WeeklyNotes/2005/06/27

1. Notelets
2. Clay Shirky on the semantic web
3. Use URNs?
4. Peter Brantley's new blog
5. Today's pictures
6. Yesterday's pictures
7. Friday's and Saturday's pictures
8. Open Threads

Notelets

The Flickr mosaic maker is cool but I'll probably end up writing my own script to make custom-made mosaics.

Jon Udell: How do you design a remixable Web application?:

It's remarkable that these effects are achievable with no explicit support from the origin sites. But what if those sites did want to offer explicit support? What would that look like?

I think we've known the answer for a long time. A website that wants to be remixable will deliver content as XML and behavior as script. These aspects can be, and will be, combined server-side for Web 1.0 clients, but Web 2.0 clients will increasingly be able to do this processing for themselves. So there will be two ways to remix: by intercepting the server-side combination of XML content and scripted behavior, or by recombining on the client.

What's unclear, at least to me, is whether -- or to what degree -- the content and code will be augmented by external descriptions that can be used by automated tools, and can insulate derivative works from change. Could a lightweight schema for the content, and a lightweight service description for the code, make these remixes more resilient without imposing too much overhead? It's a great experiment for someone to try.

Clay Shirky on the semantic web

a quote from Clay Shirky:

The Semantic Web is peopled by engineers who are offended by ambiguity, and who believe, wrongly, that ambiguous systems are broken systems. The one thing they can't bring themselves to accept is that there might be ambiguity in the world, and that systems that tolerate ambiguity, at the expense of certainty or machine consumability, might actually have better survival characteristics.

Use URNs?

[UriForBook/UseUrn]

Peter Brantley's new blog

I only very recently discovered that Peter Brantley, Director of Technology at the California Digital Library, has started a public blog, shimenawa. Even though I already have semi-regular conversations with Peter, I'm happy to read his latest thoughts about libraries and whatever else he will choose to write about.

I'm envious that Peter will be able to attend Where 2.0 and look forward to seeing how he reacts to the conference. I have been experimenting a lot recently with geospatial services, specifically combining Flickr and GoogleMaps. I've been working on a write-up of my experimentation (e.g., GoogleMapsHacking); you can see some of the pictures that I have georeferenced centered around 2195 Hearst, the location of my office.

Peter is really grooving on the technology. Today is his first podcast!

Today's pictures

Yesterday's pictures

Friday's and Saturday's pictures

Open Threads

[OpenThreadsOfCurrentInterest]

1. Notelets
2. Neil Beagrie on personal digital collections
3. Today's pictures
4. Yesterday's pictures
5. Open Threads

Notelets

Neil Beagrie on personal digital collections

I found Neil Beagrie's Plenty of Room at the Bottom? Personal Digital Libraries and Collections to be a great jumping off point for thinking about the topic of personal collections at universities, although it just points out how much research still needs to be done.

Here I list some quotes from the article that spoke to me, all of which match my own personal experience:

• "Already, personal digital stores of a terabyte or more are almost within reach. Projecting current trends, in a few more years it will be possible, for example, to envisage individuals being able to store the equivalent of all the texts in the Library of Congress on their PC." (I've not amassed that much personal storage primarily because I've not had the need to do so -- but I can see 1 TB being within my personal reach.)

• "a perceptible consumer shift from consumption to personal creation, customization, and co-production of digital content." Yes, indeed. I've been weblogging for five years and currently have 8200 pictures in Flickr

• "growth in weblogging, personal online journals, personal journalism operating on a mass scale, and interpersonal links such as picture, video and music sharing. It is forecast that there will be increased consumption of 'amateur' content and that amateurs will have better links to professional producers/publishers to send electronically content they have made themselves"

• "people are able to create, capture and store an ever-increasing amount of digital information about or for themselves, including emails, documents, portfolios of work, digital images, and audio and video recordings, and can edit, share, and distribute them easily over the net via blogs, personal webpages, peer to peer networks, or shared services."

• "These personal collections are often composites drawing material from the individual's private life, work, and education, as well as from external communities and content sources." (right on, my Flickr collection has family pictures, pictures of books to read, pictures I use for professional purposes.)

• it might be cheaper to search big collections than to organize now -- an observation attributed to Michael Lesk.

• Don't wait until the end to curate; there are big challenages of how to curate such collections -- I'm running into that problem myself, imagining using DSpace to manage my images while my collections are still being developed. A big challenge is being clear on what are working collections vs what are archives.

• "Continuous digital capture or synchronization is an approach therefore that may have significant advantages in a digital environment, and it would be interesting to see further experimentation and evaluation of this for collection development."

There's a really meaty paragraph on narrative creation that I'm still mulling over:

Selection and retrieval may be less significant for many purposes and for some content than it is for narrative creation: the ability to edit, organize, and interpret massive collections for the user. Some of the tools and skills required for narrative creation may be drawn from those of television or video production or database visualisation. Continuous capture in a personal video camera, like live footage of reality TV shows, will be incredibly tedious to watch. It is the editing, organization and interpretation of such material that makes the material accessible. If future personal digital collections have real breadth and depth, then tools supporting the overlay of specific views into that material and narrative creation will have critical importance.

I would agree from my own personal life that "current interests in family history may drive interest in transmission of memories held in personal digital collections."

I've wondered about "digital estates" -- I'm already wondering about how to pass on my digital collections to my heirs.

There are a lot of challenges ahead, which are actually ones I'm actively struggling with right now:

The growing abundance of personal data and collection outlined in this article will present numerous challenges to individuals, including: how to physically secure such material sometimes over decades; how to protect privacy; how to organize and extract information and to use it effectively; and for material intended to be shared, how to effectively present and control access by different groups of users.

Great article.

Today's pictures

Yesterday's pictures

Open Threads

[OpenThreadsOfCurrentInterest]

1. High power speakers coming to a class
2. Yahoo's MyWeb 2.0
3. Implications of tagging systems for scholarly communication
4. Google Maps API
5. Today's pictures
6. Yesterday's pictures
7. Open Threads

High power speakers coming to a class

SIMS 141: Search Engines: Technology, Society, and Business has an incredible line up of speakers!

Yahoo's MyWeb 2.0

Yahoo's MyWeb 2.0 is, at first blush, Yahoo's entry into the SocialBookmarking realm. The immediate question on the minds of several (including mine) is how it compares to del.icio.us. Yahoo! My Web 2.0 Quick Review offers a comparison.

I'm glad to see at least some basic support for the new service in the Yahoo APIs: My Web Documentation for Yahoo! Search Web Services.

Being at Berkeley, I'm intrigued that Stanford's TAP project is running Tags on TAP:

Tags on TAP combines the knowledge from several web sites and news feeds with the Yahoo! My Web 2.0 tagging system to provide synonym suggestions for traditional keyword tags. Both synonyms, such as suggesting 'porcelain' for 'china', as well as hypernyms, such as 'animal' for 'dog', are suggested. The system also tries to find related suggestions such as 'china' for 'beijing'.

A analysis of Yahoo's My Web 2.0 from Many-to-Many: Many-to-Many: Yahoo Social Search, Act II:

I got a sneak peak at this. You can save, annotate and tag any webpage -- and then share it with two degrees of separation in your Yahoo 360 network, or, everyone. Social discovery happens around time, people, locations and topics.

The timing of this release may have to do with Google Personalized Search. I slammed Yahoo for not moving from Personalization to Socialization once, and don't need to repeat myself.

Other links:

• Yahoo! Search blog: Search, with a little help from your friends

• My Web 2.0: Social Search (by Jeremy Zawodny)

Implications of tagging systems for scholarly communication

Peter Brantley wrote in reference to Yahoo My Web 2.0 and perhaps SocialBookmarking in general (shimenawa: Community Search and Scholarly Communication.):

If the Academy thinks that tagging and social search is useful, how will it overcome the laziness problem? How will it softly encourage or suggest appropriate or useful tags? Embedding this type of positive reinforcement into a tagging community has not been well addressed.

No one knows the the long-term usefulness of tagging, let alone in the academy. My sense is that there's a whole lot of experimentation going on, a shared feeling that something important is afoot, and the fear among big players that if they don't jump on it with something service now, they may miss out on the next-big-thing. I look forward to seeing what actually happens with the experiments, to seeing whether the academy will value tagging. While I wait for research findings to sort out the longitudinal evidence, I'd want to be part of the grand experiments. I'll add my own personal observations based on my limited experiences with SocialBookmarking:

• I have tagging to be immensely helpful in Flickr, though a huge number of my pictures remain untagged (6178 out of 8264 as of writing). It would easy to think, hey, 3/4 of his pictures are not tagged...but I am just pleased that 2000 of my pictures are tagged -- 2000 more than without a tagging system to begin with.

• I'd be interested in using the various SocialBooking systems if using them could be easily integrated into my workflow. Sometimes, I am willing to make the effort to push a URL into del.icio.us, extracting a key quote, and carefully tagging the entry. Most of the time, I just want to save the URL just so that I might be able to find it later. For many URLs, I'd love to have a software agent that would send all the URLs it would harvest from all of my documents (my email, my blogs, my wikis, my entries on mailing lists, my Word documents, my browser history) that I either read or write during a given day. And because I don't want to limit myself to a given system (since I want to use delicious, unalog, CiteULike, connotea, Yahoo's MyWeb 2.0), I would like the software agent to synchronize my URLs among all the systems I use. Finally, I'd like to have some software that would let me more eaily navigate the emerging social networks that cluster around the tags and references. (I wouldn't be surprised to find systems that start to get at this level of functionality and would be grateful to readers would could point them out.)

• Now again, I'm not sure how useful all this tagging is in the long term -- but I'm thrilled enough with what tagging can do that I would like to associate tags with any element in my information space, down to the most finegrain element (e.g., a specific letter in a Word document). Tags allow a break from strict hierarchical organizational schemes. For example, I think that the tagging mechanism in gmail is cool but would like that to be in my current email client of choice Thunderbird. (The last I looked, there was no tagging; perhaps an extension can be written to introduce tags into Thunderbird -- if it hasn't already been done.)

• As I create more tags in different places, they become an increasingly important entity in their own right. In the early days of my playing with Flickr, I thought that if Flickr were to disappear, I'd still be happy because I have all the original photos. As time goes by, I realize that having the pictures in Flickr has generated a lot of surrounding metadata: tags, comments, backlinks. All of that metadata would be lost to me if Flickr went out of business today because I've not backed up that metadata. It is funny to think that the surrounding tags might be of equal value to the original images in some cases.

Google Maps API

[GoogleMapsApi]

Today's pictures

Yesterday's pictures

Open Threads

[OpenThreadsOfCurrentInterest]

1. Today's pictures
2. Yesterday's pictures
3. Open Threads

Today's pictures

Yesterday's pictures

Open Threads

[OpenThreadsOfCurrentInterest]

1. iu.berkeley.edu has gone bye-bye today
2. Today's pictures
3. Yesterday's pictures
4. Open Threads

iu.berkeley.edu has gone bye-bye today

For reasons that are still unclear, the domain names iu.berkeley.edu and interactiveu.berkeley.edu were removed from Berkeley's domain name registry. So if you just dying to read my work blog , go to http://169.229.248.169:8000/rdhyee for now. The problem should be fixed within 24 hours and hopefully sooner!

Later: now, it's starting to work....more later.

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