Experiencing Information

My favorite tagging site, Librarything, turned two today. Congrats to Tim and all the others involved.

Matthew Hurst over at Data Mining has in interesting post about influence and authority. He correctly points out that they are not the same thing.

However, I think influence actually needs to go beyond number of readers. In the truest sense of the word, influence implies changing others’ opinions. So you could have a really polemic blog or blog posting that lots of people read, but doesn’t change those readers’ minds. Is it influential? Maybe, maybe not.

Not sure how you’d measure it, but you need to take the change your post or opinion has on others to really indicate influence.

Just came across Jumpchart. Looks like a very handy tool for planning websites. Doesn’t look like it can handle designing serious interaction for an RIA, though. I’m also not sure how well it scales up. If you have a 10,000 page site, you might not want to plan it out with this program.

Still, if anyone has used this, I’d like to know. Or better yet, invite me to use it.

Looks like DWN is now available on Amazon.com. Also seems to be ready to ship on Amazon.co.uk, but not on Amazon.de. It usually takes longer to make it over to the Continent.

Anyway, rush out not to purchase your copies before they all sell out! (Just kidding - you only need to buy one copy :-).

Tim Spalding, creator of LibraryThing, has come up with something new that’s quite interesting. It’s called the tag mirror. Essentially, you get to see other people’s tags for your books. Great idea.

Here’s my tag mirror (I’m Pivo1 on LibraryThing). No real surprises, but there are some interesting connections. Not sure where “Christmas”came from. The “Geek” tag might also say something about my book collection–at least those that I have on LibraryThing.

I suspect there are loads of such filters and ways of structuring tags that have yet to be explored. We’re really only just beginning. With 22 million tags and inventive tagging mechanisms like the tag mirror, LibraryThing is a clear leader in this area. Keep your eye on Tim in the future.

I’ve decided to give Twitter another chance after having dismissed it wholesale previously. The main reason is because I came across Tweetr 2.0, which is made with Adobe’s AIR technology. It’s pretty cool–you essentially have a little app that sits open on your desktop waiting for a Twitter post.

The other problem I have with Twitter is that I don’t have a network connections and can’t seem to add it to my WordPress blog page. So I’m just Twittering into thin air…unless someone out there wants to invite me to be a Twitter-friend.

There is a nice article in the most recent issue of D-Lib Magazine called Enhancing Search and Browse Using Automated Clustering of Subject Metadata. The authors looked at ways to integrated automatic classification with traditional categories. “Results indicated that while the algorithm was somewhat time-intensive to run and using a local classification scheme had its drawbacks, precise clustering of records was achieved and the prototype interface proved that faceted classification could be powerful in helping end-users find resources.”

I like the practicality of this study. Lots of screens are shown, helping you grab onto issues discussed. They also talk about user testing and integrating that feedback into the designs.

Memeorandum launched a new blog news aggregation service today. It’s an automatic summary of key news issues, with links to further discussions from around the blogosphere on a given topic. Unfortunately they don’t have the key visual clues that help people judge the importance and credibility of a story: number of conversations on that topic, and time ellapsed since the story broke. I’m also not thrilled with the information design–it’s not the prettiest thing to look at.

Interestingly, there are two categories or types of news they are focusing on: political news and tech news. This reminded me of something Chris Anderson writes about in the Long Tail: Information needs context for it to be useful. For instance, top-ten list of all bands on a online music store is meaningless, but a top-ten list for latin jazz suddenly makes a lot of sense. Similarly, news based on all blogs isn’t nearly as valuable as categorizing it under politics or tech or whatever.

In the Long Tail, categories of niches are needed before the information in that market can even make sense, so it would seem. And if services like Memeorandum expand, we’ll end up with a taxonomy of niche markets. Uh oh–did I just say “taxonomy.” Guess I did. Looks like structured information–even way out there in the long tail of the blogoshere–ain’t so bad after all.

So, after one year and three months of working and waiting, my book finally arrived on my doorstep this morning. What a pleasant surprise. I wasn’t expecting it until later. But there it was in hard copy. Relieved, proud, happy–I’m not quite sure how to feel about it. And I’m not sure what to expect next.

Thanks to everyone who helped with the book.

UPDATE: Just to be clear, I received an author advanced copy. It’s still not available on Amazon as of August 19. O’Reilly has a told me that is should be available for to buy at the end of August 2007–just a few weeks off.