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.

This 4 minute video, created by Dr. Michael Wesch for a class on digital ethnography, became really popular on youtube a couple of years back. It talks about - (really effectively!) - why and what is XML, XML vs HTML, social tagging, and several other pertinant 202 topics in the context of web 2.0.

If you have any doubts about XML vs HTML, do watch this!

Alex bookmarked this link to the New York Times Magazine story about Pandora earlier today, and I hope I'm not stepping on any toes by reposting it here, because I think there are a bunch of pretty fascinating 202-ish issues contained within that I'd love to discuss. Specifically, Pandora stood out to me after our "wisdom of crowds" discussion as a service that basically rejects the crowd and goes with recommendations derived from the basic components of music as broken down by experts.

The Clay Shirky article referred to by Marlow et al in the Tagging Paper is makes for highly entertaining reading. Shirky writes about the differences between thinking about professionals doing categorisation to people doing tagging on the web and when it makes sense to do one or the other. He calls this difference 'browse versus search':

It's now official, though many in the SEO industry have known for years -- Google's search algorithms don't take into account the meta tag in its web rankings. Google says that the main reason is because people were abusing the tag.  Not a big surprise for people in the SEO industry, but Google says that they they of couse *may* use them in years to come for something--though probably not.

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.'

Many linguists worry about the loss of linguistic diversity  -- since languages, like species, are currently threatened with extinction at alarming rates, due to rapid changes in the way humans live.

http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/09/08/twitter.shel.israel/index.html

In this article, CNN interviews Shel Israel, a 65-year old social-media journalist and author of a new book, "Twitterville: How Businesses Can Thrive in the New Global Neighborhoods."  In his book, Shel shows how Twitter flattens geographical boundaries and helps people connect with others around the world who share their interests.

Article at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/03/technology/personaltech/03pogue-email....