A wordcloud of words I’ve used while Twittering…

Booklamp is a technology demo that analyzes the text of books along multiple lines (action, density, description, dialogue, etc.) and then uses that info to find other books with similar patterns. Right now, it’s only got a handful of sf books under its wing, so it’s purely a demo, and they’re trolling for sponsors who might be able to support their effort to gets lots of books included.

Simon Willison has a Fire Eagle app that shows you (presumably on your mobile phone) the five places mentioned in Wikipedia that are nearest you. Fire Eagle (in beta) lets apps know where you are, while protecting your privacy. It comes from the irrepressible Tom Coates…

Here’s an article that cracks the code on Bestiario’s ultra-cool tagcloud visualizers (AKA 6pli). I still have no ear (so to speak) for the graphical display of information, but this article helps.

Let me disambiguate that title: Reuters is offering a Web service, called Calais, that will parse text and return it in a form (RDF) that can be utilized by Semantic Web applications. It uses natural language processing (from ClearForest) to find structures of meaning such as places, jobs, facts, events, etc. It apparently has its own metadata schema, but it allows users to extend it. It’s an open API, and Reuters is being quite generous in how much they’ll let you submit during this beta period. It’s English only for now, although they plan to support other languages, opening the exciting prospect of being able to find items of interest in languages you don’t understand via a unified metadata framework.

I’m going by the site’s FAQ. I haven’t tried it and can’t tell how well it works, how accurate it is, how comprehensive or detailed its metadata are, and how much post-processing cleanup uses will want to provide (which of course depends on the application). There are some points I just don’t understand, such as the claim “Calais carries your own metadata anywhere in the content universe.” But if it works within some reasonable definition of “works,” and if it gets widely adopted, Calais could make a lot more information a lot easier to find, and to process for further meaning. [Tags:semantic_web semweb reuters calais nlp ]

Bestiario is a Spanish group that does some insanely watchable visualizations of networks of information. For example, poke around at their way of mapping del.icio.us links.

I’m not very good at interpreting visual data so I can’t tell if it’s helpful, but it sure is cool. [Tags: visualization social_networks ]

I’ve been playing with Instapaper.com a little, and liking it a lot.

It’s a free site built by Marco Arment, who works at Tumblr (if I’m reading this right). You put the Instapaper “Read Later” button in your button bar, and click it if you’re on a site you want to read later. Go to Instapaper.com and you’ll see a list of what you’ve clicked. Simplicity itself.

There seems to be just one more feature: Any text you’ve selected on the page your instapapering is taken as that page’s description.

That takes care of my temporary bookmarking needs, a feature I’ve wanted for a while. But I wonder what would happen if my instapaper page were public and pointable. Could we start to use instapaper to build a collaborative newspaper that pulls together the recommended reading of people you respect?

[Tags: instapaper media del.cio.us tagging digg ]

I got a demo of SezWho.com, a system that enhances the commenting systems at blogs and other sites. If you plug it in to your blog, your readers can rate comments. The system tracks the reputation of commenters and uses that to weight their ratings of other commenters. (To rate a comment, you don’t have to join SezWho but you do have to supply an email address; they are going to enable you to rate anonymously, although since you won’t have a reputation, your rating won’t count for much.) You can click to see where else a commenter has commented.

Reputations are based on ratings, with influence gauged within communities of interest. Communities of interest are determined by the tags attached to the posts you’re rating.

Jitendra Gupta, who walked me through the product, points to the discovery element: If you find someone who comments well, you can click on her name and discover her blog and also easily see all of her comments on other sites.

The basic service is free. For a subscription, you get access to the details of the data about your site.

Privacy: You can manage your profile to some degree. If you unsubscribe, your history of comments and profile are hidden.

SezWho seems like an easy way to add functionality to your commenting system. It could be of great use for sites with so many comments that readers need some guidance, but I’m personally wary of adding a reputation system to smaller sites (like this one) where a comment rating system provides needless shaping of attention. It’s not like there are so many comments on EverythingIsMiscellaneous.com that you need a reputation system to figure out which ones to read. A reputation system provides a power to the crowd that, for smaller sites, we don’t need the crowd to have. For larger sites, it’s a different story.

Of course, that’s different from SezWho’s discovery function. Jitendra says that in the next release, there will be an option to “turn off the rating functionality and just have the context piece.” That provides a way to stitch together comments across sites, and, in general, stitching is a good thing because lack stitching is the number cause of wardrobe malfunctions.

[Tags: reputation_systems commenting reviews sezwho ]

From AKMA:

Alert! Cool Googlosity Feature! On a hunch, I just typed the carrier name and number of Margaret’s plane flight into the Google search box, and Google correctly parsed that data and offered as the first search result a link to the actual status page for that flight — but on the search results page, it also listed the flight’s origin, destination, scheduled departure and arrival times, and its present status — right there atop Google results page one, no messing with airlines’ arcane “enter this data into that box and click the following agreements, and by the way what’s your credit card number, your flight club number, and an email address at which we can harass you for the rest of the internet’s lifetime.”

Nice parsing, Google!

[Tags: google akma search travel ]

AdaptiveBlue ginned up this widget for Everything Is Miscellaneous, as part of their marketing outreach to authors.