i202 Fall 2010 School of Information, UC Berkeley

This hilarious 2 minute video entitled "How to Report the News" is a satirical piece looking at the structure of news on TV. The video is in the format of a 2 minute news story but rather than present an actual piece of news each element of the news spot is replaced with its abstracted element.  The video is a metadata view at the predictable composition of the news.  The video's creator has done an excellent job of marking up typical news videos into an almost "microformat" of sorts.

According to the New York Times, Silicon Valley is seeing a surge in new companies that focus on mobile photo sharing applications. Unlike many established competitors in the field, the new companies are developing mobile apps as a first priority and focusing less on the traditional web incarnation of their products. The photo apps vary in the features they offer, but often mimic the structure of existing social media applications.

This morning I was doing research for a friend.  Found a useful piece of info embedded in the webpage.

I copied from the webpage and then pasted into the chat window in gmail.

What got pasted is shown below.  Notice the "Read more,"  somewhere along the chain the browser and gmail working in nice harmony decided I wanted to share data about my data.  Which frankly though I did not ask for explicitly with my keyboard commands, in the end I am glad they enhanced by data in such a way.

Did this only work because I was running gmail within chrome? 

NYT story on July 28^th, 2010, (http://gadgetwise.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/28/why-dont-more-cameras-offer-gps/) suggests that cameras with GPS functions have been in the market for a year or two. These cameras will provide either built-in or stand-alone add-on devices to capture the latitude and longitude of the location, and ‘geo-tag’ any photo with such information.

 http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/09/20/100920fa_fact_vargas

This article, published in the New Yorker, paints a humble portrait of the co-founder and CEO of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg.  In the article, Zuckerberg discusses his desire to create a more open, honest, and transparent world through Facebook.  

Along the lines of my previous post about tagging usage in del.icio.us, you might want to take a look at TagWiz. Hyunwoo Park, Satish Polisetti, and Dhawal Mujumbar created this tool to visualize the tags of an individual user in delicious. It provides tag frequency distribution visualization and a metric of how important the long tail effect is.

http://chronicle.com/article/Googles-Book-Search-A/48245/

I dug up this almost year old op-ed published in The Chronicle of higher education because it highlights some of the most challenging problems associated with metadata, classification and describing collections.

Strategic Content Management - Jonathan Kahn

Taking us back to the old ways of gathering information, web search companies are now tapping the power of immediate social circles instead of social networks to suggest answers to any question we might have. With virtually endless information available to us on the internet, companies have been trying to hone in on how best to present us with information that interests us, and how to make money from it.

Harvard Law School professor Jonathan Zittrain and his team showcased Collage at the Berkman Center today. What's Collage? It's a tool that facilitates the creation of "an online casebook that's free, remixable and that can be used not just for a specific class, but for instructors" in law schools.