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Updated: 26-09-2005; 10:16:59
Paolo's Weblog.
 Martedì, 30 novembre 2004
Categories, Topics, Keywords, Tags
Dave: What are categories? Hmmm, maybe I misuderstood keywords. What's the
diff betw categories and keywords? Isn't keyword just a simple case of
category? (Please don't yell at me.)
Since we have been working with topics and categories both to author ENT, an RSS namespace, and for our own topic based RSS aggregator, K-Collector, I have asked myself the same question many times: here's my 2 cents.
I have always thought about RSS categories in the same way as the term
is used within Radio UserLand: a category is a channel I can route
content to. This post could, for example, belog to the "technology"
category.
Topics (or keywords or tags, I pretty much see them as synonyms) are more fine
grained, they do not represent a category or a channel a post belongs
to but describe the content of the post. For example this post could
use topics such as "Dave Winer", "RSS", "Categories" etc.
Within ENT and K-Collector, topics are grouped in classifications and a
topic cannot logically belong to two classifications. In K-Collector,
for example, we are using as default classifications "People",
"Things", "Places" (which we renamed Who, What, Where). Mercoledì, 24 novembre 2004
Fotolibra
Last week Matt posted about FotoLibra, a very interesting web service which:
makes money for its Members, by licensing usage rights in
their copyright pictures to publishers, then splitting the fee with
them like any agency. At the same time, it provides secure digital
storage for all those valuable images.
It's a good idea, we have all these high resolution images sitting on
our hard disks and who knows, maybe somebody could make a profit with
them and we could even get a piece of the action.
But hey... as I just posted, I'm already uploading my pictures on Flickr...
Legally this is not an issue, on Flickr I choose an Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs
CC License, which means that while Flickr is managing the NonCommercial
usage of my images, FotoLibra could manage the Commercial one.
And since all my pictures on Flickr are available as an RSS feed, FotoLibra could actually pull my images from my Flickr account without forcing me to upload them twice.
Amazing how open standards make integration easy, at least from the technical POV ;-)
Flickr Calendar
The calendar view is one of my favourite Flickr features, it's why I try to post at least a picture per day. Venerdì, 19 novembre 2004
Blogosphere 2.0
Brent Simmons is writing about a better common denominator
among weblog editing software. I think he's right, we need to conosolidate those
technologies and features which have become part of our everyday activity and are
available on most platform in order to be able to move forward.
Brent and other developers should be spending their time thinking about
the next big thing, not about how to keep compatibility with some old featureless
app.
The challange is to gather enough consensus (mainly from vendors),
decide to call this Blogosphere 2.0 and start thinking about version
3.0.
Google and corporate blogging
InfoWorld: Google, which implemented an internal Web log system behind its
firewall about 18 months ago, has seen tremendous benefits from it and
may in the future consider providing tools and expertise for this
purpose to interested clients, a Google executive said. Mercoledì, 17 novembre 2004
Weird contacts
Just got an email via the Radio Community server mail a note page by somebody who apparently searched " send an email" on google.co.uk. Not as weird as the video call Euan got, but still quite strange. Venerdì, 12 novembre 2004
Blogs are evil
At least according to Dublin-based Research and Markets,
which apparently has a report which says that weblogs are one of the
worst things that can happen to a company. The good news is that Suw is defending the category and google will save us ;-) Giovedì, 11 novembre 2004
Msn Search
I wanted to try some ego surfing on Microsoft new search engine,
but all I'm getting is an error. This is good: it give us small
developers a story to point to when our beta software breaks :-)
PS - 2:27 PM: Dave: BBC covers Microsoft's new search engine. Cool, but 4 hours later it still doesn't work for me.
PPS - 6:27 PM: now it works... I'm not on the first page Lunedì, 8 novembre 2004
Comments
It's no secret I have never liked comments the way they work today. I
leave them on simply beacause having them the way they are is still
better than not having them at all (but sometime I'm strongly tempted
to shut them down).
Kevin Marks on Many-to-Many writes about comments:
If instead of commenting, you write a response on your blog, you are
standing behind your words, and associating them with the rest of your
writing. The social dynamics are very different; you think more before
responding instead of posting a quick flame. You can't really spam, as
you are only soiling your own garden.
During our trip to Vienna for BlogTalk, Matt came out with a perfect metaphor:
Imagine that you really don't like me. One evening you get mad at me
and drive over to my house where you daub the message
"Matt Mower is a total asshole" in bright yellow paint on my walls for
everyone to see.
...
Note that you haven't daubed your own walls with your message of
hate. I think it would be very different if that was what you had
to do. I think the inevitable consequence of that would be that you would have to learn to be more moderate or people
would stop coming by.
The good news is that Technorati is working for us :-).
Another piece of digital lifestyle
 Delicious Library is a very cool personal library management
application. It does everything a nice little database should do. Plus
everything a cool modern internet aware application should do. Plus the
little trick of allowing you to use your iSight to read barcodes to
keep your library up to date. Thanks to Euan for the link :-) Venerdì, 5 novembre 2004
Operating Manual for Social Tools
Stowe Boyd is announcing a new project produced by Corante: Operating Manual for Social Tools.
OMST is intended to explore issues surrounding the use and
utility of social tools, such as social networking applications and
other collaboration/communication/community tools that are increasingly
social in nature.
David Weinberger and danah boyd have also joined the project. Subscribed.
Democracy
Joi Ito:
Whenever Japan or the Japanese do something stupid, I feel bad and
guilty. Like it or not, I'm part of the "Japanese". Like it or not,
Americans are all Americans. I'm reacting, in part, to the notion that
just because you voted for Kerry, that you are not responsible for the
actions of your government and the results of your election.
Giovedì, 4 novembre 2004
November sun
The weather is beautiful in these days, sunny and warm. 25 C° in November is totally unheard of here. Mercoledì, 3 novembre 2004
Depressing
I must admit that the results we are seeing do look totally unbelivable from this side of the Atlantic.
Akma: If the Democratic Party can't win in a year when the incumbent
President is administering an unpopular, unsuccessful foreign war, when
a blockbuster semi-documentary made millions of dollars exposing that
President's short-comings, when the economy is uncertain, when the Red
Sox won the World Series -- under what circumstances can it win?
Yet, look at these numbers: apparently a significant majority of US citizen are happy with this administration, more than in year 2000.
Maybe this is amazing because of the reality distortion field in which
we live in the blogosphere. Suddenly we realize that most of the voices
we hear are actually coming from a minority while a silent
majority is choosing again a world leader who has already started cruel
wars based only on lies, a majority totally unaware of what's going on
in the rest of the world and and scared to death.
It's very, very depressing. Martedì, 2 novembre 2004
US Election day
All I can do is sit, wait and see. Good luck to all of us.
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