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.

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://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.

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.

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

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.

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.

I'm finally getting around to posting this link to a piece that ran in the New Yorker back in August.  The column starts out as a discussion of the considerable recent advances in encoding and cleansing music in digital form: more than ever, it is possible to enhance the depth and quality of the captured performances and to enrich the sense of the time and place of those performances while eliminating the "noise" that obscures that richness.  As bandwidth and