Hello World

I've Moved!

2008-05-06T12:48:00.002+03:00

I've been wanting to for a while, but I never got around to it.

But it finally happened. I'm no longer blogging here.

Find me at my new blog address:

http://yaniv.golan.name/blog

You can grab my new RSS feed here:

New Hello World RSS Feed

Strange, strange world.

2007-10-09T17:14:00.001+02:00

It was only a short time ago that I asked:

But do you have a digital child anywhere?

In follow up conversations with friends, we've dared to speculate as far as a Facebook app that will let you have digital children with your friends.

Well, guess what. In this wild wild web, no matter how bizarre the idea is, someone has either done it or is doing it right now.

Check out the Make A Baby app on Facebook.

It's a strange world, and it's getting stranger by the minute.

Technorati tags: facebook, digital Children, Make A Baby, Exogeny

UnconfWiki

2007-09-04T19:28:00.001+03:00

GeekCon, the yearly gathering of the local geeks community, is coming up this weekend.

I'd like to use it to test an idea I had since the last KinnerNet.

KinnerNet is an uncoference created by Yossi Vardi. As such, the conference schedule is created, in the spirit of most other uncoferences, using a big white board on which people post their sessions.

This works great. I love watching the dynamics of this - the initial empty white board, the first person stepping forward and nailing down a slot with an idea, the rapid evolution of schedule, the informal conflict resolution...

But being a software-kind-of-guy, I can't help but wonder - can this process supported by a software tool?

Should this process be supported by a tool?

Will this process benefit - or suffer - from being supported by a tool?

My current thoughts are that if such a tool is to be of benefit instead of a hindrance, it should be modeled along the spirit of uncoferences. It should be flexible enough to accommodate rapid changes and evolution of the schedule, put a lot of emphasis on the individual and individual responsibility, and put accountability ahead of security and permissions.

The physical aspect may also be important. There is a certain undeniable charm in being able to approach the board, wipe out a session and move it to another slot. Can a tool reproduce this kind of intimacy with the schedule? Or will it take the fun away?

What are your thoughts on this?

Technorati tags: unconference, wiki, kinnernet, geekcon, geekcon2007, open space, barcamp

Exogeny #1

2007-07-23T18:39:00.001+03:00

You have friends on Facebook, followers on Twitters and Contacts on Flickr. You go online to see what your friends are up to. You form new relationships and friendship online. But do you have a digital child anywhere?

Are you sure?

Mike Marcus, a 34 y/o photographer and digital artist is creating digital children:

This is the world we now live in. A world where both the virtual and physical are becoming equally real. Where relationships between people do not depend on physical presence or even the ability to speak the same language. Where ideas and concepts exist outside of the brain of the individual in the collective mind of society where we call them memes. It is a world where a digital child is a serious prospect. If people can have cyber sex then why not cyber offspring? (source)

From the exhibition literature:

"The name “Exogeny” refers to the cultural practice of intentionally breeding outside of one’s cultural or ethnic community. The series is heavily influenced by the artist’s own experiences growing up in a segregated and xenophobic religious community and, more recently, as a witness to racial tensions between Israeli citizens and Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. The collection aims to “exogenise” or metaphorically reach out to the wider community by digitally merging the artist’s own self-portrait with those of others. The resulting images form “digital child” portraits; beings who appear real in all ways but who never actually existed. Taken together, the work forms a distinct body, all tableaux resembling the artist in some way while retaining the features of the models. Some of the images appear to be obviously male while others are androgynous. The original models represent a mix of races, ages and personality types but the final works homogenise into a uniform collective that defies categorisation. (source)

Oh well. In its own weird way, this makes sense. For Mike, it's a statement and an experiment. Me, I know it's going to happen sooner than we think.

Check out Mike's Exogeny #1 exhibition, opening Aug 2nd.

Technorati tags: Mike Marcus, Photographer, Digital Art, Digital Children

Facebook - no RSS???

2007-07-10T13:27:00.001+03:00

Yes, there is no RSS on Facebook.

Also, it's very much a walled garden. Its URLs are ugly, and its color scheme is boring. Borringgg.

And yet, it's the best social network I've used so far. In fact, I think their own description on the Facebook home page - a social utility - may be the best description for it.

Lifestreams are great, but the Facebook News Feed is carefully balanced, well thought of and a useful combined stream of most of the things I care about. And if there is something I care about which isn't supported yet by the News Feed (e.g. is outside the Facebook walled garden), you can count on someone creating a Facebook app that will add support for it.

With interaction models ranging from casual and lightweight ("poke is the new ping!", originally by Eran) all the way to personal messages, the social interaction rules defined and implemented by Facebook strike a good balance between sharing and privacy.

Of course, as wonderful as it is, Facebook wasn't really complete until now - but now that we introduced Yedda Questions & Answers for Facebook, I think we can safely call it perfect :)

P.S. Still, I'd love to have an RSS feed on my Facebook News Feed. Duh.

P.P.S.

Technorati tags: facebook, social utility, yedda, q&a, questions, answers, knowledge, rss, poke, ping

Yahoo OMG it's HTML!

2007-06-13T20:18:00.001+03:00

Yahoo recently launched Yahoo OMG!, a colorful sleek celebs gossip site.

Super-large image + title thumbnails on the home page smoothly become a preview of the item when you click on them. Seems very effective - and certainly visually pleasing! (these super-large thumbnails also happen to be of the same size and design as the super-large ad banners that are interweaved between them).

But, not being too much into celebs gossip, what really caught my eye is that it's all (almost) good old HTML. (Almost) no flash. Nice!

Technorati tags: yahoo, omg, flash, html, user interface

Twitter my Yedda

2007-06-11T11:56:00.001+03:00

Twitter is really growing on me.

So I am twice as happy to tell you about Twitter My Yedda.

You see, Yedda just learned to twitter. If you tell it to, it will automagically share with your twitter friends your questions (so that they can answer them), and your answers (so that they can see just how smart and helpful you are).

You can also tell Yedda to twitter your watched questions, the answers you like, and pretty much anything else you'd like it to.

It also does Twitter replies, so you can easily tell when the person who just answered your biggest question is also on Twitter.

If you're already on Yedda, set it up (it's really easy):

» Yedda > My Settings > Toolbox > Twitter

And if you're not on Yedda yet, hmpff!

Kudos to Eran for a wonderfully done mashup (and also for releasing the Twitter C# API!), and to the Twitter folks for being so helpful with this!

Technorati tags: yedda, twitter, mashup, integration, questions, answers

The Photosynth experience

2007-06-07T16:59:00.001+03:00

This one took my breath away. When can I have this?

From TED2007, through Idan

Technorati tags: Photosynth, TED, TED2007, Visualization, Image Processing, Photography

Hebrew is a hard language

2007-05-21T12:25:00.001+03:00

The Google folks are trying to eat their own dog food. But as it turns out, eating from right to left isn't as easy as eating left to right.

You see, the fact that Hebrew is written from right to left has been consuming significant computing resources since,well, the dawn of time I guess.

The issue has been mostly solved back in the 90's when Microsoft forced the "logical display order" standard (a.k.a implicit directionality, RFC 1556 and other names) on the industry.

And yet, check out this Google AdSense ad, appearantly from Google:

This ad translates into the following English nonsense:

Google - free from Gmail

Comfortable GB, less junk mail, 2.8 and more. POP storage, access.

Oh well. I am confident that Hebrew (and Arabic) will display perfectly soon after the introduction of peace to the middle east. Don't hold your breath on either one of them though :) .

Technorati tags: Google, Gmail, Ad, Hebrew, Right to left, RTL

JPG Mag Submission: theme "America"

2007-05-05T01:14:00.001+03:00

MS Yahoo Live

2007-05-04T17:43:00.001+03:00

Through Mashable: Microsoft May Acquire Yahoo for $50 Billion.

This rumor has been around before. It seems to be a tad more real this time - see NYPost article and SearchEngineWatch post for more sources, references and names.

This will be interesting, to say the least.

Will combining the efforts of the somewhat lame Live search engine with the search engine from Yahoo, the company that announced that it has given up being #1 in search create a real competitor for Google's most successful product?

Microsoft has toiled for years to shed off its "home desktop only" positioning and to become an Enterprise player. It wasn't easy, but it worked. Too well maybe. Because now, when Microsoft is trying so hard to join the cool kids playing on the Internet playground, the best it could do so far is the Live suite of services, with its oh-so-integrated but also oh-so-boring services. I hate to pick on stupid details, but did they really think that corporate blue is the best color scheme for Live.com?

Will the Yahoo infusion change this?

Oh boy. I just realized I might end up using Microsoft MSN Live Flickr. Scary thought. Well, in that case I'd like to direct the MS executives reading this post to here : )

Technorati tags: Microsoft, MSFT, Yahoo, YHOO, acquisition, rumor

Conspiracy Theory

2007-05-03T17:59:00.001+03:00

Everyone is talking about the Digg User Generated Revolution (that's UGR for you) story. Good summary over @ Blonde 2.0.

Me, I've got myself a nice little theory. I say that the whole thing is a conspiracy, architected by Kevin Rose and David Sifry so that Technorati has more stuff to index and Digg has more stories to be dugg.

What will be next? Will they be starting a war in the middle east just so that we have something to blog about?

Actually, that wouldn't be very hard to do : )

Oh, I almost forgot the most important bit:

This is a very special secret encoding designed to keep the AACS from discovering this post. Viva la revolución!

Technorati tags: digg, technorati, conspiracy, kevin rose, david sifry, UGR, revolution, HD DVD

Ambivalence

2007-04-30T11:48:00.001+03:00

It took me a while, but I finally got myself a new HTC TyTN smartphone.

It is an amazing piece of engineering - the sheer amount of functionality is amazing, and the cool sliding keyboard is a huge plus.

I love this tiny machine. It does just about everything, all wrapped into a not-too-large phone form factor.

Except it sucks.

I've been a loyal NOKIA user for many many years. Probably over 10 years by now. And since day 1, I've always appreciated the effort the NOKIA folks put into making their phones usable. The big things and the small things.

Like maintaining "shortcuts" across versions in a consistent manner.

Like the fact that the green and the buttons always do what I expect them to do - in every scenario, the green means the same - "Comeon, do that default thing that I probably want to do here and skip all the prompts", while the red one consistently bails me out of whatever prompt I am at.

And the keypad, while only a keypad and not a full size keyboard, works right. It automatically switches between numeric and alphanumeric modes exactly when I expect it to.

Using a NOKIA phone as an alarm clock "just works". I can set the alarm with my eyes closed, with a few keystrokes. And it will go off, even if the phone is in "silent" mode - in fact, even if the phone is turned off. It's been like that since my first NOKIA phone, and it stayed that way through the various operating system upgrades and form factor changes. Because it makes sense.

Now contrast that with the HTC TyTN.

The TyTN also has a key that lets you exit the current screen without making any changes. On the PC, this key is called "Escape". In Windows, you also have the "Cancel" button in most dialogs. On NOKIA, it conveniently maps to the Red key.

On the TyTN, the button that cancels the current screen is called "Ok". Which the exact name of the standard Windows button that performs the exact opposite function.

Plus, in many screens on the TyTN you get a visual "OK" button at the top right of the screen. Whose function is identical to the Windows OK button, but the reverse of the hardware OK button.

So when you'd like to tell someone using the TyTN to close a screen without making any changes, you should tell them "Use the OK button. NOT the one on the screen! The other OK!".

Right.

The TyTN also has an actual "confirm and do the default" button, which works sometimes, and has no name. It's that key in the middle of the navigation pad, or a click on the scrollwheel.

Ughhh!

The scrollwheel is of course conveniently placed opposite from where it is on the Blackberry. And its placement is designed thoughtfully, so that its nearly impossible to push it down it without accidentally also pushing the machine "Power" button.

Which, quite naturally, doesn't really turn it off. It just turns off the screen.

I could go on and on about how hard it is to actually place a call using the impossible-to-navigate contacts list, the mostly-useless yet dominating hardware video call button, the impossible-to-find camera shutter button, and much more. But you get my drift :)

Of course, many of the issues stem from the underlying Windows Mobile 5 operating system. Windows Mobile 6 promises to fix some of these issues.

Naturally, being the technophile that I am, I will upgrade to Windows Mobile 6. But then, I've been using Windows Mobile since the CE 1.0 days, and I've hated each and every version, so I'm not really holding my breath.

P.S. If you insist on using a Windows Mobile device, do yourself a favor and get the Spb Phone Suite, it makes the pain almost bearable.

Technorati tags: HTC, TyTN, Windows Mobile, NOKIA, Usability, Rant, Spb, Spb Phone Suite, Smartphone

To Photo Splice or not to Photo Splice

2007-04-29T12:29:00.001+03:00

There is a button on the page! and when there is a button, well, you know, some people just have to press it. Just to see what it does :)

So, I clicked Photo Splicer on FeedBurner, just to see what it does. And then I left it on.

You see, FeedBurner (FeedBurner rocks!) Photo Splicer pushes the stuff I post on Flickr into this blog RSS feed. I guess you could call it "an identity merger" - Deb would love this.

But Idan doesn't. In fact, he took the time to complain about it. So I turned it off.

So long Photo Splicer. Welcome back split identity.

Speaking of split identities, shush... don't tell anyone yet. Still too busy to complete the move. Maybe in a few days.

Technorati tags: FeedBurner, Photo Splicer, Identity

Meet Gillette, your new government agency

2007-04-16T01:26:00.001+03:00

Got to love the TSA (<-- link love!).

I am on my way to Web2Expo. In the spirit of the Butterfly Effect, a car crashing into an aircraft in Paris delayed all flights from Israel to NY. That's a good start.

Spent hours on the phone, got on standby, bla bla, made it to an alternate flight (no, it wasn't easy), missed the connection to SF by 15 minutes, bla bla, new connection delayed by 1.5 hours (and still counting). But the real highlight so far was the TSA supervisor.

Following the New and Advanced "3-1-1" branded TSA rules about clear, 3 oz bottles, I did exactly that - got several clear 3oz bottles, and put the stuff that I need to take with me when I travel in them. And this was fine with the TSA during the last 3 or 4 trips.

But today, they realized that actually, since these bottles do not have a commercial company label attached to them, they don't know what its inside and therefore cannot allow them.

You have to ponder. Now, if I wanted to do evil, how hard would it be for me to take a commercial bottle with a nice label, empty it and fill it with a malicious substance?

And is Gillette now a government agency, in charge of approving liquid substances on board?

And by how much exactly did the cosmetics companies profits increase as a result of these amazingly smart decisions by the TSA?

Technorati tags: rant, TSA, Web2Expo

FoxyTunes Planet is awesome!

2007-04-05T12:16:00.001+03:00

FoxyTunes opened up FoxyTunes Planet, which has been in a private beta for a while.

Check it out, it's pretty amazing.

When I first heard about it, I thought it'd be a complementary service to their popular browser add-on. Turned out it's actually a full featured, rich, personalized all-in-one standalone music portal.

I love the implementation. Again, when I saw the earlier versions I thought it's too much. But looking at the final result, it's slick, clean, well thought of. Kudos to Alex Sirota and the team!

Technorati tags: FoxyTunes, FoxyTunes Planet, Music

From Manhattan to London, The Google Way

2007-04-05T11:43:00.001+03:00

Would you like to get from Manhattan to London? Check out the route suggested by Google Maps:

In case the drawing isn't clear, check out step 14 in the instructions:

That's right. Have a good swim!

(Courtesy of Gilad Judes)

Technorati tags: Google Maps

A Mega-Crawler for the rest of us

2007-04-04T20:04:00.001+03:00

Do you get this urge sometimes, to query the entire web for something?

Do you wish you had your own Mega-Crawler?

I mean, it's not like you can go to Google and type in some box

SELECT TAG
FROM PAGES
WHERE DOMAIN(PAGE-URL) IS IN "domain1, domain2, domain3"

Lunch took a long time today, so Eran and myself had some time to brainstorm a bit about a crawler-for-the-rest-of-us:

Crawler code would be hosted on Amazon's EC2
The data would be stored on Amazon's S3
Anyone can add "post-crawl-processors" which will post-process crawled pages (build a full text index, extract microformats, calculate rank...). The persistent data generated by the post-processors will also be hosted on S3.
Anyone can submit URLs to be crawled. The system will automatically fork from these URLs to any other discovered URL. Eventually, the entire web will be crawled.
API for querying the crawl data, or the data generated by the post-crawl-processors.

Who will pay for this? Companies and organizations who wish to use this data:

The basic crawling code will be divided among the "subscribers". Initially, small database, low costs. Later, larger database, more subscribers, costs (hopefully) remain low.
The cost of a post-processor (CPU, storage) is divided by the number of subscribers the post-processor has. The more useful it is, the more subscribers will use it, and the less each will pay. If it's a proprietary post-processor, no need to share it, but it will naturally cost more (being used by only 1 subscriber).
Retrieving query result will cost by bandwidth.

The general idea is pay-as-you-use, with prices going down as more subscribers use the service. No one makes money (well, except for Amazon of course), everyone sharing costs, IP (post-processors) can be shared or protected. The more you consume, the more you pay. The more you share, the less you pay.

This is very rough of course. But what do you think? Is it feasable? Is it interesting?

Technorati tags: crawler, mega-crawler, search, open source

Choose-your-own Google Ads

2007-03-28T16:06:00.001+02:00

I was reading this blog (wonderful source for photography tips, thanks Gabi!) when I noticed something I haven't seen before:

Notice the "Ads by Google: View ads about: [ ]" area. Once you type in a search term, you see page with Google text ads related to the search term.

Is this a Google Ads feature I missed or some kind of Google Ads experiment? The concept of asking the user to proactively ask to see ads on a specific topic is interesting, to say the least.

Technorati tags: Google, Ads, Advertisement, AdSense

Oh, the Places you'll go!

2007-03-22T15:47:00.001+02:00

I received this wonderful gift from Jonny Sacks (our newest board member) - "Oh, the Places You'll Go" by Dr. Seuss:

And will you succeed?

Yes! You will, indeed!

(98 and 3/4 percent guaranteed)

Of course, in real life, 90% (or is it %50) of

startups fail. But, as I learned from Maya in the Social Web session, "statistics lie"!

Technorati tags: Dr. Sauss, Jonathan Sacks, Maya Lotan, Startup

KinnerNet 2007: RobotsFireEatersPowerToolsDragRacePeoplePeoplePeoplePeople

2007-03-22T12:37:00.001+02:00

Technorati tags: kinnernet, kinnernet2007, kinnernet07, unconference, israel

I got back from KinnerNet 2007 (the un-conference created by Yossi Vardi) on Saturday, but the effects still did not wear off. It was an exhilarating event, a 3 days (and nights) circus made of robots, fire eaters, drag races, jugglers, creativity and people – lots of fascinating, special, creative and positive people.

Only yesterday did I finish uploading the pictures to Flickr – all 213 of them out of, well, it’s embarrassing to say how many :)

Don’t miss Lior (Wishood) and Gil (UrbanSeeder) ’s cool Supermarket 2.0 video, and Eyal Gever (Gizmoz) and Gideon Weiler’s KinnerNet cult video.

The TheMarker COM.Vention conference was immediate following KinnerNet, on Sunday & Monday. After attending several amazing un-conferences, it becomes harder and harder to put up with the artificial rigid structure of conventional conferences. Suddenly it seems ridiculous to have to put up with fixed length, must-attend, one-speaker sessions and pre-planned orchestrated and exclusive panels.

Mesibo.Net - Invitation

2007-03-11T10:49:00.001+02:00

http://upcoming.org/event/156316/

Technorati tags: Mesibo.Net, Israel, Party, Internet, Invitation

TWS 2007

2007-03-07T09:53:00.001+02:00

The folks at the.co.ils [Hebrew] (one of my favorite blogs), which is focused on covering the Internet scene from an Israeli angle, have organized a unique event – TWS 2007. It's an opportunity for young Israeli web startups to meet, connect and present. Check it out.

Technoarti Tags: TWS 2007 the.co.ils israel internet web startup

A Moment of Quiet Contemplation

2007-03-06T17:54:00.001+02:00

I've upgraded to Outlook 2007.

I upgraded because of the integrated search capabilities. GDS and Lookout were both great, but I use full text search a lot, and I missed a tighter integration of the search results with Outlook.

So, now that the re-indexing is done (5 hours, thanks for asking), indeed I have a super-slick full text search capability on my 9 years worth of emails. Love it!

And, an unexpected bonus – it turns out that Outlook has yet another exciting feature. Every 2 minutes or so, my machine freezes for a few seconds. Every 10 minutes, when Outlook reaches into that deep void called the Internet to fetch my email, my machine freezes for even longer. So now I have these wonderful pauses, which I use for quiet contemplation.

They say that the new office took 5 years to develop. I guess that when they started out, the Internet was much faster than it is today, and CPUs were not as burdened, so they didn't really notice these pauses.

Oh well. Service Pack 1, I await you – in quiet contemplation.

P.S. I posted this with MS Word, in draft mode, and then hurried to check the resulting HTML. Gotta give it to them - very minimal features, but sparkling clean HTML. Nice!

Technorati Tags: Outlook Outlook 2007 performance rant

OpenLaszlo 4 vs. Flex

2007-02-26T17:57:00.000+02:00

My post on Adobe Flex and why I don't get it raised a bit of commotion. In particular, Ryan Stewart posted some well articulated objections to the points I raised, and most of the comments on his post seem to support his view. You can read my response to Ryan here.

Dan McWeeney commented on my original post and pointed me to OpenLaszlo 4, which was a delightful find: Modular, component-based XML syntax for declarative programming, JavaScript 1.3 with 1.4 extensions as the programming language. And, best of all, OpenLaszlo has an open output architecture, with support for Flash, Flash Lite 2 (for cell phones) and – standard DHTML + CSS + JavaScript 1.3. Plus there is no reason why it couldn't support Java, XUL or Avalon as well.

RUB – Refresh, URL addressability and Back button support is not part of the basic programming model, but can be added in a reasonable manner using built-in, documented functions. I'd love to see this becoming part of the declarative syntax instead though.

Check out this stunning LZPIX sample app, which implements cool Flickr picture search using OpenLadzlo 4 rendered to DHTML. It's almost had to believe that it's HTML + JavaScript underlying it. So hard to believe that I had to peek inside with Firebug, just to be sure :)

It can even be deployed as a desktop application – a good example of which is Pandora, which is built using OpenLaszlo.

For more info, check out Don Hopkins overview of OpenLaszlo.

Technorati tags: OpenLaszlo, Flex, Adobe Flex

Bye bye Blogger lables

2007-02-26T12:44:00.000+02:00

I removed the labels element from the blog.

Being an obsessive tagger, I use a larger number of tags (labels. whatever). And having them presented in a long list consumed way too much space.

So, I don't see anymore any value in using Blogger labels over, say, Technoarti tags. I guess I'll be going back to using Technorati tags only on my posts.

I feel that this is one of these cases where a tag cloud would make much more sense...

Technorati tags: blogger, tags, labels, Tag Cloud, Google

JPG Magazine

2007-02-25T14:05:00.000+02:00

JPG Magazine uses a collaborative, user-generated approach to create a beautiful, offline photography magazine.

This is quite unique. Do you know of other services that do the same for other types of content?

Here is the photograph I submitted to the upcoming "Entropy" theme for the next issue:

Technorati Tags: JPG JPG Magazine photography UGC offline

Why I don't get Adobe Flex

2007-02-22T10:14:00.000+02:00

I don't get Adobe Flex.

Actually, Flex looks great. Solid architecture, slick IDE, modern declarative markup language and scripting language, lots of productivity features.

Still, I don't get it. Why would an architect choose to rely on a proprietary runtime, available only from a single vendor to do stuff that can be done just as easily with standard XHTML, CSS and JavaScript?

I chatted on Flex with Mark Anders from Adobe. Mark worked on ASP.NET from 1998 until 2003, and then co-founded the Flex effort at Macromedia.

Mark demoed Flex at FOWA today, building a functional, slick Flickr tag browser in few minutes using the Flex markup and practically zero code. The thing is that the exact same day can be built with just as easily with an environment like ASP.NET, with the output delivered to the client using standard XHTML CSS and JavaScript. So why Flex?

Is Flex Adobe's way of leveraging the huge Flash developers community and lure them into a vendor-lockdown?

According to Mark, Flex is a way to avoid the browser compatibility issues, especially with regards to CSS and JavaScript. It's a reliable, predictable runtime that works the same way on all browsers.

Flex must have been a huge engineering effort. Could the same effort have been dedicated to delivering the same productivity and reliability advancements, but with the markup and the script "compiled" into XHTML + CSS + JavaScript instead of proprietary Flash runtime bytecodes?

And what about search engines and other content-aware tools, which cannot easily access the content delivered by Flex applications? And permalinks, which do not work as naturally with Flex as they do with HTML? How do you bookmark a piece of content in a Flex application on Delicious? And - which surprises will you run into when you hit the browser's Back button?

The upcoming Apollo server platform from Adobe promises to deliver support for rich web applications that work equally well offline and online. This is something I've been looking forward to for a long time. Of course, it will require the Flex runtime to provide this functionality. Technically speaking, I don't see a reason why the same capability cannot be delivered through standard XHTML + CSS + JavaScript + a client-side plugin, which could be a subset of the Flex-required Flash runtime.

Given Adobe's track record with Flash and its 98% penetration, I think it's safe to guess that Flex will be hugely successful. Still, I can't help but feel that in a sense, it's a step backward. Or at least sideways.

Technorati Tags: Adobe Flex Mark Anders Flex Standards

Outlook PST is backup-hostile

2007-02-22T00:55:00.000+02:00

Backup is important. We all know that. Of course I backup! Except that sometimes I don't.

My external hard disk crashed a few weeks ago. Literally crashed - it will, unprotected, from about 1 meter high. It contained several years worth of my digital photos.

Of course I had it backed up, only not recently… recovering the damage was a prohibitively
expensive and unpleasant experience.

I've gotten much better at backing up since then. I've looked at several different backup solutions, and end up settling for SyncBackSE, which is backing up the data to a low-cost NAS storage. Which is probably a reasonable solution.

But the solution I'd really like to use is one of these online backup solutions, like Carobonite or others. I don't want my backup to reside on my home network. I don't want to worry about setting it up and maintaining it. I'd love to have my stuff accessible when I'm not connected to my home network. And online backup solutions can do all that.

And the number one reason I can't do that this is Microsoft Outlook and its monolithic PST file. I am hooked on Microsoft's Outlook, I've been using it for years and I love its features and smooth integration. But Outlook stores its data in a single binary file, which can get rather large.

My 3.85 Gigabyte will take years (alright, not years, but a very very long time) to backup over an Internet connection. But worse then that - every new email that I receive or send, or any other minor change will cause this file to be marked as "needing backup", and the entire 3.85 GB will need to be re-transferred.

I will be switching to another desktop email solution the moment I find one that (a) allows me to read, write and search my emails, calendar information, contacts and tasks when I'm offline and (b) uses a more sensible and backup-friendly storage scheme.

Toys for men

2007-02-13T09:53:00.000+02:00

When I first tried Gillette's new Fusion blade, I loved it so much that I felt an urge to tell someone about it. And then I forgot :)

But when I saw this question on Yedda, I knew I have to answer it:

Changing from Mach3 to Fusion
I'm considering changing from Mach3 to Fusion.
Has anyone tried it yet? Is it really better than Mach3 ?
Topics: men, fusion, shaving, razors, gillette, mach3
Asked by ekuiro on February 12, 2007
View the entire discussion on Yedda

And here is my answer:

Changing from Mach3 to Fusion
Well, having "upgraded" in the past from Gillette Sensor to the Sensor Excel, and then to the Mach 3, and being very happy with the Mach 3, I promised myself that this time I will not give in to Gillette's marketing blitz and will refrain from moving to the Fusion.
Surprisingly enough, I failed, and found myself grabbing it just before approaching the checkout at the drugstore. Oh well. A man gotta have his gadgets.
Having used it for a few days now though, I am glad I did this! The Fusion is actually very good. The blades are excellent and result in a smoother shave, the plastics around them feel much better, and the vibration thingie is significantly stronger then before.
The coolest thing though is the extra blade at the back, which lets you explore facial angles where no blade has been before :

Topics: men, fusion, shaving, razors, gillette, mach3
Answered by Yaniv on February 13, 2007
View the entire discussion on Yedda

Technorati Tags: Yedda Gillette Fusion Gillette+Fusion

Blogger labels and Technorati tags

2007-02-01T10:57:00.000+02:00

Several weeks ago I've upgraded my blog from the old blogger interface to the new one. It was quite painful at the time, but hey, how can I not try a new toy.

The new blogger interface supports ~~tags~~ labels. The labels are even marked with the Rel-Tag microformat.

Too bad that the migration process did not migrate my Technorati tags (which are also marked with Rel-Tag) to Google labels. It would have been a considerate move on Google's part, especially when they took their time adding this now-standard rel-tag support.

So, I went and manually edited the older posts, copying the Technorati tags to that nice comfy Labels box.

And now Blogger is republishing my entire feed.

Oh well. Sorry for the mess!

"28% of Net users tag" ?

2007-02-01T08:59:00.000+02:00

David Weinberger, a fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society (and one of my favorite RSS feeds) points on Joho the Blog to a new Pew Internet & American Life Project report, by Lee Rainie, and summarizes it with the title "28% of Net users tag".

Back when we started Yedda, the choice to go with free form tagging was a non-trivial one. Tagging was not yet mainstream, and the concept often met objections from early testers.

Still, we chose to go with free form tagging because we strongly believed that this is the only approach that can support the dynamic, ever-evolving nature of human interests & knowledge.

However, we quickly noticed that the word "tag" often resulted in a "huh?" blank stare, so one compromise that we did make is renaming it from "Tags" to "Topics" – surprisingly enough (or not), this choice had an immediate positive impact on people's acceptance of this approach.

"28% of Net users tag" sounds great. It sounds very mainstream, and it makes me feel good about our choice. But further reading reveals that the actual question that was asked is:

Please tell me if you ever use the internet to categorize or tag online content like a photo, news story, or a blog post

Well, categorization is very different from tagging. In fact, the word is often used to describe a process that, while having the same objective, is quite the opposite of free form tagging. (Well, in Wikipedia-speak, the term categorization applies to both activities. But you get my drift. I assume that the people who answered this question did not consult with Wikipedia first).

So, while the fact that %28 of Net users actually make the effort to add that meta-data to their content and to other people content (be it in the form of categories or of free-form tags) is great, I don't think it can be summarized with "28% of Net users tag".

It'd be interesting to see a similar report focusing on free form tagging. Pew?

Technorati Tags: Tagging David+Weinberger Yedda

Flickr Machine Tags

2007-01-28T13:03:00.000+02:00

Flickr recently announced a new feature called "machine tags". From their announcement:

"Machine tags" is the technical term for the extra hamsters we've added to the Flickr servers to formalize how these sorts of tags are treated. I've included a "Ceci n'est pas un FAQ" below with all the details.

Machine tags follow a lightweight format:

namespace:predice=value

The namespace defines a class or a facet that a tag belongs to ('geo', 'flickr', etc.) The predicate is name of the property for a namespace ('latitude', 'user', etc.) The value is, well, the value.

Like tags, there are no rules for machine tags beyond the syntax to specify the parts of a machine tag

Tags that follow this format are automatically grouped under "machine tags" in the Flickr user interface, and can be hidden or shown by the user.

Machine tags, while not having a name, have been around for a while, their usage driven by people's urge to organize tags and give them specific semantics - and then, to build applications on top of this, assuming this specific semantics. I've discussed this a while ago, when I was younger. Back then, I suggested the name "applitags" for this feature, and suggested a slightly different format for differentiating Machine Tags (or applitags) from People Tags:

x:namespace.tag[=value]

I do wish the Flickr folks would have gone a step further and formalized the namespacing issue as well, as this would have made software built on top of Machine Tags more reliable. Still, this is an important move, coming from one of the tags-trend-setting players.

Are we re-building XML from the ground up all over again though?

Technorati Tags: flickr Machine+Tags applitags XML tagging

Wishood - make them, grant them, exchange them.

2007-01-02T18:10:00.000+02:00

Wishood wants to help you fulfill your wishes. It's one of those simple, pure ideas. Wishes - make them, grant them, exchange them.

I've seen earlier versions of Wishood, but this one, with the cool Wisherizers is a significant step forward.

Wishood is young, and these folks still have some more work to do (say, when will I be able to embed my wish list in my blog?). But it's slick, fun, and hey - what better way is there to start off 2007 then by making someone's wish come true?

Check them out, or read a more thorough review over at Go2Web2.

Technoarti tags: startup web2.0 wishood

5 things & 5 taps

2006-12-17T15:50:00.000+02:00

People are people are people. Just put in place an open-ended platform, the basic means for communication and as few rules as possible, and they quickly turn it into one of the oldest form of human interaction – a game!

You can see this happening all over the place, with Flickr being a prime example. There are so many different "games" taking place on Flickr at any given time, usually involving tagging and groups. These games spread informally, through one person virtually tapping the virtual shoulder of another, usually accompanied with a link that explains what the game is about. The game entry barriers are very low – tag your own stuff or someone else, post a comment with a pre-agreed template, etc.

Now there is a game spreading through the blogosphere, and my shoulder has been tapped by the wonderful Deborah Schultz. And in the spirit of the game, I will now proceed to tell you five things you may not know about me, and then tap the virtual shoulders of five other bloggers:

1. I often forget my own phone number, but I remember the value of PI up to the 8 decimal digit. Go figure.
2. I am not good with backups of my personal stuff. This just cost me $2300 (hard disk recovery fees) last week.
3. I love what I do. But if I couldn't do what I do, I'd want to be an architect.
4. By the time I finish reading the time from an analog watch, it's usually already at least 1 or 2 minutes past the time I started trying to read it.
5. I love good movies - or any movie, no matter how bad it is, that contains anything that can be labeled Sci-Fi or Fantasy.

Tap time:

Tara Hunt, Eszter Hargittai, Derek Anderson, Kaliya Hamlin, Uri Baruchin

Technorati tags: DerekAnderson EszterHargittai KaliyaHamlin TaraHunt UriBaruchin blog-tag

On Widgets and Widths

2006-11-28T16:33:00.000+02:00

I really enjoyed reading this fascinating Q&A on the recommended width for blog widgets, which quickly evolved into a broader discussion on widgets:

Blog widget standard width?
I am building a new widget that will be added by users to various blogging systems (blogger, WordPress, TypePad, MySpace, etc), most likely in the sidebar.
I am not sure what's the right way to go with regards to the widget width - should I design it to accomodate different widths, or is there a "standard widget width" I should assume?
Is there a minimal width that I can expect?
Topics: internet, software, development, wordpress, blog, myspace, widgets, widget, typepad
Asked by Jmm on November 27, 2006
View the entire discussion on Yedda

Excellent answers from Derek Anderson, from the Widgets Lab blog:

Blog widget standard width?
Jmm, (this may be long)
You are correct that Bloggers "expect it to work"
Yedda widgets resize to fit in the area they are placed in. This is a cool feature that I don't remember seeing anywhere else. However, I think that some users will want to be able to control this feature. Lets say TechCrunch wants to do an article featuring a Yedda widget. They may not want it to expand to fill the posting area. They want it to look like it would appear in a side bar.
Branding
While deciding what to post i came up with the idea of creating a Grazr widget that pointed to a specific RSS feed. In this case it was The Blogging Times.com
I titled the post "The Blogging Times mashed widget"
My bright idea was to add the code for this widget to the post I was contemplating writing. This way anyone that wanted The Blogging Times content on their blog could easily have it. (I just wanted to mash something other than potatoes)
Grazr.com saw this post and decided to take it one step further by adding the "The Blogging Times" logo to the widget.
This kinda gives the impression that TBT has a widget. (even though they don't)
This is what I meant by branding.
Feedback
I do not recall any widgets that have this feature.
We, as creators, are sometimes blinded by what we create. (does that make sense?)
Feedback isn't just for bug reporting. It's also for ideas. Widget users have great ideas for functions that widget creators didn't even consider. Get enough feedback about a certain feature...You see where this is going.
Enough of the longest answer in the world. If you made it this far...let me ask you a question...How many times did you yawn during this post?
Derek
Topics: internet, software, development, wordpress, blog, myspace, widgets, widget, typepad
Answered by deralaand on November 28, 2006
View the entire discussion on Yedda

Good stuff!

Even more answers on Answers.com

2006-11-22T20:25:00.000+02:00

User Generated Flame

Answers.com, the encyclodictionalmancapdia, announced on Monday a new partnership with Yahoo! Answers (also on Mashable).

(Disclosure: Yedda, where I work is a competitor to Yahoo! Answers)

This actually makes perfect sense to me… if done right, it would provide Answers.com with an effective method to keep their users happy even if they don't find what they're looking for right away.

The way YA is integrated into Yahoo! Search is a good example of providing searchers with an end to end scenario, converting a potentially-unhappy search user into a YA user, and eliminating one more reason for the user to leave the Yahoo Walled Garden.

This kind of scenario is not yet surfaced on the Answers.com integration, but the potential is there. In fact, without this scenario the value of the integration is somewhat limited given the questionable value of some of the Yahoo Answers content (e.g. "who here loves dogs like I do" ).

One thing that surprised me though – the Q&A on Answers.com is surfaced with absolutely no attribution to the people who created this content – the users on Yahoo Answers.

Hence, the users who asked the question, and - even more important - the users who have taken the time to answer this question - lose all credit and reputation related to the content they've created. Establishing your online reputation is one of the major reasons people share their knowledge on Q&A services like YA, QnA, Yedda, etc.

Though probably perfectly legal and covered by the YA terms of use, it still is a surprising move, coming from the same folks who've been so active in pushing Creative Commons forward by integrating it directly into their advanced search functionality and weaving it so nicely into Flickr.

Perhaps Brad Garlinghouse was right, and a cohesive vision – in this case, with regards to user generated content (oops!), crowdsourcing and users rights – need to be put in place over at YHQ.

Percentages are obtained from the Universal Mind and Intellect

2006-11-20T09:29:00.000+02:00

I've run into this manifest, describing the "Methodology of Spiritual Research" on the Spiritual Research Methodology web site, through Ami's post [Hebrew]. It's a fascinating reading in general, but one paragraph strikes me as exceptionally useful for all of us who have to come up with percentages once in a while:

4. How can you apply percentages to spiritual phenomena/attributes?

The study of the spiritual dimension is just as systematic and logical as that of the physical world. It can thus be quantified in percentages etc. These percentages are obtained in a ready-made format from the Universal Mind and Intellect through the sixth sense in a state of deep meditation. They are not obtained through conventional research methodologies.

So, there you go. Next time you need a percentage, you know now what to do.

Yes, I pay for two Flickr accounts!

2006-11-14T11:05:00.000+02:00

Three actually, if you also count the Yedda one.

The question of my multiple Flickr accounts came up several times in the last few weeks, in conversations with Eszter Hargittai, Deb Schultz, Ned Rosen and Lilly1975. I also happened to meet Caterina Fake last week, and when I mentioned to her that I am paying "her" for 3 different Flickr accounts, it seems a bit excessive even to her :)

You see, I really got into amateur photography this past year. I found that I really enjoy it, even just going on my own to shoot urban scenes for a few hours gives me immense pleasure. I also enjoy sharing it and interacting over it, which is what I do through my yanivg Flickr account. I shoot a lot, probably a few hundred pictures every week or two. I pick the ones I really like (usually from a photography point of view) to post to this account. The sets I use on this account are "thematic" – urban, people, reflections, etc.

Me enjoying photography also surfaces when I attend (un)conferences or other social-work-related events. I tend to bring my cam along with me to many of these events, and these photographs usually have a documentary / networking / social value rather then photographic value. I post these pictures to my yghelloworld Flickr account. The sets on this account usually represent specific events.

A lot of the people I know on Flickr actually freely mix the two, posting to their photostream pictures a mixture of their personal life, their professional life, and pics they just happened to like.

It may be somewhat of a vanity issue, but I hate the thought of flooding my carefully-tended yanivg photostream with tens of pictures of *gasp* people. The downside of it is that it creates a sort of a split-personality issue.

For me, my yanivg photostream is as far as I go with regards to displaying my photographic work. Contrast this with Ned for example, who makes his living from photography, and for him, Flickr provides a liberating alternative, where he can share personal stuff and work-in-progress, and document the process evolution as opposed to the final polished customer-ready result.

I guess that in a way this is the beauty of an open-system ended like Flickr. Flickr is a playground with basic building blocks (photos, photostream, tags, groups, sets), and each user is free to put meaning into this, and people from different disciplines and with different goals can still meet on a common ground.

It's interesting to compare that with, say, the newly-launched Six Apart VOX approach, which uses the notion of "neighborhood", hence defining a fixed terminology and meaning. Will "neighborhoods" work better then the generic "groups"?

2006-11-08T03:01:00.000+02:00

We were invited to participate in the Israel Web Tour, organized by the California Israel Chamber of Commerce and the Consulate General of Israel’s Economic Mission in San Francisco. This is the 2nd day of the tour, and there hasn't been a dull moment since it begun :)

One the day's highlights was a panel moderated by Michael Arrington, "The Impact of the New Web – Culture, Entertainments & Commerce".

In a room with a few hundred people, Mike asked – how many of the participants live in Silicon Valley? About half the people in the room raised their hands. Then Mike asked – and how many of you were born in Silicon Valley? Only one person raised his hand. I am not sure what the conclusion from this is, as you could draw several different conclusions. But this is clearly interesting.

Mike proceeded to introduce the panel participants – Keith Rabois of LinkedIn, David Tennenhause of Amazon, and Daniel Cohen of the Gemini Israel Funds – as representatives of "the old way of doing things".

Clearly in a provocative mood, Mike posed the first question –

Are we at the end of the beginning of the beginning of the end?

One of the interesting comments on this was from David Tennenhause: He's seeing a good, healthy supply of good people with good ideas. The problem he does see though is with the nature of the exits – because more and more companies get acquired, there are les and less independent companies and hence less companies who are able to acquire the younger ones.

Surprisingly enough, the YouTube topic came up. Mike noted that he didn't think much of YouTube when he first saw them. With no real technology, no funding, high costs and legal copyright issues, how did they end up succeeding? Keith came up with an interesting observation, that the network effect created by the fact that content creators send links to the content they create to their friends was underestimated in YouTube case.

Daniel Cohen noted that he would not invest in any company that bases its strategy on the Amazon S3 storage services, since in his opinion it takes the economics away. This is interesting, it goes against my instinct and what I would recommend to people debating this decision. I'd love to see his math.

Discussing business models and their importance, Keith shared his early PayPal days experience, reminding everyone that initially, PayPal was about beaming "currency" from one palm pda to another. Apparently, at one point they look at the implementation and figured that since they were using unique email addresses as the identifiers in any case, why not allow direct email to email as well. And then, some 50 or so eBay users stumbled upon this capability and added it to their eBay listing. Keith described an executive meeting in which this was discussed, and in which 2 of the executives said "What? Why would they do that? We should block them!". 24 hours later, they understood that they've found their business model.

Check out the Israel Web Tour blog, and more pictures from the event.

Web 2point2, Nov 9-10

2006-10-30T13:02:00.000+02:00

I'll be attending the Web 2point2 uncoference (San Francisco, Nov 9-10). The event is organized by the energetic Chris Heuer of the Social Media Club (a project of BrainJams, Inc). Check it out, it's shaping up quite nicely. Will you be there?

Popup menus - Flickr vs. Google

2006-10-26T01:10:00.000+02:00

A few weeks ago Google quietly opened up SearchMash.com.

While SearchMash is not branded with the Google brand, the fact that it is being operated by Google was quickly revealed and widely discussed:

(The lack of branding was explained by Google as an attempt to gather more objective data about user response to new interfaces).

The most surprising change for me was the behavior of the green link:

Since it looks like a link, and smells like a link, you'd probably expect it to - duh - behave like a link, and take you to the web page it points to.

This is not the case in SearchMash though. When you click on the green link, you get a *gasp* popup menu with options:

It's interesting to compare this to the approach taken by Flickr in their recent user interface revamp.

Looking at the menu toolbar on the top of the Flickr page, you'll notice a list of links, and a small arrow next to each one of them:

Now, it's interesting to note that unlike the Google interface, which sacrifices old habits to provide richer functionality, the Flickr menu manages to provide the richer functionality while retaining the class link semantics and behavior.

When you click the arrow, a drop-down popup menu opens up with a list of options:

Which is great. But, if you didn't notice the arrow, or you don't understand what is it supposed to do, you can simply click the link:

What's really nice though, is that once you click the link, you get the Latest Photos page - but you also get the same list of links which were in the popup menu listed at the top row of this page, so you're still able to navigate to them.

I find the Flickr choice of user interface a much better balance between retaining compatibility with existing habits and known metaphors, and providing new functionality.

Podcast me

2006-10-25T08:50:00.000+02:00

I've used Talkr to add an automatically-generated podcast to this blog. Check it out, seems to work pretty well. Not sure how useful it is, but it makes me go "cool!", which is a good enough reason to add it :)
I've also switched to Firefox 2. I just love the built-in spell check. A long-overdue acknowledgment of the fact that so much of the content created today is created using the browser's text input box.

But what if I'm offline?

2006-10-11T18:55:00.000+02:00

Sitting in the Office 2.0 conference, after several days on the road, hopping from state to state, from one airport to the next one, from one flaky wireless connection to the next attempt to get connected, the following question posted to Yedda by one of the Office 2.0 attendees stroke a chord:

What happens to office 2.0 functionality when you ...

What happens to office 2.0 functionality when you don't have access to broadband (airplane, cottage, network goes down, etc)

Topics: web 2.0, office 2.0, office20con

Asked by jakerton on October 11, 2006

View the entire discussion on Yedda

The same issue came up in the morning keynote interview, where Dan Farber interviewed Esther Dyson, who confessed she's posting to her blog mainly through email since she's so often traveling and offline and email works so much better in this scenario.

Karen Leavitt pointed out later, in the "Office 2.0, Where Are We" panel, that in the future, there'd be no offline or online, only choosing if I want to be offline or online. Most likely true, but I hate waiting.

We could put together different solutions for different applications - post to a blog through email, keep the Flickr Uploadr window open with new pictures, use an offline bookmarks manager that knows how to sync with delicious, etc. But this doesn't scale. It's not simple enough. It feels like a hack.

Creating a offline client client for each different applications would theoretically work, but is not very practical - it's expensive to build, and I feel that most of us are kinda tired of downloading (and trusting) so many different desktop clients.

Can we do it in a different way?

It'd be great if browsers would be smarter about offline vs. online, allowing the same bookmark to present an offline version when I'm not connected. So, the Yedda Ask page bookmark would still work when I'm offline, but would have reduced capabilities (for example, topics would not be automatically suggested), and would do something slightly different when the Post button is clicked.

It would be great to have the form posted data go into a "offline queue", and be posted to the online URL next time I go online.

But waiting for browsers to support new functionality is not a good idea, since at the current release rate, it means that we'll need to wait a year or two at best before we have this stuff up and running. And I hate waiting.

Can we hack this functionality today? Ideas anyone?

Technorati : browser, office20con, offline, webapplications, yedda
Del.icio.us : browser, office20con, offline, webapplications, yedda

Backto Earth

2006-09-10T19:13:00.000+03:00

GeekCon 2006 was packed - people, action, projects, ideas. Loved every moment of it!

See for yourself:

> GeekCon 2006 on Flickr

> GeekCon 2006 on YouTube

> GeekCon 2006 in blogs

Technorati : geekcon, geekcon2006
Del.icio.us : geekcon, geekcon2006

Just because...

2006-09-07T18:39:00.000+03:00

Just because I am off to GeekCon, it does not mean I am a geek.
And no, that Zoom 2400 Baud modem (still in the original box) is not sufficient proof either (jumper settings documentation here).

Further documentation to be delivered on Sunday.

Technorati : geekcon, geekcon2006
Del.icio.us : geekcon, geekcon2006

Upgrading an Omelet with Yedda

2006-08-27T16:24:00.000+03:00

Just had to try this shiny new "blog this" thingie we added to Yedda. And what's better to blog then one of my favorites questions:

Upgrading an Omelet
Does anyone have interesting ways to upgrade an omelet? I'm bored with the usual cheese/onion/meat options I usually use, and since in most evenings I'm too tired too cook anything more interesting, I'd like to hear your suggestions.
Topics: cooking, omelet
Asked by gypsie on July 13, 2006
View the entire discussion on Yedda

More Yedda coverage

2006-08-21T18:30:00.000+03:00

Following the TechCrunch post on Yedda on Aug 14th, we've been covered some great folks around the globe. I wanted to list here some of the Israeli bloggers who covered Yedda (in Hebrew):

Ilana Tamir wrote a wonderful, thorough review on Yedda and its approach to knowledge sharing on Nana

the.co.ils, who covered Yedda back in May, announced the public launch and pointed out very accurately the upcoming challenges

"The Marker", one of the leading business magazines published an article on Yedda on August 16th

my-paradox reported that she's addicted to Yedda! Should we start a support group?

Tzafrir wrote a heart-warming review on his Yedda experience on Starter, plus some really interesting ideas...

And while at it, don't miss the older post from Ami Ben Basat on his blog, which also appeared as an article in the Globes (hmm, that would be the other leading business magazine in Israel :))

BTW, the $10,000 (play money) I invested in Yedda on Alexadex about a month ago are now worth $56,942 (hmm... play money too...). Now how cool is that.

And now, after all this wonderful excitement, back to the drawing (key)board - we have so much more work to do in order to make Yedda live up to all these expectations!

Technorati : Alexadex, Nana, Starter, TechCrunch, TheMarker, Tzafrir, my-paradox, thecoils, yedda

Google search results - link tracking costs 90 Gigabytes / day

2006-08-17T10:21:00.000+03:00

I spent a few minutes, together with Eran, looking at the method that Google uses to track which links are clicked in the Google search results page. I figured they must be doing this, since it sounds like an essential bit of information, and of course they do that.

The mechanics are simple, and very well implemented - the generated links in the search results have a onmousedown JavaScript function (named clk) attached to them. When a link is clicked this JavaScript bit is run. Essentially what it does is use the JavaScript Image object (one of the oldest tricks in the JavaScript "book") to send a request to the Google web site, with the clicked link information:

function clk(url,oi,cad,ct,cd,sg) { ... new Image().src="/url?sa=T"+oi_param+cad_param+"&ct="+e(ct)+"&cd="+e(cd)+u+"&ei=jwbkRLWWGYfa2wKN1uRj"+sg; }

I was surprised though to find in that otherwise-sparkling-clean Google implementation a bunch of additional JavaScript functions which appears to be never used, like:

function ss(w,id){window.status=w;return true;} function cs(){window.status='';} var bdg = 0; function sb() {bdg = 1;} function ga(o,e) { ... } function anbc(id) { ... }

A quick count of the bits shows that the unused JavaScript code amounts to about 1K in size, per search results page. Assuming 91 million searches per day, this means unnecessary waste of 80-90 Gigabytes (depending on how you count MB - the right way or the Western Digital way :) ) of bandwidth, every day.

It's a good thing that bandwidth is so cheap. If Google was running on GoDaddy, they'd consumed their entire $10/month 500GB bandwidth limit in 6 days :)

And no, please don't count how much bandwidth we waste on unnecessary JS in the Yedda pages, I can tell you right away it's quite a bit. Functionality first, optimizations later!

Technorati : bandwidth, google, javascript, link, search, tracking
Del.icio.us : bandwidth, google, javascript, link, search, tracking

My profile on Yedda

2006-08-14T11:03:00.000+03:00

Check it out:

My profile on Yedda

Questions I asked on Yedda

Questions I answered on Yedda

In case you're wondering, this one was just a test question! I am not sure I understand why it became so popular, but the truth is that she's not spending any time with me because she's so addicted to answering questions on Yedda. Go figure...

Technorati : me, yedda
Del.icio.us : me, yedda

It's been 128 days

2006-08-09T19:30:00.000+03:00

Here is the sad truth from Technorati:

Yup... it's true. 128 days since my last post to this blog.

I do have good excuses though. I've been busy coding, designing, specing, supporting, promoting, and not sleeping enough.

Initially I thought it's just a busy week, no biggie, I will post next week. It's not like the world is holding its breath waiting for my posts. But then the busy week became a busy month, and another, and... 128 days.

Creating Yedda.com is exciting. There is so much to do, and every day brings new challenges, making me wish there was away around that 24 hours/day limitation. Only 24 hours a day... this is so Web 1.0, don't you think so?

It's good to be writing code again. I almost forgot how satisfying it is, to write-compile-run-upload - and see how it changes the way people interact with each other. There is magic about it.

In any case. This post is meant to break the silence. I'm back :)

Technorati : yedda
Del.icio.us : yedda

It's been a long week

2006-04-03T00:31:00.000+03:00

I got back yesterday from KinnerNet 2006, a long-weekend-long unconference camp organized by Yossi Vardi. Long days, short nights, lots and lots of fascinating people, and tons of intellectual stimulation. Some physical stimulation too, as I was trying to avoid being hit by a water gun, misguided missile or a hostile robot.

I attended so many fascinating discussions during this weekend, both during the sessions and one-on-one. Topics ranged from blogging to online advertising, business models, MMO, culture jamming, standards, SEO, digital photography, swarms, economics, robotics... cool.

The Marker's COM.VENTION conference started immediately following KinnerNet, with many of the KinnerNet participants attending this one as well. I attended only a small part of it (someone gotta code around here!), and was pleasantly surprised to hear that Yedda, the startup I'm involved in, was selected as one of the 10 most promising startups in Israel in 2006!

And now, that we've been selected as "promising", all we need to do is deliver the promise :)

Technorati : Israel, KinnerNet, KinnerNet2006, KinnerNet06, Yossi Vardi, COMVENTION, The Marker, Yedda
Del.icio.us : Israel, KinnerNet, KinnerNet2006, KinnerNet06, Yossi Vardi, COMVENTION, The Marker, Yedda

Bubbles are cool

2006-03-16T11:02:00.000+02:00

3D3R, a small software studio in Israel led by Ohad Eder-Pressman and friends, is preaching for "good, simple and straight-to-the-point solutions". And guess what. This is what they actually deliver.

3D3R just released the first beta of Bubbles - a "Simplified, Stripped-Down & Straight-To-The-Point browser window, that is tailor-made for housing those cool Web apps".

I love Bubbles. It's such a simple, good idea.

The desktop we use was designed with the assumption that most of the apps we use are available on the desktop, and therefore, they can be minimized to the task bar, iconized into the system tray, right-clicked to provide a context-sensitive menu, etc.

But guess what. As more and more of the basic services we use are moving online into cool web apps, I find that a lot of my time is spent inside the browser's (tabbed, if lucky) window frame.

Bubbles bridges the gap between Windows desktop apps and web apps. It creates a small hosted-browser frame for a web site, which behaves pretty much like an independent Windows app.

The window is minimal - nothing but the actual web page, no toolbars, sidebars, status bars, etc. This window can be minimized to the task bar or the tray, uses the web site logo as its icon, and can provide its own context sensitive menu when right-clicked.

It's not perfect yet, but what was done, was done right. I'd love to see the option to have Back / Forward / Refresh buttons for sites that rely on them for functionality, a better task bar double-click logic, and a few other bits and bytes, but hey, it's the first beta release.

Small, simple, makes sense.

Technorati : Israel, browser, cool, simple, 3d3r, bubbles
Del.icio.us : Israel, browser, cool, simple, 3d3r, bubbles

Web 2.0, kicking even harder

2006-03-09T19:07:00.000+02:00

The local Web 2.0 scene is heating up. Following the Gemini Internet event on January, the informal lunch with TechCrunch's Michael Arrington two weeks ago was another trigger in getting us Israeli web entrepreneurs talking to each other, and trying to form local "support groups". The lunch event was covered in a TechCrunch post (see also Valleywag's slightly different interpretation :), and later by the local Ilana Tamir on the Nana portal (Hebrew. I was interviewed for this one).

Another nice development is the introduction of the.co.ils (Hebrew), by Yaron Orenstein and Yemi Glick, both internet veterans. ("co.il" is Israeli commercial domain name, equivalent to .com). the.co.ils is an independent blog aiming to cover the local 'net-related initiatives - existing and new. It's young (3 days old...) and fresh and looking good!

Plus, Google is opening its first Middle East R&D center in Haifa, Israel. Yes, things are heating up.

By the way, "Valley" in Hebrew is emek, and "Silicon" is tzoran. This knowledge may be useful one day :)

Technorati : Google, Hebrew lessons, Israel, TechCrunch, Yedda, the.co.ils, web2.0
Del.icio.us : Google, Hebrew lessons, Israel, TechCrunch, Yedda, the.co.ils, web2.0

TechLunch

2006-02-27T13:59:00.000+02:00

We had lunch yesterday with Michael Arrington of TechCrunch and edgeio in Tel Aviv. It was great meeting the person behind TechCrunch, the blog that in the few months it exists has become one of the central discussion hubs for the recent wave of innovations.

Several other interesting folks were there too - Ouriel Ohayon who (in addition to his other activities) is running TechCrunch.fr, Netanel Jacobsson from Make-The-Illuminati-Seem-Like-Exhibitionists Maxthon, Frank Smadja from RawSugar and some additional folks, including Daniel Cohen from Gemini who stopped by.

Both Michael and Frank, who had early exposure to Yedda, had their fun teasing us about Yedda's public launch date. Yup, we had to push it forward a bit - we received so much important feedback on the user experience from the early testers, some of it we would like to incorporate into the build before the next round of testing, and some of it got pushed further down the road into later builds. We did feel somewhat better when Michael shared that he originally thought that edgeio would be out on October '05. I guess that while the Web's revision number was increased, some basic software developments truths still hold even in Web 2.0 :)

Technorati : Israel, Michael Arrington, TechCrunch, Web2.0, Yedda
Del.icio.us : Israel, Michael Arrington, TechCrunch, Web2.0, Yedda

edgeio

2006-02-12T10:30:00.000+02:00

Michael Arrington from TechCrunch provides early details on edgeio, the aptly-named startup he co-founded with Keith Teare. Actually, due to the conflict of interest, Michael is just providing the links to coverage on edgeio by BussinessWeek Rob Hof. Additional details and manifest are available on the edgeio blog.

From the edgeio blog first post:

We will find edge published listings if they include the category or tag "listing" within the post or content. The listings will be indexed through the blog's RSS or Atom feed and aggregated with other "listings from the edge". Users of the edgeio service will be able to search through listings and communicate directly with the publisher. Edgeio will also make aggregated listings available though a web service to other Internet sites and services that would like to include edge listings.

Turns out Frank Gruber's early guesses were right on spot!

I love the idea, aggregating classified listings from "the edge". Given the unstructured nature of these listings, filtering may prove to be a challenge though. The Structured Blogging effort, spearheaded by PubSub, might prove to be very valuable in overcoming this challenge.

Early (unauthorized?) screenshots are available on Pandorasquared, and look pretty interesting. Clean, focused experience.

The customary register-for-beta is provided at www.edgeio.com.

Technorati : blog, classified, edgeio, listing, microformats, social, web2.0
Del.icio.us : blog, classified, edgeio, listing, microformats, social, web2.0

Web 1.0 logos

2006-02-09T15:46:00.000+02:00

Stabilo Boss (?) posted to Flickr an image incorporating the logos on most of the Web 2.0 companies out there (yes, Yedda is there too! with the old logo though, instead of the cool new one).

Complexify responded with a link to his collection of "Web 1.0" logos, straight out of '99.

A quick look at these two images was enough to reach a clear conclusion - at the very least, from a graphic design point of view, Web 2.0 is a lot nicer :)

Technorati : blink, collection, flickr, logo, vintage, yedda, web1.0, web2.0
Del.icio.us : blink, collection, flickr, logo, vintage, yedda, web1.0, web2.0

Yedda - People. Sharing. Knowledge.

2006-01-26T17:20:00.000+02:00

Michael Arrington of TechCrunch posted a short piece on Yedda yesterday.

And the reason I mention it is that I've spent the last few months hard at work on Yedda, the company I co-founded with Avichay Nissenbaum and the amazing Yedda team.

Yedda is about people sharing knowledge. It's going to be a great place for people to ask questions, and for people to provide answers. Note the emphasize on people :-)

At this point it's still Yedda.org, but as soon as those DNS servers around the world are done synchronizing their bits, Yedda.com should also be up and running. But, to tell the truth, Yedda is very much an .org thing… Go ahead, visit it, register for the beta if you're interested, or check out the Yedda team blog.

Can you tell I'm pretty excited? :-)

Technorati : answers, knowledge, questions, web2.0, yedda
Del.icio.us : answers, knowledge, questions, web2.0, yedda

Web 2.0 kicking @ Israel

2006-01-18T16:46:00.000+02:00

I've attended the Gemini Internet event a few days ago. Bob Rosenschein of Answers.com, a true veteran of the software industry, gave a great presentation full of ever-so-relevant quotes that demonstrate his way of thinking. My favorite:

"What information consumes is rather obvious - it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence, a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention."
(Herbert Simon)

... as demonstrated with each and every wave of aggregation-filtering-discovery technologies...

Daniel Cohen of Gemini followed with an energetic presentation, highlighting the challenges of Israel-based Web 2.0 companies, and reaffirming the commitment of the Israeli VCs in general (and of course, Gemini in particular) to Israeli Internet companies. The track record isn't there yet, but judging from energy radiated by the participants, things might look quite different in a few months.

From among the participants, I was intrigued by Nir Ben-Dor's CoMagz.com, a different take on online content publishing. CoMagz.com attempts to integrate the dynamic nature of blog publishing with the collaborative, polished experience of a magazine. Done right, this could provide an interesting alternative to blogs vs. content sites.

ilcu.com's founders, Iddo & Michale, were surprised by the rapid adoption of their service, a slick implementation of social-event-sharing.

Together with FoxeyTunes, Speedbit, Spearcast, Hotbar, Maxthon, Incredimail, eSnips, Dotomi and many others (Yadda!), it was an impressive demonstration of things to come from off-the-valley.

Technorati : israel, vc, web2.0
Del.icio.us : israel, vc, web2.0

Practicalities and lists

2006-01-10T11:23:00.000+02:00

Lots of lets-talk-about-how-it-really-works posts in the last few days. Maybe it's part of cleaning the house for 2006.

Michael Arrington posted "Don't Blow Your Beta" on Techchrunch. This is especially valuable coming from someone who's been exposed to a lot of betas recently. Useful and practical if you're at the point where you're designing your own beta process.

Guy Kawasaki followed up on his "The Top Ten Lies of Venture Capitalists" with "The Top Ten Lies of Entrepreneurs". My favorite is actually #11, the bonus lie:

All we have to do is get 1% of the market.

And to complete the list-of-ten, Guy also posted a list of 9 truths about the art of innovation. Excellent stuff.

It's interesting to note where Guy's list conflicts with Michale's list :)

Hugh Macleod followed up with his Top Ten Blogger Lies. Hey, these ads really were just an experiment :)

Technorati : beta, blog, list, top ten, vc, web2.0
Del.icio.us : beta, blog, list, top ten, vc, web2.0

Delicious Aroma

2006-01-09T14:40:00.000+02:00

Library Stuff pointed to Delicious Aroma (a.k.a deli.ckoma), a service provided by Philipp Keller.

The service collects stats about delicious. It seems like a valuable source of information for all tag-o-philes out there.

I found the "tags per bookmark" chart interesting:

Note that the majority of bookmarks have 1-2 tags associated with them. What do you think this number implies? Does it indicate efficient tagging, or does it indicate that the art of tagging has not been mastered yet?

In any case, it's a valuable service. Phillip also provides the raw data if you'd like to perform your own analysis.

Technorati : folksonomy, social bookmarking, statistics, tag, tagging, web2.0
Del.icio.us : folksonomy, social bookmarking, statistics, tag, tagging, web2.0

GDoom anyone?

2005-12-14T15:34:00.000+02:00

Off topic.

Google released the API to add ~~widgets~~ modules to the Google personalized homepage.

Naturally, one of the first ~~widgets~~ modules made available is "Eyes".

We've all been through this before, so many times. We all know where it leads to:

New Platform -> New Windowing System -> New Widgets Framework (yes! widgets! not modules! and while we're at it -also tags, not labels. ) -> A Port of Eyes -> A Port of Doom.

Is anyone working already on a port of Doom to run inside the Google personalized homepage??

Technorati : api, doom, google, google personalized homepage, modules, widgets, xeyes
Del.icio.us : api, doom, google, google personalized homepage, modules, widgets, xeyes

Yahoo Answers

2005-12-11T11:33:00.000+02:00

Yahoo launched Yahoo Answers on Wednesday - this is almost old news :)

Yahoo Answers is a service with a simple and compelling objective - allow any (Yahoo) user to ask any question and get an answer from other (Yahoo) users.

The service was first announced without too much fanfare on the Yahoo! search blog, by Jeremy Zawodny.

Personal disclaimer: [stealth mode. If you really have to know feel free to ask.]... having said that:

Yahoo Answers is slick and easy to use... the user scenario is simple and straightforward: join the service, ask your question, add details, categorize the question, and post it away.

A points system throttles a user's usage of the service, with points awarded to actions ranging from mere participation (login into the service and you get 1 point), to having your answer voted as the best answer (10 points). The more points you have, the more you can participate (ask, answer, vote and rate). Somewhat similar to the original experts exchange points system, and somewhat counter-Web 2.0-religion, as it potentially limits user's ability to co-create and to contribute value to the service.

From the bells and whistles area, RSS feeds are available for categories, questions and users, but tagging is very much absent - a point noted by many of the reviewers. Instead, Yahoo provided a taxonomy / hierarchical categorization system. Interesting choice, given Yahoo's leadership in the tagging area (Flickr, Del.icio.ous, My Web 2.0). And a choice that will limit the service ability to leverage the long tail of knowledge, since it forces the questions into the mainstream topics, exiling all niche questions into the "Other" category.

Yahoo Answers is not the first attempt at this. In fact, Susan Mernit referred to it as a YAAN - Yet Another Answer Network, comparing it to Wondir and to others. While it's true that Yahoo Answers is not much different then Wondir, which has been around for quite some time, the user experience in the Yahoo implementation is considerably more slick, and is likely to get better and better. Not to mention the fact that, not really surprisingly, Yahoo Answer got on its first day traffic similar to what Wondir is seeing after ~3 years of operation.

Which does make me wonder - what's going to happen if Yahoo Answers turns out to be really successfull? Let's say that I am interested in answering questions in a specific category. Browsing through categories is fine as long as there are a few hundred questions in each one. Subscribing to a category makes sense if it gets 20-30 questions a day. But what do you do when you got 100K questions per category? Thousand of questions in each category per day?

How do you make sure that askers experience a reasonable "SLA" - or satisfaction level - meaning, have most of their questions get reasonable answer in a reasonable timeframe?

To survive the potential onslaught of Yahoo's 82M users, the service will need either a more effective way for answer-providers to easily find questions relevant to them, or a more convincing incentive system. Or, better yet, both :) Without these, the differentiator between this service and any other mega-bulletin-board is not clear.

As noted in SearchEngineWatch's review of Yahoo Answers, spam, scams, blatant advertising and other forms of abuse could turn out to be a problem in such a system. Looks like Yahoo is hoping that the points system, combined with community filtering and the need for a Yahoo ID, will reduce this to a manageable level. The exploitable areas in the system are quite obvious - for a second I thought about listing them, but on second thought, maybe it'd be wiser to let spammers come up with that list on their own :)

Like Wondir, Yahoo Answers suffers from the "initial impression" effect (we call this "The Harry Potter Effect" - whenever a new Harry Potter book is released, Wondir is swamped with Potter-related questions...) - when a user enters the system and is exposed to the "most recent" questions list, the content of these questions determines the flavor of the service in the eyes of the user. And given the random nature of this most recent list, and the topics which people are most interested at, that initial impression may cause users who are valuable knowledge sources to click-back-away. Again, if leveraging the long tail of knowledge is a goal of the service, thought should be given to this topic as well.

Yahoo is probably leveraging lessons it learned from observing similar services from its competitors in Korea, where one of the top portals provides a successfull similar service that integrates Yahoo Answers-like "knowledge search" into the search and commerce experience. It's clear though that the success of such a service depends on cultural factors which may be very different between the Korean and the US markets. One notable point is the fact that in the Korean implementation, the sign in into the system is using the user's social security number, making the reputation system considerably more attractive.

It's interesting to note that at pretty much the same time, Answers.com, a Google's partner, announced that it will buy Brainboost, a service that relies on an algorithm nicknamed AnswerRank™ to extract answers from existing web pages. Again, a demonstration of the people empowering through the machine vs. people empowering through people approach. Google also offers its own take on the issue with Google Answers, a service that provides answers from a selected small group of pre-screened researches for fee, where the fee is determined through bidding.

Here are some interesting reviews on Yahoo Answers:

Barb Dybwad, on thesocialsoftwareweblog, discusses the challenges that Yahoo Answer will face with regards to reputation, scams and infomercials
Michael Arrington on TechCrunch discusses the service and complains about the categorization system
Michael Parekh compares Yahoo Answers with Google Answers
Susan Mernit compares Yahoo Answers with Wondir, 43 things and Squidoo
Gary Price published on SearchEngineWatch a 2-part in-depth, fascinating review
Michael Bazeley published on SiliconBeat an interview with Ofer Shaked and Caterina Fake of Yahoo, in which Shaked mentioned that Yahoo is looking at letting posters tag their question
Pete Cashmore published on Mashable interesting thoughts on the merits of the Yahoo Answers points system

Technorati : answers, google, incentive, knowledge, long tail of knowledge, reputation, yaan, yadda, yahoo, yahoo answers
Del.icio.us : answers, google, incentive, knowledge, long tail of knowledge, reputation, yaan, yadda, yahoo, yahoo answers

y.ah.oo!

2005-12-10T10:29:00.000+02:00

Yahoo! acquired del.icio.us yesterday, proving once again that among the big 4, they are the one who actually "get it".

Joshua's announcement on del.icio.us was aptly titled "y.ah.oo!".

They couldn't have made a better choice of course. Despite its often-discussed shortcomings, and maybe somewhat because of them, del.icio.us has the liveliest, most vibrant and active community from the social bookmarking crowd. The gentleness track record that Yahoo demonstrated with Yahoozation of Flickr might help making sure that this community won't walk away.

Walking away should be a real concern - since switching from one social bookmarking service to another is very, very easy today.

Reminder: Yahoo introduced their own del.icio.us-like service, My Web 2.0, not so long ago. The service was not as successful as you'd expect, with "only 424K saved pages and about a quarter of that in tags". I said back then: "… might save a lot of time in those VC weekly investment committee meetings". I guess that was somewhat premature :)

It'd be interesting to see what will the result of this ongoing process - the Flickrization of Y.ah.oo!. One thing is sure - with so many tagged web objects, and, even more important, so much information on which users act as a de-facto authority on what's interesting, Yahoo!'s search engine should get quite a boost in the relevancy of its results.

Now that my photos are on Yahoo's Flickr and my bookmarks on Yahoo's del.icio.us, will Yahoo be able to get me - and, slightly more important, others :) - to move from typing "google" when I think web search to typing - hmm... what is the URL for Yahoo's search thingie? Maybe I should start memorizing it..

There is something poetic about this battle between the two giants, with one betting on algorithms and server farms, and the other betting on people.

A different way to look at it: Google is about empowering people through the machine. Yahoo is about empowering people through people, with the machine as an aggregator. Oh yeah, and Amazon, making an attempt at empowering the machine through people :)

Technorati : delicious, flickr, google, amazon, search, my web, tagging, yahoo
Del.icio.us : delicious, flickr, google, amazon, search, my web, tagging, yahoo

Tagging as a comodity?

2005-12-09T15:06:00.000+02:00

I've had an interesting conversation last night with an engineering lead in one of the mega-portal companies. While it wasn't really the topic of the conversation, he said something that got me thinking. He said:

"Tagging is by now a commodity".

Is that really so?

In my eyes, tagging, while not really a novelty anymore, is far from being a commodity. The vast majority of internet users (outside the valley of course :) never heard of it... as I noted in earlier post, I still find myself explaining quite often to people who never heard of it - what tagging is about and why it makes sense. And by "people", I mean pretty internet-savvy people.

Browsers are commodity. Search is commodity (is it?). Tagging is still at the beginning of the adoption curve, still firmly in the hype area.

It's going to take a while before the dust settles down, and tagging will become a commodity - to be used only where appropriate (no, tag clouds do not always make sense) and with clear predictable user expectations and usage patterns.

Technorati : commodity, cycle, hype, tagging, tags, web2.0
Del.icio.us : commodity, cycle, hype, tagging, tags, web2.0

Google Beware

2005-12-06T01:04:00.000+02:00

And now for something completly different:

Quantum Entanglement is the new Search. At this point it's good mostly for 2-bit searches, but hey, it's a start.

Technorati : google, humor?, quantum, search, search engine
Del.icio.us : google, humor?, quantum, search, search engine

Google anyone?

2005-12-03T23:49:00.000+02:00

There is one player notably missing from the social bookmarking, and that's Google.

2 years ago there were rumors that Google tried to buy Friendster, and shortly after Google introduced orkut.

Google's Personalized Search, introduced on Nov '05, does bookmarking with tags (oops, labels in Google-talk) as a sidekick. But these ~~tags~~ labels are personal, not "social" - they cannot be shared with the community.

How come?

Either Google believes that its algorithms can do just fine (or be further improved) without the need for human input, or, maybe they believe that they can simply leverage the social tagging done by other non-Google services (which, after all, result in links- the fuel for Google's PageRank algorithm), or maybe something is cooking.

It's interesting to note that Google has a patent that covers certain aspects of social bookmarking:

[0068] In one embodiment, a user may share or overlay bookmarks. For example in one embodiment, a user is able to open up their bookmarks for others to view.

also:

[0069] One embodiment of the present invention fosters community and relationship building. In one embodiment, the search engine is able to recognize clusters or pairs of users having similar interests.

Rumors anyone?

Technorati : google, patent, social bookmarking, web2.0
Del.icio.us : google, patent, social bookmarking, web2.0

Tag-cloud my OPML

2005-11-29T15:41:00.000+02:00

Both tagging and RSS aim to help us cope with the information overload.

Tagging means that we no longer have to decide for each and every bookmark in which folder it should be filed.

RSS means that we don't have to go our favorite information source to check what's new; instead the information is aggregated and delivered as a notification to us.

Unfortunately, most RSS readers file the RSS feeds in... guess what. Yup, folders :)

Back to square one, only now instead of having to file hundreds of bookmarks, we're filing hundreds of RSS feeds.

Can we please have tagging in OPML? I'd really like to be able to specify the tags for the feed I am subscribing to, and have the RSS reader allow me to navigate my OPML using a tag cloud.

Mashing up the OPML tag cloud and the RSS items tags, together with an indication of the number of new posts, into a single visual display, would be even more powerful, as it'd allow me to quickly identify the hot topics in the feeds I am subscribed to.

BTW, RSS supports tagging directly (through the category element), but it doesn't seem to be widely supported.

Technorati : opml, rant, rss, tag, tag cloud, tagging, web2.0

Del.icio.us : opml, rant, rss, tag, tag cloud, tagging, web2.0

Web 2.0 Metaphors

2005-11-28T15:13:00.000+02:00

In his notes about Mark Cuban's post suggesting a new music distribution model, Michael Eisenberg said:

Anyone in the path of the "Free Information/Content Tornado" beware!

That "tornado" (also referred to as Tsunami by some :), coupled with people's desire to interact with actual real live people, is the real engine behind Web 2.0, with simplicity being the engine oil. And that's 4 metaphors in a single post :)

Seems like anyone standing in the in the path of the desire to interact with people should also be somewhat nervous... as proven recently by Paul English from Kayak.com [IVR Cheat Sheet].

Technorati : free, ivr, web2.0
Del.icio.us : free, ivr, web2.0

Tagging Whmpfff

2005-11-27T12:22:00.000+02:00

The Freesound Project is back online, after several days of downtime due to being slashdoted :)

Freesound is about sharing tagged sound samples, all available under the Create Commons Sampling Plus license.

More than 10,000 sound samples already shared and tagged (some are also geotagged). Pretty cool.

Not much more left to tag in the world :) (yes, I know I will be proven wrong)

Technorati : CC, create commons, freesound, geotag, music, sound, tag, tagging, web2.0
Del.icio.us : CC, create commons, freesound, geotag, music, sound, tag, tagging, web2.0

To Web or to Bubble?

2005-11-27T03:36:00.000+02:00

Depending on where you stand, the buzz around Web 2.0 seems to be getting louder and louder. In fact, at some places, it gets so loud that it makes lots of smart people wonder if it's actually Bubble 2.0:

Kevin Buton is frightened:

A lot of the recent news around Web 2.0 is starting to frighten me. There is just too much money flying around with too much hype and too little value.

Mike Rundle is worried:

Are we growing too fast too quickly? Are people throwing their money around too haphazardly, without due diligence? I don't know, but it's always a possibility.

Robin Miller is amazed by the silly business ideas:

There really are people running around with money to invest who know that little.

Speculations and hints go back as much as 6 months ago:

It is too early to say whether the flush environment heralds another tech investment bubble, but there are echoes of the dotcom boom.

David Hornik is already looking past Bust 2.0 and toward Web 3.0:

So when I hear large numbers of companies pitching themselves as excellent acquisition candidates before they've even gotten out of the gate I can't help but think to myself that we are in the heart of Bubble 2.0. Sadly, only one thing follows Bubble 2.0 and that is Bust 2.0. On the good side, there's always Web 3.0.

There is even a blog dedicated to the new bubble, and a very useful Web 2.0 Business Plan Generator.

Are we heading down toward an industry-wide embarrassment again?

Some other smart people believe that this is not the case:

John Battelle is optimistic in a recent New York Times article:

But regardless of all this déjà vu, we are not in a bubble. Instead we are witnessing the Web's second coming, and it's even got a name, "Web 2.0"

Signal vs.Noise by 37signals feels that there is no bubble, though there is certainly a lot of Babble 2.0.

Om Malik agrees:

I agree - so far it is not a bubble.

Though he goes on to warn:

But it can very quickly become one.

Scobleizer is asking:

Which gets me onto the point of this post. Is Web 2.0 a bubble?

and answering:

Not when Google's advertising revenue and profit lines look steeper than KT-22's ski slope at Squaw Valley

and

Not when companies like Meetro are so capital constrained that they are all living and working in one house in Palo Alto.

I believe that Brian Shin nailed it down, getting closer to the truth, in "On Web 2.0: Where are we going?":

... we've all deluded ourselves into thinking we're more important than we really are. It just looks like Web 2.0 is hitting it big because as technology bloggers, everything we see and touch is affected by it.

I am not located in The Valley. From over here, things look a bit different. Some of the most savvy VCs around here didn't even hear about that "Web 2.0" thingie until recently. The buzz is limited to a very active but still small group.

Hopefully this means that we're still in the productive part of the curve.

The Bubble may and probably will come, but not quite yet.

Technorati : bubble2.0, web2.0
Del.icio.us : bubble2.0, web2.0

Wink

2005-11-23T01:47:00.000+02:00

Wink, launched almost two months ago and now accepting beta users, is interesting.

Half delicious-like social bookmarking (with tagging, duh.), half-Wiki, with a bit of Outfoxed

The Wink user scenario begins pretty much like a search engine - a small text box, with a "Search" button next to it. Enter a search term, click Search.

You will get two sets of search results - first, links which were already tagged and rated by Wink users (ordered using Wink's TagRank), and second, standard Google search results. For each link in either of these two sets, you can add the link to your favorites, tag it, rate it or mark it as spam.

In addition, you can view the Wiki entry related to your search term, edit it if needed or create a new one if one doesn't exist already. Plus, you get a list of related search terms.

Other features - the ability to aggregate links into collections, and to subscribe to other users' collections.

Pretty cool. A potentially smooth integration between the search, bookmarking, tagging and content creation processes.

However, since it's going to be uphill battle getting us to switch from typing Google whenever we think "search for pages", they might be better off packing all this wonderful functionality into a browser plugin, Outfoxed-style (or integrate with Flock).

Technorati : delicious, flock, outfoxed, rank, search, spam, tag, tagging, web 2.0, wiki, wink
Del.icio.us : delicious, flock, outfoxed, rank, search, spam, tag, tagging, web 2.0, wiki, wink

Web 2.0 Litmus Paper

2005-11-22T07:42:00.000+02:00

It's been a few days since I last posted. [rule #8]

With so much of the industry energy and time going into trying to figure out What-Is-Web 2.0 (a.k.a. "Web 2.0 - wtf?"), the new "Web 2.0 Validator", even though it's only at beta version ~2.7183, could prove to be a real boon.

If you find though that AJAXing your site by adding prototype.js didn't get you slashdotted, here is an actually useful description of Web 2.0 by Tim O'Reilly (also in summarized version by Dare Obasanjo). It's almost 3 months old though - read it quickly before the definition of Web 2.0 changes again :)

A wonderfully short and to the point definition comes actually directly from the Web 2.0 Validator site:

...that 2.0 sites exist and gain value from the aggragation of user data, which thrives when users are trusted to be in charge.

Technorati : TimOReilly, web2.0
Del.icio.us : TimOReilly, web2.0

All Your Base

2005-11-16T13:53:00.001+02:00

Now that Google Base was launched, we will be seeing a revival of the "All-Your-Base" wave. So, here is some useful background :) (thanks Daniel)

Technorati : allyourbase, base, google, humor
Del.icio.us : allyourbase, base, google, humor

Openomy.com - online tagged file system

2005-11-15T17:19:00.000+02:00

Ian Sefferman introduced Openomy. It's a brave attempt to start from the bottom up - a web file system based on tagging (no folders. nada. nothing. just tags.), RSS (notes on implementation), completely open APIs, and infrastructure for building applications on top of this.

Everything is still rudimentary - basic functionality, minimal user interface.

Pretty exciting, but the real test of course would be existence of applications leveraging it.

(From Tagrio)

Technorati : IanSefferman, Openomy, api, file system, rss, tag, tagging, web2.0
Del.icio.us : IanSefferman, Openomy, api, file system, rss, tag, tagging, web2.0

Amazon is tagging too

2005-11-15T08:30:00.000+02:00

It's not clear exactly when did this happen, but Amazon is gradually introducing tags into its service. See Techcrunch for details. I just hope they didn't patent it :)

I love Amazon's recommendation engine, and tagging certainly has the potential to make it even better.

I was just thinking, that in order for users to come up with unorthodox usages for tags (a-la Flickr's deleteme), there has to be some sort of bulletin board in the service. Without it, new tagging conventions would be much slower to emerge.

Technorati : amazon, applitag, deleteme, tag, tagging
Del.icio.us : amazon, applitag, deleteme, tag, tagging

The Flickrization of Yahoo

2005-11-15T01:32:00.000+02:00

Erick Schonfeld wrote in Business 2.0 about the effects of the Flickr purchase on the Yahoo culture, and Yahoo's approach to Social Media and amateur-created content. An interesting read.

"Yahoo has done the best job of the large guys of getting the concept," says tech guru Esther Dyson, who was an early investor in Flickr.

I agree :)

On the other hand, the article presents some facts regarding the success of Yahoo's home-grown social bookmarks service:

In practice, however, tagging search results and bookmarks may still be too geeky an activity for Yahoo's average Joe. Thus far, My Web has seen tepid growth in the number of pages saved (about 300,000) and tags applied (fewer than 90,000). That might not seem bad for a product still in beta, but My Web is seeing little month-to-month growth. (Del.icio.us, by contrast, has 10 million saved pages and half a million tags.)

Why are mainstream users slow to adapt tagging? Is it because it is inherently attractive only for a small segment, or is it just a matter of time before one of the competing social bookmarking services will get the ingredients + the secret sauce of the tagging user experience right?

Technorati : ErickSchonfeld, EstherDyson, delicious, flickr, mainstream, my web, social media, tagging, yahoo
Del.icio.us : ErickSchonfeld, EstherDyson, delicious, flickr, mainstream, my web, social media, tagging, yahoo

Amazon Gets Patents on Consumer Reviews???

2005-11-14T11:13:00.000+02:00

... and, in sharp contrast to my previous post, Internetnews.com reports that Amazon was awarded three new patents, covering its purchase circles, search and consumer reviews.

The third patent, on consumer reviews, even covers collecting reviews by letting visitors to a Web site fill out a form.

Surprisingly enough, these wonderful patents aren't mentioned on the Amazon press release page. Could it be that they find this somewhat embarrassing?

This might generate a few more posts similar to Scobleizer's "slave generated content" post.

Technorati : amazon, patent, reviews
Del.icio.us : amazon, patent, reviews

Dave Winer

2005-11-14T10:41:00.000+02:00

Throughout the years, doesn't matter what my current interest is - XML RPC, SOAP, RSS, blogging, or the banned word - Dave Winer is there, and is always worth reading.

Dave just posted his "vision for podcasting" - though in fact, it's a manifest for amateur-created content. An inspiring read.

Technorati : DaveWiner, amateur created content, web2.0
Del.icio.us : DaveWiner, amateur created content, web2.0

Oh, baby, baby it's a TagWorld

2005-11-13T11:28:00.000+02:00

Michael Arrington of TechCrunch reported on TagWorld - a new uber-tagging service. Their vision, from the About page:

build the Social Web by providing a unified set of easy-to-use, web-based services that will let users create and engage in a more meaningful, social experience

Also:

TagWorld sees five fundamental components for building out this new social web infrastructure: people, photos, blogs, tags and storage.

They do a pretty good job at providing an integrated, do-it-all experience, with a slick(er) user interface. The free-form tagging interface is still somewhat lacking to my taste. They have a cool tag-by-selecting-from-a-tag-cloud user interface in some of the areas. Bookmarks, like pretty much everything else, can be tagged as public or private.

The search experience is real pleasure though. A slidebar for indicating the number of results you'd like to see at once. Thumbnails of the web sites in your bookmarks.

The service has a strong "mass consumer" flavor to it. Also, it seems to be one of the only Web 2.0 services developed using .NET technology, and not LAMP. No, I'm not hinting at a connection between the two facts. Almost not all :)

Technorati : MichaelArrington, blog, bookmark, delicious, flickr, search, social, tag, tagging, tagworld, user interface, web2.0
Del.icio.us : MichaelArrington, blog, bookmark, delicious, flickr, search, social, tag, tagging, tagworld, user interface, web2.0

Standartizing Tag Semantics

2005-11-13T00:52:00.000+02:00

striatic has been leading for several months a brave attempt on the Flickr discussion board to standardize the usage of certain tags.

Several similar discussions went on in the del.icio.us discussion list. Suggestions for a wiki-like solution to organize such an effort keep coming up.

There are some things that tagging systems could do to reduce the effort associated with this, without losing the value of free-form, tag-with-whatever-comes-to-mind tagging.

Some of them can be done in the backend, when searching for tags (like stemming). However, there are probably more things that such systems can do to encourage users to choose the more standard tags.

For example, using the same logic used by the Flickr clustering algorithm, when a user tags an item with "SF", the system could - after letting me use the SF tag - make a suggestion:

The "SF" tag often stands for "San Francisco". The "SF" tag was used 36,717 times, while the "San Francisco" tag was used 214,347 times. Would you like to add the "San Francisco" tag as well?

As more and more users join the tagging circles, thought should be given to the scalability of the model - it is in everyone's best interest to reduce the number of tags in the tag space. Well. Except maybe for Oracle and MySQL :)

Technorati : delicious, flickr, semantic, standard, striatic, tag, tagging
Del.icio.us : delicious, flickr, semantic, standard, striatic, tag, tagging

More Big.Blue.Licious

2005-11-11T21:18:00.000+02:00

Also, Internetnews.com reported on more from IBM: "Public Image Monitoring Solution" monitors and analyzes blogs, wikis, news feeds, consumer review sites, newsgroups and other community-generated content to allow corporations and brands to keep tabs on their image.

Also, personal lesson of the day: don't blog while cooking.

Technorati : blog, ibm, wiki
Del.icio.us : blog, ibm, wiki

The IM Generation

2005-11-11T09:53:00.000+02:00

CNET reported on an America Online-commissioned study of instant messaging trends.

"Nearly 66 percent of 13- to 21-year-olds say they send more IMs than e-mails, compared with 49 percent last year, according to an America Online-commissioned study of instant messaging trends.
... Overall, 38 percent of users say they send as many or more IMs than e-mails.
... About 80 million people in the U.S. regularly use IM"

CNET also reports on a new study from IDC:

"about 1 billion IMs sent every day between 28 million enterprise users."

New study from PEW:

"Fully half of all teens and 57% of teens who use the internet could be considered Content Creators. They have created a blog or webpage, posted original artwork, photography, stories or videos online or remixed online content into their own new creations.
... 19% of online youth ages 12-17 have created their own blog.
... 7% of adult internet users say they have created their own blog."

I still (vaguely) remember what the BITNET TELL and RELAY screens looked like, and I'm not that old. I think.

These 13-21 years old are and becoming more and more so our users.

Technorati : IM, bitnet, blog, cnet, e-mail, idc, instant messaging, pew
Del.icio.us : IM, bitnet, blog, cnet, e-mail, idc, instant messaging, pew

Shop By Color

2005-11-08T10:39:00.000+02:00

TechCrunch has a short piece about Etsy, a rather cool P2P ecommerce company for handmade items. The post goes into details about the features and functions of Etsy, read it all there. But what really got me is Etsy's Shop By Color thingie - Flash at its best. Wonderful toy.

Technorati : color, commerce, ecommerce, flash, p2p
Del.icio.us : color, commerce, ecommerce, flash, p2p

Big.Blue.Licious

2005-11-07T23:31:00.000+02:00

David Weinberger live-blogged a rather amusing recount of an IBM press event, "The Future of Social Networks" held in the IBM office in Cambridge.

Turns out that IBM did their own application wiki thingie (JotSpot-like), and also - behold - DogEar, an internal social bookmarking service.

My favorite quote:

"Irene: It's all Web 2.0 stuff." :)

An interesting read, especially given the live-blogging effect (less-filtered opinions).

Technorati : DavidWeinberger, DogEar, IBM, JotSpot, app, appliki, delicious, folksonomy, tag, tagging, wiki
Del.icio.us : DavidWeinberger, DogEar, IBM, JotSpot, app, appliki, delicious, folksonomy, tag, tagging, wiki

10 Issues Facing Web 2.0 Today

2005-11-07T20:32:00.000+02:00

Dion Hinchcliffe posted a wonderful completly subjective list of "10 Issues Facing Web 2.0 Today".

#8: Blogging Instead of Doing. :)

Technorati : DionHinchcliffe, blog, blogging, web2.0
Del.icio.us : DionHinchcliffe, blog, blogging, web2.0

Matchbox Wisdom II

2005-11-07T18:09:00.000+02:00

Matchbox Wisdom II,
originally uploaded by YanivG.

Too much tagging. Gotta balance it with some matchbox wisdom.

tagstd:recap

2005-11-07T15:41:00.000+02:00

I've had some interesting comments from several folks regarding the tagging standard ( & follow up) I've proposed a few days ago - thank you! I'd like to try to address some of them here.

On a general note, I'd like to note that the list of predefined values for the rel attribute is defined in the HTML4 specification. Obviously it does not include "tag" as predefined value.
The specification however explicitly permits defining new values for the rel attribute (though it recommends that in this case the conventions used will be cited in the profile attribute of the head element).
So, technically speaking, using rel="tag" is OK from HTML point of view. But, putting aside the spec, why take the risk of using a non-universally-accepted value when we don't have to? I don't really see why "
<a tagstd:rel="tag" href=..."
is significantly more usable then
"<a rel="tag" href=... "
and that would already be a big improvement in the robustness of RelTag.

Kevin Marks (from Technorati, and who is credited with the concept of Rel-Tag) raised some great points:

Mixing data and representation is by design. If the tags are embedded in the content they don't get detached (link)

I agree, this is a worthy cause. But, there are several different options for embedding the tag in the contents, and some of them provide the ability to embed the tag in the content without mixing data and representation. For example, using
<span tagstd:tags="tag1 tag2 tag3">content here</span>
would get the job done just as well. (though using span has other drawbacks though).

Redundancy is not a problem in practice (I have 18 million examples). (link)

While it's hard to argue with 18 million examples :), it'd be interesting to know - does the Technorati crawler verifies a match between the tag as indicated by the URL postfix and the tag as indicated by the link text?

When you do cut-and-paste, you get cut-and-paste errors, that's one of life's most basic truths, second only to "if you use 1.0, it will crash".

Usability: straw man argument here. Bloggers know how to make links. Adding rel="tag" is very easy to remember. In any case, if a tool is generating it this is moot. XML is no more robust. (link)

Hmpff. I beg to differ. Bloggers != HTML coders.

For people who click "new post", write their thoughts, and then click "Post", the rel="tag" is not only not easy to remember, it's also.. well. They pretty much have no idea what we're talking about :)

Now this of course could be solved by tools. But, if we rely on a tool, why don't we choose a format that assumes a tool (though it can still be added manually).

I am not sure why you're saying that XML is not more robust. XML can be validated against a schema, assuring 100% match between the expected syntax and the actual syntax. And even if a schema is not used, the mere fact that XML supports namespaces solves a lot of problems. Even just defining your own tagstd:rel attribute instead of using the HTML standard rel attribute would be a huge improvement in robustness IMO.

Tag Spaces: these are there for disambiguation, and to provide alternatives. You should pick an appropriate one for each tag, bearing in mind that it should make sense to your readers if clicked on. See your own complaint of redundancy supra. (link)

I am not clear on this point, disambiguation of what? and alternatives to what?

Let's keep in mind that the whole tagging thing is about a flat namespace, in which all tags start as equals. That's the beauty of tagging. And, when we do want to disambiguate them, I doubt it will be done by URLs.

Let's admit it, everyone reading this blog is probably an early adopter to some extent. Let's try to imagine what will the tagging world look like when the dust settles down a bit. I'd guess we'll have 3-4 "tag collections" web sites, with direct tagging and tag-lookup support integrated into the browsers, and lots of non-technical people using this.

I'd guess that for them, the right thing to do is that when you'd like to look up a tag (e.g. find all "things of type X" associated with this tag), they'd want that it would be them who decides - at "run time" - which repository to use to look up the tag, not the one determined by the author.

Scope: this is deliberately left unspecified in the rel="tag" definition.

Just wondering, what is the issue that not defining scope was meant to avoid? Also, as pointed out by Kevin, while the Rel-Tag spec avoid this, the other microformats use facilities such as the class attributeto define the scope. Again, according to the specs, this is ok. But there are practical questions to ask... what would prevent a CSS developer from defining a CSS class "tag" and using it? How would the tools and the browser resolve the conflict? and the biggest question... why not reduce the chances of a conflict from happening at the spec level. A very simple solution would be to use class="tagstd:tag".

Also, it should be noted that the input from Priyantha, from Zoundry, which is the tool I'm using the write this post, express confidence in the Rel-Tag (and the other microformats). Also, Hendrik responded to Eran's comments indicating that in his opinion, a tagging standard should not assume any changes in the (X)HTML specs, and should in fact be independent from HTML.

Technorati : KevinMarks, Technorati, Zoundry, blogger, folksonomy, html, relTag, specification, standard, tag, tagging, tagstd.org, technorati, web2.0, xml
Del.icio.us : KevinMarks, Technorati, Zoundry, blogger, folksonomy, html, relTag, specification, standard, tag, tagging, tagstd.org, technorati, web2.0, xml

Chicklets

2005-11-05T20:00:00.000+02:00

Check out the sidebar. I've added the obligatory "chicklets" thingie [ ]. What a waste of screen-estate.

I wonder what will the "standard" for this end to be, 2 years from now, when RSS is finally mainstream. Which will happen of course only when smooth, integrated support for this will be incorporated into Windows (reading this blog: 78% Windows, 5% Linux / UNIX, 17% Mac OS X).

Yeah, I know that Firefox has an extension. Yes, there are wonderful readers out there. Right, we've got feed:// and feed: and rss:// and auto-discovery and USM. They're all great. But it ain't over until the Lady from Redmond sings, and we all know it.

I'd be happy with:

feed: being supported and configurable directly by the OS (a-la mailto:)
Integrated browser-support for auto-discovery, redirected to the OS feed: support
"Standard" alternate subscription user interface (inside an orange rectangle of course, for legacy reasons :) ), for browser-only no-desktop-of-my-own users, leading to a Microsoft/Google/Yahoo-provided universal subscription mechanism, similiar to MultiRSS.

Technorati : USM, chicklet, feed, rss
Del.icio.us : USM, chicklet, feed, rss

More on a tagging standard

2005-11-04T10:45:00.000+02:00

The Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything

2005-11-03T14:26:00.000+02:00

Osher Frimerman just pointed out that the numerical value of the word Google, as written in Hebrew, is... yes. 42.

Hmpff :)

Technorati : 42, Gematria, Numerology, google, hitchhiker's guide
Del.icio.us : 42, Gematria, Numerology, google, hitchhiker's guide

The Perfect Tagging UI

2005-11-03T12:51:00.000+02:00

Enough whining. I'm going to try to be constructive by listing what are the behaviors that will make me fall in love with a tagging thingie:

Clearly mark the tag boundaries
- Why? we still have a mess with different conventions regarding what separates tags - spaces, commas, semicolon, ... until we figure out it, we need a way to provide a visual hint to the user whether they got it right or wrong.
- Reasonable: Flock. Tags are comma-separated; whenever you type the comma, the previous tag is visually surrounded by a gray bubble indicating that it's a "single unit".
- Bad but not awful: Flickr. You can't tell as you type the tags if you got it right or wrong, but when you click the "Add" button, you get immediate visual feedback by inspecting the tags list above the entry line.
- Terrible: Zoundry (which other then this is a pretty cool product, I am using it to write this post :). You won't know if you did it right or wrong until you see your post
  on the blog...

Support copy and paste of tags
- there, and paste them here. Using a standard copy-and-paste interface, mind you.
- list, but selecting the tags in the list is hard, and pasting them results in a mess.
- Good: delicious.

Auto-complete
- Why? I love tagging, they make life easier. I don't like typing, it makes life shorter.
- Reasonable: blinklist.
- Bad: RawSugar. The auto-suggest does not follow well with the typing process. I can't press enter to choose the currently selected auto-complete suggestion and then proceed to type the next tag. I am forced to leave my typing context to select the tag, and after it's selected, to use the mouse to move back to where I was in the tagging line.
Auto-suggest
- Why? I'm not always in the mood to generate tags. Sometimes I am feeling lazy. Comeon, you know so much about me and about other users, use it to make my life easier, not just the search engine life :)
  - Based on tags that I've often used together with the tags I've already typed
  - Based on tags that other users often use together with the tags I've already typed
  - Based on tags that other people who tagged this page used
- Good: delicious
- Bad: Flickr

No hierarchy, classification, or anything else that disrupts the cognitive process
- Why? Because I find it distracting. And I have a good excuse for this :)
- Good: Flickr
- Bad: RawSugar

Ability to edit tags like text
- Why? because I make typos and change my mind, and I want to be able to quickly go back during the tagging process (or later) and fix it
- Good: Flickr, Delicious. Though none of them makes it too easy to edit the tags once they are submitted.
- Bad: Flock. The visual bubble around the tags, which I mention in #1, really gets in the way when you see a typo in a tag you just typed and you want to fix it.

Search previously tagged items with an already-typed tag without disrupting the tagging process
- Why? Because I'd like to borrow the tags I used when I tagged related items in the past
- Good: Flickr. Modless tagging interface, I can always open a new window and search.
- Bad: Flock (modal dialog...), Microsoft Live Favorites.

Funny, if you scan the "Bad:" examples, you'll note that the application that I am pretty much addicted to - Flickr - scores pretty high on the Bad list. Which kinda puts my rumbling in perspective :)

Technorati : Zoundry, delicious,favorites, flickr, flock,folksonomy, microsoft live,rawsugar, tag,tagging, web2.0
Del.icio.us : Zoundry, delicious,favorites, flickr, flock,folksonomy, microsoft live, rawsugar,tag, tagging, web2.0

Looksmart leveraging Furl to create vertical search

2005-11-03T10:45:00.000+02:00

Looksmart launched yesterday 161 new vertical web sites in 12 categories, apparently leveraging their Sep' 04 acquisition of Furl by using Furl users tagged bookmarks to discover and rank web pages relevant for a specific category / vertical.

I believe that they are the first major search engine company that truly leverages the tagging phenomena and integrates it with conventional search engine to deliver general purpose better search for the non-tagging public.

Technorati : better search, folksonomy, furl, looksmart, search, search engine, tag, tagging, tags, web2.0
Del.icio.us : better search, folksonomy, furl, looksmart, search, search engine, tag, tagging, tags, web2.0

MS Live Favorites - almost, but not quite.

2005-11-03T08:45:00.000+02:00

Windows Live Favorites is one of the many services introduced as part of the recently-announced Microsoft Windows Live suite (MS's new AJAX-based virtual desktop).

It's got rudimentary tagging support (called keywords. unlike Google, which calls them labels. well. it's always good to have a topic for flame wars...). Tag, search by tag. No tag cloud support. Tag bundle? Huh?

You can share your tagged favorites with the world. Hmm... that's a much as there is there in that area right now. No real community features there right now - can't see who else used this tag (I mean, keyword :), how many did that, what else did they tag with related tags, etc.

The tagging user interface is... hmmm... minimalistic :)

You can import your existing favorites from your browser (as long as its Internet Explorer, at least at this point). Nothing there about my favorite feature - synchronization between the desktop browser favorites and the online copy - but the entire desktop / live synchronization thing is supposed to be coming later. Instead, it got an "export to bookmarks.htm" feature, with a distinctive '96 smell.

No real leverage of tags across the entire suite. I can't search the entire suite - favorites, email, files, ...- using my tags.

No information yet about the APIs that this service will expose.

Looks like the giant is waking up, but it doesn't feel like they really dig what this is all about. But then, that was also the case with Internet Explorer 1.0 :)

And until it does, no real reason to switch away from your current favorite social bookmark thingie.

Technorati : ajax, browser, desktop, folksonomy, integration, live, microsoft, tagging, tags, web2.0, windows live
Del.icio.us : ajax, browser, desktop, folksonomy, integration, live, microsoft, tagging, tags, web2.0, windows live

Toward a tagging standard

2005-11-03T02:40:00.000+02:00

How come we still don't have a standard for associating tags with content?

We've got delicious and friends tagging entire web pages, and Technorati tagging blog posts. Flickr tags pictures. But how different are they really from each other in this aspect? Do we really need a propriety way to express the association of a piece of content with tags?

How's about something along the following lines:

Tag a piece of content:

<tagstd:tagged tagstd:scope="children" xmlns:tagstd="http://tagstd.org"> <taglist xmlns="http://tagstd.org"> <tag>tagging</tag> <tag>folksonomy</tag> </taglist> <p>This is a long blurb about our favorite topics:</p> <ul><li>tagging</li><li>taxonomy</li><li>web 2.0</li></ul> </tagstd:tagged>

(scope="children" indicates that the tagged content is the children element of the tagged tag).

Tag a link (in fact, tag the resource that the link is pointing to):

<tagstd:tagged tagstd:scope="resource" xmlns:tagstd="http://tagstd.org"> <taglist xmlns="http://tagstd.org"> <tag>tagging</tag> <tag>folksonomy</tag> </taglist> <a href="http://www.hyperorg.com/">Joho the Blog</a> </tagstd:tagged>

(scope="resource" indicates that the tagged content is the resouce expressed by the first non-comment element, which is a child of the tagged element.

What do you think? Good? Bad? Reinventing the wheel?

Let me know.

Technorati : blogger, delicious, flickr, folksonomy, html, standard, tag, tagging, tagstd.org, xhtml, xml
Del.icio.us : blogger, delicious, flickr, folksonomy, html, standard, tag, tagging, tagstd.org, xhtml, xml

The scariest interface contest

2005-11-01T16:13:00.000+02:00

Don't miss this wonderful contest on OK/CANCEL:

This week we're taking entries for the scariest interface youÂve ever used. Leave a comment and a screenshot link. Feel free to show stuff that frightens you because of how it looks, works, or what it does. Then we'll 'interface your fears' (har har) by talking about how to improve Âem.

The person who has the scariest interface, or comes up with the best fix wins something cool.

Some pretty good (scary) stuff on there.

How's about we do the same, leave a comment with a link to the tag-a-whatever web site (you can select from the ones listed in tag-o-verse 2.0 or come up with your own) with the most confusing and frustrating interface.

This might actually turn out to be a somewhat useful exercise...

What will you win? Don't know. Maybe a golden tag.

Tags: tags tagging folksonomy web2.0 ui userinterface contest worst

Post activation analysis paralysis

2005-11-01T12:28:00.000+02:00

Scott Golder wrote (together with Bernardo A. Huberman) a while back a paper on "The Structure of Collaborative Tagging Systems" (which I mentioned a while back).

Scott published his notes from Rashmi Sinha's session at TagCamp 2005 a few days ago. Rashmi Sinha, from Uzanto Consulting, posted about a month ago a wonderful piece on "A cognitive analysis of tagging". It's a must read.

Her main point is that the tagging process is so much more easy and natural then the classification process (e.g. organizing URLs or Pictures or whatever into hierarchies or folders based on a predefined categories), because it avoids what she calls "post-activation analysis paralysis":

"post activation analysis paralysis": A state of fear that you will make the wrong decision. And the item will be lost forever - it will land in some deep well, some hard to access branch of the tree and disappear from your view and attention.

Her analysis makes a lot of sense. If this is true, I think it's a good argument in favor of keeping the tagging process as simple as possible, and not to encumber it with facets, hierarchical tagging or anything else that makes that will pause that sub-conscious stream of tags from flowing. Hopefully we can avoid over-engineering the tagging process for a while, focusing instead on perfecting (and standardizing) the usability of the core tagging process.

Tags: tags tagging folksonomy web2.0 delicious search cognitive RashmiSinha hierarchy
facet classification

about del.icio.us

2005-10-31T10:18:00.000+02:00

Michael Arrington summarized the new del.icio.us features in "Wow! Del.icio.us rolls out more stuff" on TechCrunch .

The Del.icio.us Search Engine, now available to non-delicious users as well, puts delicious on par with Furl (a Looksmart company), Wink, and others who are leveraging tagging to create a better general purpose search engine.

Does anyone know if Google are already leveraging tags from the various tagging services directly in their PageRank algorithm?

David Weinberger posted an interesting summary of two sessions that Joshua Schachter of del.icio.us gave at the Berkman Center @ Harvard a few days ago. I find the summary of the first session particularly interesting:

Currently at delicious: 5M links, about 10M posts, on average about two tags per item. About 500,000 unique tags. Growth in tags is slow.

500,000 unique tags... that's a good number to take into account when designing tagging systems or application that leverage information from tagging services.

My personal favorite:

Q: Why "tags" instead of "keywords" in coming up with the terminology?

A: It was inadvertently clever. I wish I could say I did it intentionally. Typically, when keywords are used, you don't see a list of the aggregated keywords. Maybe it is a slightly new thing.

... and so the revolution has begun, with tags, tag clouds, tag bundles, meta-tags, taggers, ... and has turned the tag "tagging" into one of the most used tags :)

Oh yeah. Joshua also got hold of delicious.com. So maybe people will actually be able to find delicious :)

Tags: tags tagging folksonomy web2.0 delicious search MichaelArrington DavidWeinberger

Blogs

2005-10-30T16:43:00.000+02:00

You. Yes you, the one reading this blog.

A study by Advertising Age [requires registration first. isn't the deep web wonderful), finds that

"About 35 million workers -- one in four people in the labor force -- visit blogs and on average spend 3.5 hours, or 9%, of the work week engaged with them"

Some more stats:

"Work time spent reading and posting to blogs this year will consume 2.2% of U.S. labor force hours.
Work time spent at blogs unrelated to work will eat up 1.65% of labor force hours.
U.S. workers this year will waste the equivalent of 551,000 years (based on a 24-hour day) or 2.3 million work years (based on a typical nearly 40-hour work week) reading blogs unrelated to the job."

The article ends with an interesting extrapolation:

Technorati, a blog search engine, now tracks 19.6 million blogs, a number that has doubled about every five months for the past three years. If that growth were to continue, all 6.7 billion people on the planet will have a blog by April 2009. Imagine the work that wonÂt get done then.

Social social tagging site tagging

2005-10-29T13:43:00.000+02:00

Here is a much better way to maintain an up-to-date Tag-o-verse.

Supr.c.ilio.us - the best thing since tagged bread.

It's a "social social tagging site tagging". site :)

From their About page:

With so many places to tag so many things, how could one person keep track of it all?

Which just proves the old proverb - build a better mouse trap, and someone will build a meta-mouse.

Tags: tags tagging folksonomy web2.0 humor meta