i202 Fall 2010 School of Information, UC Berkeley

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.

London’s Imperial War Museum (IWM) is renovating its technology infrastructure to take advantage of the benefits of digital storage. 

(just cutting and pasting here for people who enjoyed Kimra's talk about metadata for video on 9/27)

The explosion of the mobile device market demonstrates how consumers have come to expect and rely on access to the network from anywhere, at any time. Increasingly, people expect similar access to the Web from consumer electronics such as televisions. W3C has begun to organize a series of workshops to discuss this convergence with television industry and other producers of consumer electronics.

The methodical creation -- and subsequent illustration  -- of taxonomies can provide critical insight and analysis into both organizational and evolutionary qualities of a data set. Rap names lend themselves particularly well to taxonomical examination. Influenced by both strong community bonds (The Wu Tang Clan being the most prominent example) as well as fervent competition among peers, naming conventions in rap have further beneffitted from decades of rapid artistic evolution and cultural influence.

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.

This blog would like to explore two different Identification / Organization approaches to explore value in their retrieval results.

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

Devin Coldewey of UX Magazine recently wrote a piece entitled "Making the URL Bar Useful Again", where he proposes a new metadata tag that would create a breadcrumb trail within a browser's URL bar based on the web page you are currently on. Instead of seeing a long, indecipherable URL address, this space would present users with enhanced information on where they are within the navigation structure of the web site.

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.