Dopplr went live while I was traveling last week, and I’m just now getting around to noting the fact.

Dopplr does something simple: It tells you which of your friends are going to be in the places you’re going to. And it does it quite simply, even though specifying places is actually quite a daunting task: Did you mean Paris in France, Texas or the other dozens of places on earth that share that name? The Dopplr UI makes entering this info just about as painless as possible.

Or course, my good feelings about Dopplr, where I was a beta user, are abetted by the fact that the people doing Dopplr are among the people I like and respect the most on the Web.

BTW, here’s a moderately funny video parody of Dopplr from Mahalo.

[Tags: dopplr travel dan_gillmor everything_is_miscellaneous ]

Tell Lijit.com what social networking sites you’re in and what content aggregation tools you use and it will create a search engine that returns results that you or your social network has created. Give it a try:

Lijit Search

I spent some time this week with Patrick  de Laive, one of the founders of Fleck.com, a reinvention of Third Voice that looks much more promising. Fleck lets you leave comments and annotations on any site. Those notes can be seen either by the whole world or by one of your designated groups. It has obvious applications within an organization, and is a nice, open annotation platform that people may find lots of uses for. Plus, it’s a pretty cool implementation, and the upcoming one has lots and lots of miscellaneous goodies.

I’ve flecked the “play pen” page where you may be reading this post…

Pandora.com explains some of the 400  metadata attributes it tracks so that it can tell that Song A is like Song B…

Michael Wesch, who did the incredible info-visualization YouTube, The Machine Is Us/ing Us, has now done the same to explain the change from paper-based information to digital information. In just a few minutes, he explains the thesis of Everything Is Miscellaneous (which he credits, thank you). It is a brilliant piece of work. And totally delightful. [Tags: wesch everything_is_miscellaneous ]

W. David Stephenson has created a word cloud of the latest bin Laden video. Interesting… [Tags: osama_bin_laden w_david_stephenson everything_is_miscellaneous visualizations ]

Fred Stutzman writes at TechPresident about WikiDashboard, from PARC, that provides a visualization of who has been editing an article with what frequency. Very cool and sometimes revelatory.

They ought to make this deliverable as a sound, so when you go to a page, you can tell the shape of the edit history by the pitch, quaver and number of voices. [Tags: wikipedia everything_is_miscellaneous visualizations parc fred_stutzman]

From SnarkMarket:

AideRSS is a Godsend. It analyzes the activity around each item in an RSS feed — Technorati hits, comments, Del.icio.us links, traffic reports, etc. — and calculates a score for the item. It then creates four feeds from the original feed, each set to a higher activity threshold.

Yet another way to sort through the miscellaneous…

Tim Spalding at LibraryThing has introduced a new wrinkle in the tagosphere…and wrinkles are welcome because they pucker space in semantically interesting ways. (Block that metaphor!)

At LibraryThing, people list their books. And, of course, we tag ‘em up good. For example, Freakonomics has 993 unique tags (ignoring case differences), and 8,760 total tags. Now, tags are of course useful. But so are subject headings. So, Tim has come up with a clever way of deriving subject headings bottom up. He’s introduced “tagmashes,” which are (in essence) searches on two or more tags. So, you could ask to see all the books tagged “france” and “wwii.” But the fact that you’re asking for that particular conjunction of tags indicates that those tags go together, at least in your mind and at least at this moment. Library turns that tagmash into a page with a persistent URL. The page presents a de-duped list of the results, ordered by interestinginess, and with other tagmashes suggested, all based on the magic of statistics. Over time, a large, relatively flat set of subject headings may emerge, which, subject to further analysis, could get clumpier and clumpier with meaning.

You may be asking yourself how this differs from saved searches. I asked Tim. He explained that while the system does a search when you ask for a new tagmash, it presents the tagmash as if it were a topic, not a search. For one thing, lists of search results generally don’t have persistent URLs. More important, to the user, tagmash pages feel like topic pages, not search results pages.

And you may also be asking yourself how this differs from a folksonomy. While I’d want to count it as a folksonomic technique, in a traditional folksonomy (oooh, I hope I’m the first to use that phrase!), a computer can notice which terms are used most often, and might even notice some of the relationships among the terms. With tagmashes, the info that this tag is related to that one is gleaned from the fact that a human said that they were related.

LibraryThing keeps innovating this way. It’s definitely a site to watch.

[Tags: tags folksonomy librarything tim_spalding everything_is_miscellaneous]

Every link is a tag

Samuel Wantman, who works on Wikipedia’s category strategy, has suggested that every hyperlinked word in every Wikipedia article be treated as a tag.

What a cool idea! It’d frequently give you so many articles that it wouldn’t be worth it, but especially if we were able to do intersections of the hyperlinked words, there are times when it’d be worth its weight in bits.

Apparently, however, this would require so much processing power that the lights on the Eastern seaboard would dim every time someone used it. So, perhaps it’s a project that a third party could undertake? Or refine? [Tags: wikipedia samuel_wantman tagging folksonomy everything_is_miscellaneous ]