Just watched this great video from Phil Borges on ‘Documenting our endangered cultures’ at TED.
I also love the idea of ‘Bridges to Understanding‘, take a look an act if possible :)
Ahmet
Jun 212008
May 052008
Recently Digg made an official adoption of RDFa (a set of extensions to XHTML being proposed by the W3C). While watching a tutorial about RDFa (below video) I asked myself how it could be possible to do it for Flash/ Flex document.
In fact bringing RDFa to a SWF itself is not possible, as I far as I know, but if you use XSLT and XML to provide the data to your SWF then you can also add the RDFa extension into your content, very easily!
Some more explanation on how to embeded RDF attribute on a XHTML web page:
Ahmet
Mar 212008
I’ve been very interested in tags lately, for me tags are the perfect combination between human and computer.
Computers can easily links a lot of tagged content together while human can easily tag complex document. Computer can’t extract the semantic of document and human can’t recall all the document concerning a topic…
Now let’s focus on why human tag. I’ve come across a very interesting study ‘Why We Tag: Motivations for Annotation in Mobile and Online Media‘, from Yahoo research Berkley. Also I’ve asked to my linkedin network why would people use tagged based search engines.
To sum up :
- People tend to use tag in a social & bookmark way: share links, find fresh information, and find back easily web pages.
- Tags got an incredible facility to summarize information: where, when, how, who, why … in a few words.
- Tags are mostly used for organization for ourselves and for the public while we where using tags for communicating with friends.
Why do I love tags?
I had the luck to follow a course about semantic database and even if it was passioning I couldn’t help myself to see it as an impossible goal to reach… How would we force people to define their content following a standardized structure?
With the birth of social powered content (aka web 2.0 for marketer) we can see the web as an interaction of multiple humans and hope for a clarification of content thanks to tags. Even human search and memory are modified with tag, so why won’t WE change the web?
What do you think, what is your personal relation with tags?
Ahmet
Very interesting article from ‘The blog of the Augmented Social Cognition Research Group at Palo Alto Research Center‘ about the effect of social tagging on memory.
[...]As reported in the paper, the results suggest that:
* In the type-to-tag condition, users appears to elaborate what they have just read, and re-encoded the knowledge with keywords that might be helpful for later use. This appears to help the free-recall task (a) above. In other words, users seem to end up with a top-down process and induces them to schematize what they have learned.
* While in the click2tag condition, users appears to re-read the passages to pick out keywords from the sentences, and this appears to help them in their recognition tasks (b) above. In other words, users seem to use a bottom-up process that simply picked out the most important keywords from the passage.[...]
They provide a small technical report to download.
While tagging affect memory it also affect research, it is interesting to note that the way we organize information in our memory will be used to find information in search engines. We are likely to use same keywords/tag to find information, our brain will also save the information using the same hierarchical patterns.
[...]Early adopters found that the automatic clustering of bookmarked URLs by their associated tags led to the discovery of other useful URLs on similar topics. (Shirky 2005) The number of sites utilising user tagging as a form of information organisation is increasing and tagging is beginning to be integrated into web sites with more traditional hierarchical organisational systems[...]
An increasing interest of tags is the description of content by human that could be used to help computers achieving semantic search on documents.
[...]Many user terms were found to be related to the author and intermediary terms but were not part of the formal thesaurus used by the intermediaries and, thus, not formally linked to the intermediary terms. In some cases this was due to faceting of terms for example ‘protein’ and ‘structures’ used separately in the tag lists where they were linked in the thesaurus or the use of abbreviations such as ‘PDB’ for ‘Databases, Protein’.[...]
This suggests that user tagging could provide additional access points to traditional controlled vocabularies and provide users with the associative classifications necessary to tie documents and articles to time and task relationships as well as other associations which are new and novel.[...]
I’m wondering if someone already saw a standardized description of social tagging and what you would expect to find in such a standardized format?
References:
Tagging Practices on Research Oriented Social Bookmarking Sites
Remembrance of Things Tagged: How Tagging Affects Human Information Processing
Ahmet
Just read this news from Tim Anderson’s blog,
it appear that the W3C working draft has a statement about the use of proprietary UI languages.
As an open, vender-neutral language, HTML provides for a solution to the same problems without the risk of vendor lock-in.
BUT:
For sophisticated cross-platform applications, there already exist several proprietary solutions (such as Mozilla’s XUL, Adobe’s Flash, or Microsoft’s Silverlight). These solutions are evolving faster than any standards process could follow, and the requirements are evolving even faster. These systems are also significantly more complicated to specify, and are orders of magnitude more difficult to achieve interoperability with, than the solutions described in this document. Platform-specific solutions for such sophisticated applications (for example the MacOS X Core APIs) are even further ahead.
Read the W3C working draft for HTML5
Even if HTML5 seems to be heading in the right direction:
- New Structure
- Block semantic elements
- Inline semantic elements
- Embedded media
- Interactivity
The only point where I see an overlap with Flash or Silverlight technologies is for ‘Embedded Media’ and ‘Interactivity’.
However those are just a minor part of what is feasible with Flash…
So no, for me HTML5 is not going to make me stop using Flash & Flex, for Silverlight it’s another question as I didn’t even started using it…
For the semantic part, well I’m looking forward to use those new HTML5 elements, but seems that I’ll have to wait a long time :(
Ahmet
A bit off topic for this blog but this news from Wired is still interesting IMHO.
A Geo-Information technologist, has been using satellite photography to help NGOs document atrocities in isolated crisis zones like Darfur, Zimbabwe and now in the Union of Myanmar.
[...]To catch human rights abusers in the act, Bromley will need a heads-up from the NGOs, who usually know what’s about to go down. “If enough groups learn of the satellites,” he says, “the odds increase that we can collect useful pictures” — pretty much anywhere in the world. Though the impact of such photos is uncertain, in matters of human rights abuse, global attention is never a bad thing. “Right now, we take what the NGOs already know and prove it,” Bromley says. “But my job’s not done until we put a stop to it.”[...]
Although it is obvious that military research in technologies can brings positive points for the humans society (remember ARPANET?) they tend do hurt more than they help (accept this one like a personal comment without statistics proof).
Nevertheless I’m always happy when technologies help people and not injure them… Now the reasons of this post is to gather some comments about the possibilities to use Internet for Humanitarian (2.0 ?) goals? I’m sure their must be more useful things to do than just donate (but do it!). In my point of view donating is always admitting our fails in preventing a unacceptable situations.
Any idea?
Ahmet
Nov 292007
[Via TechCrunch]
Google is working on a new experience within their search result, offering a way to the users to customize their search (voting for or against a result). Unfortunately this behavior would be only for the users not for all the research neither than for a network of friends / coworkers:
It sounds quite obvious why Google doesn’t want to open the result to a voting systems (security, spams, relevancy,…). I’m quite persuaded that Google thinks the best way to deliver pertinent search results is to analyze the content of a page and it network of link. Meta tags proved us that we can’t trust people on the web, but meta tags were created by the webmaster (or any things / persons involved in the creation of web pages) and here I’m talking about social results. A platform like Digg proved that a lot of users can give a liability to a voting system, so why won’t Google trust the mass? |
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