the ryan king

Blogs as Pubs:

I think viewing weblogs in terms of influence as the end-game misses the mark. It begs the issue of why people blog, what they get out of the experience, and why folks read what other bloggers write.

I prefer to think of my own weblog, and the weblogs I like to read, as digital pubs.

I agree. However, don’t try blogging *from* a pub. It just doesn’t work out the way you would hope.

Update: Got the link from limbo via IM.

I’ve just now read through the proposed spec forhReview.

Here are some thoughts I have on it:

First, I’m not sure how I’d review a TV show or movie. Item type is limited to {product, business, event, person, place, website, url}. I guess a movie could fall under ‘product,’ but I’m not sure. I really don’t know where a TV show would fit in.

Secondly, having said that, it seems there would be a good number of things to be reviewed that have some degree of duality to them- for instance, a DVD movie is not the same as the VHS or cable version of the same movie, yet they obviously have a lot in common. I’m not sure how’d I’d review a movie and be able to make a comment about just the DVD version. Of course, hReview is supposed to be simple, so situations like this can probably be ignored for now.

I think the spec should state that many of the values can actually be plural. For example, I think the ‘reviewer’ item could be plural, as there are often co-authors of reviews (Siskel and Ebert style). I guess in these situations is may be better to either seperated the review into two seperate versions, or to create a multidimensional review, with two people’s reviews within the one structure. Of course this is more complexity that may easily be ignored.

The only other value that would likely be plural is the tags element and the example code is already showing use of an unordered list for this.

The only other ideas I have related to the format are specific to music reviews and the spec states that it is to remain general at this point, so I’ll hold back on those.

Overall I’m excited about the format and think it has great potential, especially given the input it has recieved from various companies.

We’re talking about folksonomy for class tonight. Reading list here.

I’m re-reading a lot of stuff on it today and a few new ideas have come to me.

Many people defending folksonomies cite the difficulty of geting people to classify objects within a strict taxonomy. I think its quite obvious that non-experts will always have difficulty and be reluctant to categorize in taxonomies. I think a key thing to realize with regard to folksonomies, is that not only to they open up the categorization to more people, but they open up the creation of the vocabulary. And isn’t that just as important?

Joshua Porter says:

taxonomies may fail to reflect the language of users if they are not fully tested with the target population

I say, why not just let the target population create the taxonomy/vocabulary/whatever?

Its likely that as we get more experience with folksonomies that we’ll be able to build stuff on top of them that’s more controled. Qualitative and quantitative analysis of folksonomies is likely to yield some interesting new ways to deal with information.

I went to the Flickr meetup last night. Good times. I didn’t really take any pictures, but plenty of others did.

And, as a sidenote, when did I become a FlickrTag?

Updates at bottom.

I bought and installed Mac OS X version 10.4 (aka, Tiger) yesterday. Here are a collection of my reactions:

• The new Mail.app interface will take some getting used to. I’m elated that they chose to do away with the drawer, making it a bit easier to navigate around without using the mouse (more about his later), but I think the colors of the left sidebar and the change away from bolding folder names with new messages make it a bit harder on the eyes. Perhaps I just need to adjust, though.
• I was a bit annoyed to see that Spotlight used Cmd-Space by default, since I use that for X-Tunes (and have been using it for such for at least 2 years). Thankfully, I was able to change the Spotlight key to F8.
• I’m amazed that X-Tunes still works, though it hasn’t been updated since 2003.
• The update to Tiger seemed to reset the default browser to Safari. Ok, so Safari’s supposed to be all hip and cool with RSS, but I’m still going to use NetNewsWire and Shiira.
• Shiira is having some problems. Probably something to do with WebKit updates.
• I like DashBoard, but I wish there were a way to move the focus between widgets without using the mouse. Specifically, I want to be able to pull up the Dashboard and activate the calculator, do my calculations, copy the result and put the Dashboard away- all without touching the mouse.
• Why does my scroll-wheel mouse suddenly scroll alot slower? Seriously. That shit sucks- I have to spin the wheel a dozen times now to get anywhere.

Back to the issue of not using the mouse. For me, the more often I have to move my hand between the keyboard and mouse, the worse the interface is. Anything that allows me to key my hands on the keyboard is a win for me. Current tools for this include: X-Tunes, LaunchBar, Terminal and now Spotlight. I hope the Dashboard will be helpful, too.

Update: It appears that Apple has changed their screenshot format from PDF to PNG. Interesting.

Update 2: Upgrading to Shiira 1.0 has fixed most of the problems.