i202 Fall 2009 School of Information, UC Berkeley

Spock is a people search engine that uses a "man + machine" approach that includes text extraction and tagging to build pages about people. Spock crawls and indexes "people-related" web sites and augments this with editorial and social oversight.

http://searchengineland.com/spock-people-search-with-a-man-machine-appro...

According to this article, Microsoft researchers have seen some limited success is reading subjects' minds and extracting some tagging info. That is, when exposed to images of human faces, the subjects' brains fire off in certain areas more so than when shown images of cars, non-human animals, etc. The researchers think that though this is greatly limited and specific at the same time, it shows a possible way to add tag info to images in a more rapid and "automatic" way.

Last month, news (http://www.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/10/19/pif.flu/) broke that pigs in Minnesota had tested positive for H1N1 (aka "Swine Flu").  The story mentions what has been reported numerous times before: H1N1 is not foodborne.  Two days later, the National Pork Producers Council (NPPC) turned to Congress for financial support.  The NPPC (http://www.nppc.org) reports that the U.S.

I noticed this while working on an IO Lab project: 

For what it's worth, the "metadata" tag is also very popular. On the other hand, Weinberger's "Everything is Miscellaneous" has been tagged with "wishlist" 22 times.

Also, here's LibraryThing's take on what a "work" is.

To one person, "music" may be an enjoyable if undifferentiated experience; to another, categorization by genre, recording studio, artist, date, etc., can provide vital information (if, say, one has an intense interest in tracking how influences spread through the music world). But being too serious about it could have hazardous effects -- see "Don't Touch My Records!": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=au3xP7ITQ0A

Is this an irreconcilable difference? Or can this marriage be saved?

True Engineering Technology is going a step further from just tagging links, photos or files, they're tagging individual pieces of data. This short article from Technology Review touches briefly on the importance of associating context with information, the technology being used, and whether it's worth the effort to organize information in this way.