i202 Fall 2010 School of Information, UC Berkeley

With a 'radical overhaul' of its website, Twitter has to decide how to describe itself. 'Media company' or 'Content Aggregator' or both?

A service that extracts associations and their relationships to entires in Wikipedia, i.e. crawling a wikipedia side an generating tags based on the content. The Platfrom works like a search engine wher users type in a word and an ontology that distinguishes between people, places, labels etc. is displayed.

dev.sigwp.org/WikipediaThesaurusV3/

Photo from doodlepuppy.com.

The IFLA includes the abstraction hierarchy in its Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records in order to assist in cataloging entities. The abstraction itself is a way to define and distinguish between different types of entities in a library system.

A new 14-miles long 680 express lane will be unveiled next Monday.

Patrick McKenzie has identified 40 incorrect assumptions that programmers (and non-programmers) tend to make about names (of people, that is). Some of the assumptions are common "obvious" facepalms like #21:  "People’s names are globally unique" (how many Michael Davises or Ali Mohammeds are out there, do you suppose?) or #7: "People’s names do not change" (oh hi, newlyweds!).

This week's New Yorker recently featured an interesting article about phone books. Once a source for information retrieval, "its legitimacy as a reference tool was undermined long ago-- first by 411, then by the Internet and smartphones."

In an attempt to reduce spam, scams, and the spread of pornography via cell phone, the Chinese government is requiring citizens and visitors to provide identification when purchasing a SIM card. Working with government-control telecom companies, convenience store owners and street vendors, China hopes to organize a system in which all cell phone numbers and SIM cards can be linked to an individual.

While the whole world is going crazy over social networking, how can Apple be behind? Steve Jobs has taken it upon himself to make people think of Apple, as a Social networking company, on the lines of Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and others. But will Apple succeed in changing people's mindsets? Only time will tell, meanwhile, check out the powerful list of social media offerings by Apple:

Haven’t you run across images online where you’ve wondered what a particular item in the image was? And then read the image caption to discover that it told you nothing about what you were wondering about. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could describe parts of an image that may or may not contribute to the overall message in the name of the file or the image caption? Well, now you can.