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.

April 2-4, I’m going to TopicMaps, a conference that may be particularly interesting (to people who are particularly interested in it, of course):

The basic idea is simple: the organizing principle of information should not be where it lives or how it was created, but what it is about. Organize information by subject and it will be easier to integrate, reuse and share – and (not least) easier for users to find. The increased awareness of the importance of metadata and ontologies, the popularity of tagging, and a growing interest in semantic interoperability are part and parcel of the new trend towards subject-centric computing.

The organizers have let it be known that there’s still room… [Tags: conferences topicmaps oslo everything_is_miscellaneous]

Seb Schmoller has a really interesting post about the taxonomy of a museum of cutting-edge tools. [Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous taxonomy museums seb_schmoller ]

Tim Bray has a terrific piece on the development of XML, now in its tenth year as an official standard. He focuses on the people, not on the technicalities of the standard.

It’s worth it just to re-read Tim’s words about Yuri Rubinsky, an SGML advocate of enormous energy and passion, without a mean bone in his body.

It’s also worth it to learn the off-the-mainstage history of XML, of course.

David Warlick has created word clouds based on the words Andrew Keen and I use in our debate in the WSJ. Pretty interesting. For me, the stand out result is that I use the word “amateur” far more than Andrew “Cult of the Amateur” Keen does.

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 ]

Poking around the photos the Library of Congress has posted at Flickr shows some of the strengths and weaknesses of social tagging.

For example, take this 1940 photo of two kids gathering potatoes in Maine. There are about 80 tags, ranging from potato, maine, and boys to rural, bucolic, plaid, browen, and pommes de terre. The comments include people appreciating the aesthetics of the photo, recollecting their own lives on farms, and nattering on gaily about the cute hats the kids are wearing. For example:

I grew up in southern Minnesota in the 50s. I was probably 5-6 yrs. old. In the fall after the potato fields had been harvested, they allowed people to come in and collect the potatoes that the machines had missed. I can still remember the cold cloudy day, playing with my brothers in the furrows of the field, throwing clods of dirt at each other, instead of picking up potatoes, and getting yelled at by my Mom.

and

this ‘human interest’ is really ‘awesome’ during the world war ll eras, you can survive eating potatoes in the whole year, wthout rice. potato a native of pacific slopes of s. america, in 16th c., with roundish or oval starch containing tubers used for food. batata or sweet potato, is widely known in the philippine island, brought to table and used for food. biggest plantation of potato in the philippines is in northern luzon.

Three people have played with Flickr’s feature that lets you draw a box around a portion of a photo and add an annotation. All three are wastes o’ time (obviously in my opinion): “I love these barrels” is not worth the visual interruption. (You only see the boxes if you move your mouse over the photos.) So maybe Flickr will turn these off for the LC photos. Maybe not. We’ll see.

Nevertheless, this is some very cool stuff. Sure, some of the tags are oddball. So what? In the great wash of tags, they will lose significance. Meanwhile, that photo of two children harvesting potatoes, which had been locked away behind brick and paper walls, now is in the world, gathering meaning, memories, and connections.

[Tags: library_of_congress flickr tagging folksonomy taxonomy]

Doris Obermair interviewed me at the Picnic conference in spring 2007, and now has posted an edited version in which I talk about the effect of the miscellaneous on business. (With Spanish subtitles.) (By the way, I list videos here.) [Tags: doris_obermair]

Very interesting posting from the venerable Library of Congress on its blog (which by itself is pretty cool). Here’s a snippet:

Out of some 14 million prints, photographs and other visual materials at the Library of Congress, more than 3,000 photos from two of our most popular collections are being made available on our new Flickr page, to include only images for which no copyright restrictions are known to exist.

The real magic comes when the power of the Flickr community takes over. We want people to tag, comment and make notes on the images, just like any other Flickr photo, which will benefit not only the community but also the collections themselves. For instance, many photos are missing key caption information such as where the photo was taken and who is pictured. If such information is collected via Flickr members, it can potentially enhance the quality of the bibliographic records for the images.

We’re also very excited that, as part of this pilot, Flickr has created a new publication model for publicly held photographic collections called “The Commons.” Flickr hopes—as do we—that the project will eventually capture the imagination and involvement of other public institutions, as well.

Except for my general nervousness about putting this stuff into a privately held, for-profit organization, I think this is quite cool. It has the advantage of putting the data where the people already are. As a footnote to the posting says, it takes a photo of a grain elevator as an example “because it helps illustrate that there are active Flickr user groups for even such diverse subjects as grain elevators.” As the Commons page says,

The key goals of this pilot project are to firstly give you a taste of the hidden treasures in the huge Library of Congress collection, and secondly to how your input of a tag or two can make the collection even richer.

You’re invited to help describe photographs in the Library of Congress’ collection on Flickr, by adding tags or leaving comments.

Gives me little goosebumps.

And, by the way, the photos are fantastic. [Tags:library_of_congress tags flickr folksonomy taxonomy photographs metadata ]