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August 9, 2006
Jason Toal is researching people’s relationships to their tape collections by aggregating photos at flickr. A weird but wonderful idea. [Tags: jason_toal flickr research tapes everything_is_miscellaneous]
Jason also mentions Gene Smith’s collection of photos of name tags at the Information Architecture Summit, which is several degrees of meta.
August 6, 2006
Evgeniy Gabrilovich and Shaul Markovitch at Technion (Israel Institute of Technology) have written a paper about applying machine learning techniques to Wikipedia to improve automatic categorization of text. For example, by analyzing Wikipedia, their algorithms can figure out from the sentence “Wal-Mart supply chain goes real time” that Wal-Mart uses RFIDs to manage their inventory. More examples:
Given a very brief news title “Bernanke takes charge”, a casual observer can infer little information from it. However, using the algorithm we developed for consulting Wikipedia, we find out the following relevant concepts: BEN BERNANKE, FEDERAL RESERVE, CHAIRMAN OF THE FEDERAL RESERVE, ALAN GREENSPAN (Bernanke’s predecessor), MONETARISM (an economic theory of money supply and central banking), INFLATION and DEFLATION. As another example, consider the title “Apple patents a Tablet Mac”. Unless the reader is wellversed in the hi-tech industry and gadgets, she will likely find it hard to predict the contents of the news item. Using Wikipedia, we identify the following related concepts: MAC OS (the Macintosh operating system) LAPTOP (the general name for portable computers, of which Tablet Mac is a specific example), AQUA (the GUI of MAC OS X), IPOD (another prominent product by Apple), and APPLE NEWTON (the name of Apple’s early personal digital assistant).
Then the articles goes into the technical aspects of doing this. I’m in no position to evaluate them. But using Wikipedia as a knoweldge mine is a cool idea. (Thanks to Hanan Cohen for the link.) [Tags: wikipedia everything_is_miscellaneous taxonomy ai knowledge_representation]
July 27, 2006
I’m doing the final keynote at Wikimania, the Wikipedia conference. This has me a tad nervous since in my experience Wikipedians tend to be knowledgeable, forthright, and have a low tolerance for the sort of BS that is my stock in trade.
I’ve posted my in-progress notes about what I plan on saying, although I also expect to modify it based on what’s discussed at the conference itself. I’m open to comments, suggestions, snorts of derision and prognostications of doom… [Tags: wikipedia wikimania everything_is_miscellaneous knowledge]
July 15, 2006
Ninety-nine “top” Harvard professors are calling for the ceation of a new coordinating committee with the power to hire 75 science faculty for research that doesn’t fit comfortably within a single established discipline, according to an article in the Boston Globe today. The committee would also have the power to allocate funding for inter-disciplinary projects.
Disciplines are ways of knowing held apart by models, methodologies and the power of incumbency. Without ’em we wouldn’t know how to know. But, we also recognize there’s something artificial about the distinctions introduced by disciplines: The chemistry and the biology of animals are united in the actuality of the animal, as are its math, astrophysics and string theory. The space between the disciplines is useful to explore not only because it is, by definition, what the disciplines ignore, but also because it reminds us that we are the ones who have brought discipline to the unitary cosmos. We don’t do so arbitrarily — astrology is not a science — but neither is there only one way that works. [Tags: harvard everything_is_miscellaneous interdisicplinary science]
June 29, 2006
Dan Bricklin does a great job explaining what makes StyleFeeder — just acquired by Top10Sources — especially interesting. Briefly: StyleFeeder lets you grab an image off a page and use it as a tag for remembering the page and for letting others quickly browse. It’s designed especially for bookmarking products you’re interested in buying, but there are other applications as well.
(You know you’re a geek if you assumed “StyleFeeder” was about CSS, not about clothing.) [Tags: tags taxonomy everything_is_miscellaneous dan_bricklin stylefeeder top10sources tagging ]
June 28, 2006
Torturing prisoners is better than burning a flag.
Crushing our children with debt is better than burning a flag.
Burning up the earth with CO2 is better than burning a flag.
Making America a hated nation is better than burning a flag.
Conclusion: Making it illegal to burn a flag is the single most important issue facing this country…at least now that we’ve come through the lying-about-adultery Constitutional crisis. [Tags: usa patriotism politics obscene_idiocy]
June 27, 2006
Liz Lawley has come forward with what she’ been working on: A library mashup called “personal ubiquitous library project” (PULP…yay for good acronyms!) that harnesses Microsoft Research’s AURA project to make it easy to scan in your books. There’s lots lots more to it. Sounds great. [Tags: liz_lawley libraries taxonomy everything_is_miscellaneous ]
The Journal writes up LibraryThing — Del.icio.us for your books — and makes the article available online. [Tags: librarything taxonomy tagging everything_is_miscellaneous]
June 21, 2006
Flamenco, the pioneering faceted classification system, has gone Open Source. Woohoo!
Faceted classification allows users to browse a complex tree of data by dynamically deciding which branch is a branch of which branch. (Demos here.) Flamenco is a project led by Marti Hearst at UC Berkeley School of Info. It was an important influence on commercial providers such as Siderean.
FLAMENCO is an acronym that stands for FLexible information Access using MEtadata in Novel COmbinations. Or, as I prefer to think of it: FIAUMINC. [Tags: faceted_classification flamenco open_source taxonomy everything_is_miscellaneous marti_hearst]
June 20, 2006
Pito Salas, the person responsible for the free, open source aggregator, BlogBridge, has a new project underway. I wasn’t so impressed with it until we had coffee together this morning. (Disclosure: I’m a BlogBridge user, and I’m also on its board of advisors. If Pito offers his new project commercially, there are unlikely circumstances in which I could make a little money from it. Frankly, my friendship with Pito is more likely to distort my opinion than the far whiff of money.)
The idea behind BBL is so simple that my first reaction to Pito was: Surely this has been done a thousand times already. But I think maybe it hasn’t. BBL is designed for a group that wants to build a shared online library with some degree of centralized control and management. So, someone comes up with a way of slicing up the topics, hierarchically. BBL has tagging built in so if you prefer to skip the tree, you can. (Or at least you will be able to — BBL is still quite draft-y.) Different branches can be administered by different people. Everything is RSS-enabled. BBL inhales and exhales OPML. Dynamic folders can show the current contents of a remote OPML structure, raising the possibility of creating interlibraries. The aim is to make it dead easy for a group to build, maintain and make accessible a structured online library. It’s cooler than I at first thought.
If you’ve got comments, go to BlogBridge and let Pito know. He’s an open-minded, open-hearted sort of guy.
(Ironically, the links for posts about BlogBridge Library need to be organized better. Here’s a link to the tag. And here are some key posts: 1 2 3 4. A preview is here. And there’s a SkypeCast about it on Thursday.)
[Tags: blogbridge libraries blogbridgelibrary pito_salas taxonomy everything_is_miscellaneous]
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