Flickr Machine Tags

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.

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

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

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

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

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!

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"?