Published on Saturday, 28th May 2005 .
If only I’d forgotten the punchline…
“The first time I met my g/f’s parents, we
had a cracking piss up, got absolutely ratted
then started telling jokes. They were getting
progressively nearer the knuckle so I thought
it safe to tell her Dad my favourite (”Did
you hear the one about the SS Commandant?”
then as they say “no” you slap them around
the head and shout “LIAR” in your best Jerry
accent). Firstly I knocked her Dad off his
seat, secondly I had completely forgotten
that they were Jewish. I’ve not been invited
round since.”
thanks to Seb for forwaring this one.
Published on Thursday, 26th May 2005 .
Drupal treats taxonomies like any other entity and so you can have as many as you like. You then associate them with module types and when someone creates an instance of a new module (Node) they are given the option to select which term(s) (i.e. category) they want to put the data in. Modules can have more than one taxonomy associated with it. In reality all data is treated the same and the taxonomies make the bumps in the landscape. we had the problem that you couldn’t associate one bit of content with another but someone wrote a handy module to do this. It basically allowed parent child relationships between the data of different module types i.e. so a an ‘Article’ about a course could have ‘Events’ listed with it to book those courses. The interface became unintuitive because the admin had to make then both separately and then separately make the associating between the course description and the booking listings.
I was thinking that you can globally use a flat Tag like taxonomy for organiising data and have small fixed hierarchies for building composate data types e.g. if you want to do a booking system you could have a ‘Gig’ which can be made up of three smaller modules ‘Address’, ‘Event’, ‘Price Tag’ (for buying tickets). This would be a small hierarchy but grouped as one entity and perhaps appear on the site under ‘Festival listings’ and also with the band when you look at them. Parts of the Gig could be used separately e.g. the Event which has a Date could be used in a Calendar of what’s on in the Festival, and the Price Tag might appear in the shop with other band merchandise.
I’m thinking this mini hierarchy thing will present one face for entering the data for a ‘Gig’ to the three ’sub modules’ of Gig, ether as a series of forms or some how as one form (avoiding conflicts with field names etc) and processed as one.
The way that the mini hierarchy can be put together using Tags I’m thinking is that they will all be given Node ID’s (all module instances will have one) and have the same Tags as the ‘Gig’ is given but the sub modules will automatically be give the ‘Gig’ node ID as a tag, so when you view the ‘Gig’ anything with the Gigs Node ID as a Tag will appear with it. The only problem this leaves is ordering of content on the screen which is no trivial matter and a problem that Drupal had too but I’m working on an answer.
Kitaro KOUSAKA produces some beautiful work. I watched half of ‘Princess Mononoke‘ last night and was impressed with the quality of the animetion. It looked like ‘Spirited Away‘, another beautiful anime film. I did a little sniffing around and found that it was a combinatioon of Kitaro KOUSAKA as Animation Supervisor and Hayao MIYAZAKI detailed and original story and direction.
I shall hunt down some more their work. Of note ‘Whisper of the Heart’ and ‘Castle in the Sky’ look good.
Published on Saturday, 21st May 2005 .
Shirky: Ontology is Overrated — Categories, Links, and Tags
This article looks at ontology’s and compares traditional predefined fixed expert ontology’s with the current web trend of individually defined organically growing tagging of web content post-publishing that is becoming every more popular on the web.
It reviews the traditional methods and looks at how they are based on library’s who’s systems where designed to find a book on a shelf so a thus it had to have only one place in the catalog system.
The essence of a book isn’t the ideas it contains. The essence of a book is “book.” Thinking that library catelogs exist to organize concepts confuses the container for the thing contained.
The article basically compares hierarchical systems with a flat unstructured one. The realisation that:
One of the biggest problems with categorizing things in advance is that it forces the categorizers to take on two jobs that have historically been quite hard: mind reading, and fortune telling. It forces categorizers to guess what their users are thinking, and to make predictions about the future.
It ends with an analysis of del.icio.us tagging and provides some statistical views of it.
My ideas from this
- Perhaps you can get the users on a community driven site to classify the content on that site. If uses are offered a system to mark articles (items) as ‘favourites/bookmarks’ they could be also offered a option to tag add tags so they can find it again. These tags could be globally pooled and a dynamic thesaurus could be generated between like terms/tags.
- Music managers, such as iTunes or Winamp, should allow a tag type labelling for genre. Disocogs handles this well but having ‘Genre’ with a top level type label and then ‘Style’ which can be a list of styles an album falls into. Better would be to have this per song as often tracks on the same album will be in different styles.
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the semantics here are in the users, not in the system. This is not a way to get computers to understand things…The tag overlap is in the system, but the tag semantics are in the users. This is not a way to inject linguistic meaning into the machine.
I disagree here. I believe that ‘meaning’ of words is individual to everyone and is based on the examples of our own experience. del.icio.us is providing individual opinions of word meanings/groupings and giving an example (the URL). I think together this is closer to how our brains work than anything else. It might be argued that del.icio.us doesn’t understand this information, but what is understanding it? Because del.icio.us doesn’t have a mean to express its ‘understanding’ how can we say it doesn’t?
Within its domain and only mode of expression (i.e. recommending tags based on a given one) then it does understand because it can equate tags that are similar. If this is not understanding then what is? I mean isn’t this what we do when we are asked what a ‘dog’ is? Don’t we recall our experiences of ‘dog’ to create an ‘understanding’ in our minds which is converted to words to relate this. Words that come together to form related meaning, as a dictionary uses words to describe words.
I think in this way Google is in fact intelligent as it is like a concept dictionary of all the information online. ‘Intelligent’ within its domain and mode of communication.
I like most of the artists on the Warp Record website. Loves ‘em I do. So it was only natural to go to their website and check it out. They keep a pretty low profile but have a huge cult following:
“People will look at Warp in 20 Years like people look at
Blue Note or Motown now.”
So you figure they could have a huge community driven site, really hyping up the fans, who are all pretty hard core really, but sadly this is not the case. In fact they have a site that not only has music in the front page that you can’t stop (and being a music fan I’m always playing my own so I want to get off the front page in a hurry every time). In a panic I hit teh ‘Albums’ nav link which, thank god, makes the music stop but you are presented with a piece of genius user interface design.
A grid of squares with one corner lopped off with a seemingly random colour coding. There are 146 of these squares, each representing an album. The only way you can find an album is to drag your mouse over each one which brings up the artist, album and catalogue reference serial. The ordering of the albums and the colour coding seems to be random.
Its assumed that there was some sort of ‘idea’ behind this interface. The little maimed cubes pop up when you mouse over them like sifting though a second hand record collection in an obscure shop somewhere. The trouble is if your looking for something specific it seems to maximise the time it will take for you to find it. At least a record shop has its albums sorted by artist. There is no searching or way to chose sorting, nothing.
Considering its there interface to their online shop you might think they would make it easy for you to find what your after.
Apart form that, there is no community driven stuff on the site, which a label with such a cult following would benefit enormously from.
Published on Wednesday, 18th May 2005 .
It makes a big difference.
NERD FLASH - similar to the predictive text stuff we’ve mentioned recently, jon l writes, “There’s an odd thing in Microsoft Word: “jesus” is not automatically corrected to a capital J whereas “hitler” is.” Woo. This makes us as happy as when we learnt that searching for “monkeys” in a Microsoft clip-art application it produced photos of affluent black people.
Thanks seb
On a similar vain I’ve notice that with predictive text if you spell ‘lips’ the next predictive text option will be ‘kiss’. Also ‘anal’ -> ‘cock’. Any others?
Published on Tuesday, 03rd May 2005 .
I’ve long thought that ‘direct action’ is a waste of time in a modern indirect world. Protest are a bit of a throw back to the 1960s where they were first tried in a democracy to a successfully end
- I think they were successful because it was quite a new thing to do in a 1st world country and the system of power wasn’t prepared for it thus there was unlimited media focus.
- It was coupled with a social movement that expressed the angst of a large group of young people (i.e. ‘the baby boomers’), and rode the already existing momentum of social change.
Time has changed dramatically and I don’t think a political decision in the 1st world has been swayed by a protest in decades. What makes me say this is that we had the biggest series of protests around the world in history against the ‘war on terror’.
So maybe it wasn’t the direct action that was important in the 60s but the social movement. People hanging out, sharing love and drugs and generally having a good time. I think the article ‘Your Politics Are Boring As Fuck’ sums it up nicely and offers a more evolved way forward. It realises that people need something back from volunteering, even if its just the basics of pleasant human interaction.
If political activates are fun and sociable (rather than socialist) they will be able to affect more people for longer. After all who doesn’t want to be apart of fun?