or RDF).
2. Provide a link to a metadata page where you explain your different metadata feeds, what they include and wether they are stable or experimental implementations.
3. Metadata feeds live forever.
4. Metadata buttons have a title attribute explaining the button and link to the feed directly, not to an intermediate page.