« March 2005 | Main | May 2005 »

April 30, 2005

Text: Plain and Simple

In the last few weeks, a trend has been growing towards simpler web design that looks more and more like unstyled HTML. Influential designer Tom Coates recently switched over to an extremely simple, almost austere, format for his blog and philosophized about it. Two days ago Ben Hammersley joined the fray with his essay on why simple is the new black.

I've been feeling a similar desire to simplify things when it comes to all of the web designing I do and I think it has a couple of sources. First, doing more and more of my online reading in my RSS reader means that my eyes have gotten more and more used to plain unstyled text, making the graphical web feel like a loud and shiny carnival show, when I click over to it. Sometimes, that's what I'm looking for, but it's not necessarily the most efficient mode for information transfer.

Also, as I've been using my text editor for more and more projects, it (rather than Microsoft Word) has become the thing I reach for to make daily text documents for whatever purpose. And thus, when it comes to printing things out, I find myself using HTML and CSS. Even though, on first glance, this sounds more difficult, since I've gotten to the point where I don't have to really think about the markup too much, I actually find that making documents this way can be simpler and, believe-it-or-not, faster, than using a behemoth like Word since SubEthaEdit doesn't fight me at every turn.

Finally, this shift towards the look of unstlyed HTML (because that's really what these new simple designs are approaching) fundamentally jibes with the practice of the alpha geeks. Danny O'Brien and Merlin Mann have argued that the tips and tricks alpha geeks come up with end up eventually trickling down to the rest of us because they're the ones that first encounter new problems (spam, organization or large amounts of email and files, constant interuption from IM, etc.) and because they're more likely to have the tools to solve them. For all kinds of reasons, alpha geeks seem to love plain text it helps them "see the trees for the forest, so to speak, without the GUI getting in the way of their work." This applies equally well to the reading of web pages, especially blogs which can prickle with tiny design elements just the way GUI apps suffer from feature bloat.

Basic HTML (or something that looks like it) is a way to reduce the amount of "GUI" on the information that you're trying to get to (or, conversely, to distribute). After all, even though the graphical web is a great thing, when it comes to text, I think that the book has got it beat.

Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Greg at 5:30 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 29, 2005

Bloggable Public Space

For each of the wifi hotspots around town, especially in public places with particular cultural cache or communal access, there should be a blog that anyone can post to. The catch is that you should only be able to post to the blog while you are actually in the physical space. So, to give a Portland example, you could only post to the Pioneer Square blog while you were accessing the wifi network that covered Pioneer Square.

The technical details are a little bit over my head, but I bet someone smarter than me could set up a blogging system that would only accept posts from computers connected through the particular IP addresses on those wireless networks (or something). Each blog would then become a kind of record of the physical space. If something interesting happened there people would record it and otherwise, the blog would just become an accumulation of different people's impressions of the place. We could supplement the entries with web cams of each of the places. As more and more of the cool places around town come online the network of blogs could grow making for a kind of virtual folksonomic map of the city's culture.

Tagged: , , , , , ,

Posted by Greg at 4:08 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 26, 2005

Google SMS Tipsheet Hack

A couple of posts ago (though more weeks than that do to my recent, and even more recently terminated, unplanned blogging vacation), I wrote about my discovery of Google SMS. I have since been using it happily and effectively to, for example, find the address of a karaoke bar while driving out of a bowling alley parking lot during someone's birthday party.

Yesterday, I found a little hack that will make Google SMS even better. First of all, it turns out that the system does more than just yellow pages-style lookup. With special commands, it does movie showtimes, weather conditions, trivia, stock quotes, etc. These commands are multiple and though intuitive, rapidly become fiendishly difficult to remember as they accumulate. Handily, Google provides a tiny little PDF crib sheet, thusly:

Now, taking a page from 43 Folders' Amazon Wishlist Hack, I immediately printed this out, cut it loose from it's sheet of paper, folded it in half, and dropped it into the accordion folder of my Moleskine so that I always have it with me. As Merlin says, "Swish."

Tagged: , , ,

Posted by Greg at 5:07 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 25, 2005

Making Stuff

I have a kind of obsession with being able to make stuff and with people who already can. It's not something I'm especially good at, making stuff. Now, I can write, play, and record songs. I can research and write newspaper articles. I can draw and paint pictures and take photographs. I can make websites. I can make websites that do things. I can make widgets

What I can't do is actually build anything in the three dimensional physical world. When I try to measure out and cut parts for a simple box, say, it always ends up as a non-euclidian (and therefore non-assemblable) hyper-box. I can't solder together circuits that work (mostly I make solder bridges and melted breadboards). When it comes to the kind of making that results in useable devices, gizmos, or doodads, of whatever complexity, I am pretty hopeless.

Lately, this divide between things I can and can't make has been seeming both more important and more bridgeable because of the omnipresence of Neil Gershenfeld. He's in the first issue of Make Magazine, on a podcast on IT Conversations, the author of a book that showed up in my mailbox. Unlike me, Gershenfeld can definitely make things. He is an MIT prof, runs the Center for Bits and Atoms, and teaches a class called How to Make (almost) Anything.

Gershefeld does "fab" -- Personal Fabrication. Basically, he's developed a system for combining a set of high tech tools usually used for rapid protyping of potential industrial products that allows people to design and build technologically and aesthetically sophisticated devices, for example Revolver, a three dimensional display made by spinning a single clear plane filled with embedded LEDs. Or a web browser for parrots. Or a sound proof backpack that will save your screams for later. He teaches relatively non-technical students (for MIT) to use these precision tools, which is apparently pretty easy to do -- in the IT Conversations talk he mentions being able to get someone started using most of the tools in a day.

Gershenfeld thinks of the Fab Lab, the $20,000+ worth of machines used in these kinds of processes as equivalent to the mainframe stage of the development of personal computers. He imagines a day when all of these tools become intigrated and miniaturized to the point where they can sit on your desk and become part of your normal life, just like the personal computer did, doing for manufacturing what the desktop publishing revolution did for graphic design and production. People will design and build quirky devices that just they or their friends and family will want to use. What will be the manufacturing equivalent of the family newsletter that was the pride of so many early desktop publishers? Also, I wonder about the "prosumer" market that this kind of revolution will create. Just as in music there are now many fine gradations between professional products and services and cheap eaasy to use lo fi toys I wonder what kinds of high level, professional grade manufacturing will be available to us all for only a small investment before too long and what objects we'll simply be able to "print out" on our desks.

Imagining this future, I wonder if learning to use laser and waterjet cutters, injection molding machines and microfabricators, will finally mean that I'll be able build a box where all the sides fit together flush.

Tagged: , , , , , ,

Posted by Greg at 2:05 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 12, 2005

Google Calling

Today at work, I was stuck with the day shift. Since I also closed the shop last night, I was operating on even less sleep than is normal for the highly-unnatural-for-me nine-thirty a.m. start time, which is never much to begin with.

So, in my semi-zombified state, I was pleasantly surprised to learn something new and seemingly quite useful when a former co-worker who now works at the Verizon store in the Lloyd Mall stopped in for a sandwich on his lunch break. Since I've recently learned some Flash for MFDZ (check out the new in-browser play buttons for the streaming audio of every track), I was asking him some things about text and graphical web browsers on cell phones imagining what I could develop to make Music For Dozens content available on them (this may be somewhat jumping the gun when we have, basically, no customers that aren't also parents of our artists, but it never hurts to be prepared, right?).

In the course of the conversation, Jobie showed me something really interesting: you can text message Google with a search query and they'll text you back with the results. Google calls the service Short Message Service (SMS) and the number for it is 46645 ("GOOGL on most phones," according to their website). Normally I would see this kind of service as another example of a technology looking for an application -- text messaging, in this case, which I've only ever used as a novelty to zatz someone I was already most likely sitting next to -- but Jobie, who spends his days selling people cell phone extras like text messaging packages, had a pretty airtight reason for its usefulness: the cost relative to 411 Connect calls. Verizon charges $2.99/mo. for 100 text messages. 411 Connect calls, on the other hand, cost $1.25 each. Looking at the bill that came today, this past month, I used exactly 2 of my available 100 text messages. That leaves 98 text messages that could have been used for 411 Connect calls, or $122.50 worth of 411 Connect functionality for $2.99. I actually made four 411 Connect calls for a total of five dollars, or about a seventh of my total bill. Which now feels like a lot for a function I could have accomplished with features I was already paying for.

It seems with this kind of economic logic (along with the cache that comes from its position in the storied Google Labs), Google SMS would be much more talked about than it is. Granted it doesn't connect the call for you, but as a trade off, it's much more flexible: giving you a larger number of results on broader search terms if you want them (all the results for "pizza 97214," for example). Anyway, never having previously been a person who wanted his phone to do anything other than make phone calla, I could feel another side effect watching Jobie demonstrate this feature: I could see it acting as a gateway drug to getting comfortable with text interfaces for web data on the phone and therefore leading into using it to check email and read news headlines, and check RSS feeds, and . . . suddenly this simple thing in my pocket feels a lot like a platform.

Tagged: , , , , , ,

Posted by Greg at 1:39 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 11, 2005

The Wired Tower and the Digitally Collaborative Thesis

Right now, I'm in the middle of reading an inspiring text book. Philip Greenspun is a long standing MIT denizen, a leading advocate for the construction of web-based communities, and the author of Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing (which is what I'm reading) as well as Software Engineering for Internet Applications, the only college level computer science text book on building web applications. I had never heard of him before listening to Doug Kaye's recent rebroadcast of an IT Conversation featuring Greenspun last night on the walk to work. It included some inspiring talk, since the ever-casual Greenspun built Photo.net, an online community with a quarter of a million users, by accident in something like 1994 to answer questions arising from the photos which accompanied his online travelogue, Travels With Samantha. Also, since the stated purpose of his Software Engineering for Internet Applications course is to teach the student how to build Amazon.com by him or herself, his experience has some applications to the current process we're going through making version 2.0 of Music For Dozens.

Anyway, the point of this post, besides praising Greenspun, was to talk about an idea I had a while back of which his writing put me in mind. It's a good idea, and one I'm now not entirely unqualified to try to execute. The background: at Reed College, my alma mater, every senior completes a senior thesis as part of the requirements for graduating. In most departments theses consist of an extended essay and research project, a kind of mini-dissertation. Mine was called "It's Not Just Academic: The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and the Marketing of Genre". It is 231 pages long with four appendices and 25 illustrations. There's a copy of it sitting at the far right end of the shelf above my desk bound in blue hardback and a number more in my dad's closet in LA and others scattered with other relatives, friends and advisors. Plus, as part of submitting the thesis for graduation, the library gets two copies, one of which they display in the Thesis Tower and one of which they store.

Throughout college, I would often, when bored of the airless art history basement, find myself on the second level of the thesis tower thumbing through the shelves for interesting or, especially, old theses. I remember looking through a political science thesis that conducted structural analyses of Hitler's Germany and Mussolini's Italy and was written in 1936. I would always come back to an amazingly fat two volume physics thesis dated over an impossible five year time span in the late seventies that had something to do with the grinding of lenses and one of whose volumes consisted entirely of tables of numbers. I was fascinated by them and many others.

My idea is this: both the entire content of the Thesis Tower, every word of every thesis written by a Reed grad, and the entire thesis process should be brought online.

First, the existing theses: The Reed library catalogues theses by title, author, and major, but they don't enter them into the larger library system on any level. I don't think they go out for Orbis or Inter-Library Loan. Also, while it is very unlikely that I will pull a particular thesis off the shelf because of a sitation of it in a book I'm reading or a recommendation from a faculty member of other student (the normal things that drive people to academic books) the group of them, when taken together, consistute something of a powerful database of knowledge.

Since most theses are narrow and relatively expert monographs on a particular subject which passed through the rigorous editing of the thesis process (about which, more in a minute) they are proximally authoritative and information rich. If combined, their full texts would constitute a kind of searchable encyclopedia students, and anyone else with an interest, could access through the web. A music major writing a paper on Wagner could do a search on Parsifal and find every reference to it in every older music thesis as well as English theses and French theses on the original myths which constituted it and German theses on Wagner's role in the intellectual history of the third reich as well as theatre-lit and art history theses on Wagner's theatre, Bayreuth, and it's role in the performance culture of 20th Century Europe, etc. In addition to all of these references, the search could return a list of a all of the relevant sources cited in the footnotes and bibliographies of the theses that mentioned Wagner in order of their popularity and their most cited passages (giving the student a very concrete place to start their reading). The search could also provide a list of current Reed faculty who have advised theses that touched on Wagner and therefore might be sources of additional information. It wouldn't be difficult for these and other kinds of results to add up to the point where they constituted a pretty thorough overview of any topic searched for in the archive. Also and secondarily, having all Reed theses in a database would be a pretty useful tool for finding out what subjects Reedies are interested in, what books they're reading and citing, and just generally what kind of academic output they're producing.

What about the process of writing a thesis? Downstairs in our basement office right this minute, under my printer and scanner, I've got a stack of scratch paper about a foot-and-a-half high. Most of it is printouts leftover from the process of printing my thesis three years ago. It is different for everyone, but in my experience, the thesis process, especially in it's second semester was a constant back and forth between me and my advisor. Passing pages of chapters to her, getting feedback, putting in the changes, printing more pages, reading her scrawled comments in the margin, scrawling my own notes for revisions during our meetings. At the end, during the proofreading and last looks period many pages just got big X's through them to indicate that they were fine (no edit marks) and yet were not part of a finished print out.

Microsoft Word already offers the option of saving a file as html. It would not be difficult to offer students a central place they could upload html files of their theses where they could then make them public, or only available to their advisors (or any other faculty or students they asked to take a look) via a password protected login. The system could log reader comments and associate them with parts of the text, allowing the student to easily look at the most recent comments made by all of his various editors and to tell whether or not he'd already incorporated the changes (this would be especially helpful around the ends of the semesters when many departments conduct 'mini-orals' in the fall and then full oral defenses in the spring and students are often overwhelmed when receiving edited copies of their completed chapters from four or five readers all at once and finding themselves facing the prospect of rectifying those changes with each other as well as their existing text). The software could act as a node to collect citations and resources as the student came across them or as the advisor thought of them and do any manner of other things students and advisors might find helpful to the collaborative thesis project. Further, at the end of the school year, the system could provide a comprehensive log of the process, showing when major progress was made in writing new pages, what types of comments were the most helpful in creating big writing breakthroughs, what sources provided the most insight. This report would aid both self-evaluation on the advisor's part since it would provide concrete feedback on how their advice helped, and the thesis grading process which is meant to take into account the process the student underwent in completing the project as much as the project's inherent qualities themselves.

Obviously both of these projects have potentially valuable applications outside of Reed if they were well-developed there. Universities are going to be putting a lot of energy into digitizing their vast holdings of information in the coming years and beyond whatever value lies in the simple process of scanning the texts themselves, most of what's to be won or lost in this will come in the design of the interface for this information: what it makes accessible and how easily. Also, since the inception of the modern university, the best teaching tools professors have had available have been unoccupied offices and chalk fragments that somehow retained a useable size. Isn't it time we gave them something better?

Greenspun's two books are almost textbooks for completing projects like this one and they do a good job emphasizing their value. His vision of the web populated by sites that let people work together to share information and solve each other's problems is a compelling one and worth working towards. And the clarity with which he approaches the engineering problems involved makes them seem nearly trivial. If a twelve year old can write Amazon.com, surely all these college students, graduates and professors can find a way to work better together through the web.

Tagged: , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Greg at 5:49 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 8, 2005

Stovepiping

Back in 2003, after the end of the war part of the Iraq war (don't worry, this is a post about music, not politics), Seymour Hersh wrote an article in the New Yorker titled, The Stovepipe. Hersh defines "stovepiping" as taking a request for action arising from intelligence "directly to higher authorities without the information on which it is based having been subjected to rigorous scrutiny." In other words, stovepiping results in intelligence failures when conclusions are allowed to pass rapidly from the lowest levels of the intelligence gathering apparatus, the ones with their hands directly on new information as it comes in at ground level, up to the decision making authorities many levels above without passing through the normal many-layered time-intensive vetting and checking processes inbetween.

In the case of military intelligence and decision making stovepiping can cause failures of caution and diligence resulting, as in the Iraq war weapons of mass destruction problem, in calamitous mistakes in judgement on globally important matters. But what about in fields where the stakes are much lower?

Sometimes, being a band in the music industry can feel a whole lot like being a piece of intelligence in the intelligence apparatus. There are endless and endlessly picky levels of gatekeepers through which you have to pass before the real decision makers -- the audience -- can even hear you in the first place: club bookers, music label reps, radio station programmers, and music journalists of many stripes and levels of influence just to name a few. And each of these gatekeepers has different, and often contradictory, criteria for what music they'll put their weight behind. Whereas the process for vetting intelligence is, at least theoretically, based on objective methods for verifying facts, the process for deciding which bands get attention from all of the musical gatekeepers is random and corrupt: tastes differ, favoritism is rampant. I don't think it would be too controversial to say that if the music industry was in charge of our intelligence gathering and vetting they'd do an even worse job than the actual military and intelligence communities.

The thing is they do an equally bad job with identifying and promoting good music. Mediocre artists filter up because of coincidences of the social network and their location, great bands that could be widely loved are inexplicably ignored. Just look at the parade of small overlooked bands from the eighties and nineties that are currently having their day in a much brighter sun: Mission of Burma, Slint, The Pixies, etc. So, where stovepiping is a disaster when it comes to military intelligence, it could just be the savior of the music industry, or at least its audience. In musical terms stovepiping would be any opportunity for an individual or a small group to choose one or more bands that are not widely known but that the group feels are excellent and expose them to a much wider audience without having to go through all of the normal industry filters.

With the PDXPOP Now compilation selection process, I've been lucky enough to be involved with exactly such a process. In addition to seeking out tracks from some of the best of Portland's many successful bands, we also openly solicited CDs from anyone who wanted to send them to us. We listened to music from something between 300 and 400 different bands, most of which none of us had ever heard. All of us were amazed at the high level of quality amongst these entries. Each of us found five or ten bands that we really liked that we didn't know before. And the best part of it is that now we get to put songs by these bands on a CD that thousands of people will buy and listen to. I'm sure that some of the bands that will end up making onto the comp (the process is not quite one hundred percent finished) will end up having success far beyond what would otherwise have been possible for them. It's been exciting to see bands that were in this exact situation before last year's festival and compilation, like Wet Confetti and talkdemonic, have so much success in the wake of the CD and festival.

One last, hopefully larger, point here. With the intervention of the computer and the internet into the creation and distribution of music the barriers to making music and puttting it where anyone can get it are falling away. However, this does not necessarily mean that the cream will necessarily rise to the top and the best music will suddenly be freed from the constraints of the music industry's gatekeepers. If anything, these gatekeepers, albeit in a new form, will become even more powerful as listeners fight not to drown in the rising tide of available music. The more music is available to listeners the more they will rely on filters to limit the pool of what they're exposed to, and while some of these filters may end up being electronic or social (Music For Dozens, for example, is going to offer both), there will still be individual people and entities with a tight hold on what people listen to. In this environment the kind of musical stovepiping that PDXPOP offers will become even more important than it is now since the potential for really great music going unknown will be so high. And that is something that neither listeners nor artists want.

Tagged: , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Greg at 3:39 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 7, 2005

FOAF, del.icio.us, and "The Net" (the Real One, the One We All Grew Up Reading About)

This post is a little different from others I've made. It is still an overly long and maybe less than precisely clear exposition on a technical issue of limited interest on which I have minimal expertise, so there's no reason to really worry, but the different thing about it is that it's not new. It comes from an email I wrote a while back to Brain Kuhn in the wake of the discussion that arose from my first post on Rory's blog. Chris and I were talking about some of this stuff last night so I forwarded the email to him. He recommended that I post it, so here it is, slightly edited to add in some necessary context. Enjoy!

One of the things that needs to happen for the web to become more a part of "real life" is that online communities need to have some of the advantages of real communities. I remember, as an early- and pre-teen, reading sci-fi books like Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game where the public sphere of the world would take place on "the net". Characters would have online personas that would, in turn, have political rights, be able to make speeches in public forums, that would become more or less famous, that would, in short, have complete public identities. Right now it can be said of certain internet "celebrities" that they have an identity on the web (Rory is an example of this within a limited community, Cory, within a larger one). They have a homepage, when they comment elsewhere, people know it's them, they have jobs in the physical world that are related to their online identities, etc. The system for online identity that I'm trying to imagine would enable this for everyone and, hopefully, in a way that is not based on celebrity as the cost of entry (as if we didn't place enough importance on that already).

Before moving forward, let me give you a miniature example of what I'm talking about. I'm sure there are all kinds of technical problems with what I'm going to say, but I'm not interested in those, I'm just trying to illustrate a concept by reference to an existing technology (that I happen to only understand in its barest outlines). The example is: FOAF (Friend Of A Friend).

Here is a quick link with a good description and some technical examples that I didn't completely understand: it's from the IBM developers' network.

The point of FOAF is to create something like an open Friendster. The way it works is that individuals create their own XML files in which they describe themselves via fixed unique reference points (their email addresses) and, more importantly, their relationships to other people. Then concatenating these various XML files allows a service to describe a social network (if Billy is friends with Sally and Sally is Friends with Joey, then maybe Billy is friends with Joey). The idea is that you could create your own self-describing XML file and then just point a service like Friendster to it so you could withdraw it if you felt it was necessary. You wouldn't be uploading a batch of your personal data to them that they would then own (and be free to do whatever they want with including charge you for, sell to the Nazis, or accidentally lose). Also if you didn't like a Friendster policy (like firing an employee for blogging) you could withdraw your file in protest.

Taking it one step further, it seems to me that if a trustworthy third party could verify a relationship (or, better, that there could be some kind of open protocol for this), by checking the XML files of both parties in a claimed relationship (Joey claims to be Sally's friend and Sally claims to be Joey's friend) then, we could start to embed public web identities in a network of trust that would establish identities beyond a reasonable doubt without reference to anything like credit card numbers or social security ids. (I think there are significant social benefits to reducing the dependence of digital identity security on these types of government and corporate-issued markers, but I won't outline those because I want to try to keep my focus here).

While the Friendster example of this has somewhat limited scope imagine the same thing applied to Google. Steven Mallett wrote a mobilizing rant on this subject. And then founded a group to do something about it: Data Libre. These areas are where data-decentralization of this type really becomes radical.

Now, here I want to do a little bit of a jump cut to talk about folksonomies before coming back around, hopefully, to link the two areas together.

All of a sudden, seemingly out of nowhere in the last couple of months, del.icio.us appeared with the concept of tagging (or at least that's how it looks from my a-historical seat as a recent arrival to these kinds of issues). Before we get too far, we need a definition of tagging. Here's mine:

Define: tagging. noun. the act whereby users mark certain websites with various words for a variety of purposes including their own future reference and public consumption. The idea being that the convenience to the user drives the action of tagging and then great social utility is derived from combining all the results. See also: folksonomy.

(A great discussion of the comparative merits of folksonomy v. taxonomy (the traditional library way) is taking place on Many-2-Many)
So, the juice for us here is that, just maybe, this solves the problem of credibility. On a web filled with, say, a thousand times the data, Google becomes less useful. Especially because the more "amateurs" are empowered to create data, the more the results for the most popular search terms become useless (I had a link to a more authoritative source on this, but I can't find it right now -- why didn't I tag it!?): when you search for Iraq, do you want to get the NYT or some Portlander sitting in the Red and Black cafe blogging a latte-drink-in? Now, if your search was based on tags created by actual people, and organized by what results were tagged with your term by the most people then this problem would be at least reduced (ironically, del.icio.us doesn't anywhere allow for sorting of results by most popular; I think they've got some kind of ideology about causing churn, with most recent results always at the top and their deep commitment to RSS-ing everywhere they can, rather than re-enforcing popular links by letting them rise to the top). Del.icio.us places their emphasis on another way of dealing with this problem, which is through filtering. You have an inbox there where you can subscribe to other people's tags, essentially indicating them as trusted filters of the web. You can also, through RSS, subscribe to any at all on del.icio.us. So you can get a feed of del.icio.us/atduskgreg/useful+web (all of the things I tag with "useful" and "web", which, since I mentioned it, is a tag combination I use to mark sites I find that relate to the kind of issues we're talking about here. That page has links to all/most of my online reading on the subject so far).

Now, I'd finally like to try and link my two areas (FOAF and tagging) together. I don't exactly know how to do this yet, but I feel like they could be related very powerfully to try to solve the issue of trusted content. Some kind of method for having the trustworthiness of a tagger (determined via their FOAF xml file) weight their tags in search results. So, if you have verified links with a lot of people as being a trustworthy tagger then your tags will play a greater role in determining tag-based search results. This is basically a way of enacting the importance of experts in giving authority to information without creating barriers to entry for becoming an expert (no degrees, no learning complicated taxonomies). This would also deter spammers, etc., since their FOAF would reflect their extremely untrustworthy status and so their tags wouldn't effect search results (you could, potentially, even set up something like a do-not-call list, where you could choose to specifically eliminate all sites tagged by a particular user from your results, or set some kind of floor where only people with a certain level of trustworthiness could contribute to your results; you could range this level anywhere from only your direct friends to just high enough to try to keep out bots).

Tagged: , , , , , ,

Posted by Greg at 5:13 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 6, 2005

My Old Boss Makes Good

My overseer when I worked at the Willamette Week a couple of years back, Nigel Jacquiss won a Pulizer Prize this week. The prize, awarded for investigative journalism, went to Jaquiss for breaking the story of former Oregon governor Neil Goldschmidt's sexual relationship with a 14-year-old girl while he was in office and his following use of the power of his office to cover up that relationship. Goldschmidt's secret held for 30 years before Nigel came along. And I can't remember the last time a Pulizter for investigative reporting went to a reporter at an alternative weekly, so this is more than a little bit of a coup for both Nigel and the WWeek.

I remember Nigel as a serious and helpful boss who always sought out the most serious public interest stories without regard to their flashiness. He deserves the recognition. As does the WWeek news room, which is scary good for any alternative weekly, let alone one in a city Portland's size.

Posted by Greg at 1:11 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack