i202 Fall 2009 School of Information, UC Berkeley

This is a wonderful piece by Derek Powazek on how to design systems that enable online crowds to be wise. These include simplicity, aggregation, and participation. I especially like his comments on aggregation: 'One of the reasons discussions do not lead to wise results is that there’s no aggregation—the conversation just happens. But WOC systems are there to produce a result. This requires an aggregator (like you) and an algorithm.'

It's widely claimed that the only universal language is math. If that's true, could math be the solution to the vocabulary problem? Personally, I'm terrible with numbers and savor the nuances of vocabulary but I could see how categorizing/classifying objects by a number rather than a name could simplify things. Semantics wouldn't be an issue if a given object is assigned a number as an identifier. I certainly don't think humans would ever accept replacing names with numbers as a solution to the vocabulary problem but machines wouldn't mind....hmmm. 

Coding Horror, one of my favorite blogs, has an article on Xanadu, a vaporware software project envisoned by Ted Nelson in 1963 and still not quite in beta.

In the essay "Three Tweets for the Web" for the Wilson Center's Wilson Quarterly, Tyler Cowen considers how the web has truncated our cultural output and our attention spans. One example he gives is how the LP has become the iTunes single. He argues that the way we pull together our personal information streams from the vast array of resources, both online and offline, is a unique expression of who we are.

Samsung and LG joined together to promote a unified standard for delivering local TV content via existing frequencies to mobile devices.  This highlights the continual trend towards delivering geographically context-sensitive media services.

U.S. TV Body Approves Mobile Standard

-joan

Hakia is a company that uses semantic search, taking into account word context and a hiearchy of categories that a search term might fall into.  Supposedly Microsoft's Bing's category designations are based on Hakia.  The company also recently (about a month ago) came out with a commercial ontology product called Contexa to help advertisers better connect with relavent web content.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/11/business/11unboxed.html

I found a number of open source ontologies that are being developed.  I wanted to get a feel for how far the idea has come.  This one stood out -- I stopped reviewing it after the browser had loaded over 500k lines.

It begs the question - how big is too big when it comes to the useability of an Ontology? 

Warning - this link may freeze your browser - http://svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/diseaseontology/trunk/HumanDO.obo?view...

While I was working on last IO Lab project on Metacrap, I read an interesting interview given by Cory Doctorow on Wired. He talks about Flickr tags and metacrap. It also gives good insights on the problems of explicit metadata. This interview was given in 2007.

Link: http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2007/05/metacrap_and_fl/

"Decay" is one of the most popular tags on Flickr. Shocking.. isn't it? Do read that part.

While the Book Search battle is still waging, Google enters the eReader war by providing an eReader-agnostic, browser-based solution.

Google Online Bookstore Fuels eReader War

During L13, as part of our review, we talked more about separating the content from the presentation. I posed the question that if you consider the statement that “Meaning is Use” (in terms of use equating to the presentation), does that mean that content alone is meaningless? Well, this concept has been percolating in my brain over the last few days and I think I’ve concluded that the answer to that question is: Yes.

Here are some examples in support of my assertion that content is meaningless:

Example #1 – Raw Data

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/15/books/15libraries.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/04/travel/04pracchip.html

Good stuff that connects to today's class discussion on standards adoption and the interoperability issues presented when there is a lack of incentives to comply.

Having the chip-and-PIN technology in the US would just make us 'socialists'.  :)

Seriously though, one has to wonder what the tipping point will be when the benefits of adopting such standards will become realized.

Came across this article today that talks about the recent efforts of the Industry group Consumer Electronics Association and the California Energy Commisson from to prevent the passage of the nation's first energy-consumption standards for big LCD and Plasma Televisions.  Interesting that some TV makers aren't actually against the standards, which they say won't make much of a cost difference for consumers.

Nobody is immune!