RageBoy stumbled on Amazon’s Amapedia, a wiki for the products you like. It uses what Amazon is calling “collaborative structured tagging.” Click on, say, “cameras” in the tag cloud and you can walk through a camera hierarchy until you get to a particular model. There you can do a product write-up or record your opinion, personal experiences, etc.

Siderean, a faceted classification company, has announced a patent for what it calls “relational navigation.”

Faceted classification lets a user browse a field in typical hierarchical fashion—like navigating through the nested folders on your desktop—except the hierarchy is created dynamically as the user decides which property matters to her now. So, instead of having a fixed taxonomy that first divides all books into fiction and non-fiction, and then subdivides them by language and then by year, with a faceted classification, a user might decide first to find all the works written in the 19th century, then drill down to the non-fiction, etc. It has taxonomy’s virtue of guiding navigation without its vice of having to present the user with one and only one path through the taxonomy.

Faceted classification and taxonomies both work by showing the user narrower and narrower results . That’s often what we want, but in this crazy world, we may also want to leap off the branch we’ve walked onto. Siderean’s relational nav shows context from branches outside of the path you’ve walked. Siderean refers to this as the ability to “pivot,” as in a database pivot.

Techniques that let us play with the dialectic between narrowing our focus and expanding it—searching and discovering—are all to the good. The faceted classification industry overall is up to important and exciting stuff. [Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous taxonomy faceted_classification facets siderean ]

MetaGlossary is a definition aggregator that scrapes online glossaries and other sources. It’s got about 2,000,000 English words and phrases, and is particular useful when the words are new or you’re looking for a phrase. (Try “truthiness,” “alternative fuels“, “mission accomplished,” or “miserable failure.”)

Until today it’s been algorithmically driven. The new version of the beta lets anyone suggest a new or improved definition. You can also give a thumbs up or down to an existing definition.

It’s a good start. It’ll be fascinating to see what other social structures emerge. E.g., do we need to be able to edit existing definitions? A way to indicate that two definitions are good but need to be forked? More of a reputation system? It’ll be fun to watch this site… [Tags: metaglossary wikis dictionaries web2.0 everything_is_miscellaneous ]

Inside Google Book Search writes about a mashup of digitized books and Google Maps, that plots on maps place references in books. Click and get a snippet of the text. Very cool. (Thanks for the link, RageBoy.) [Tags: libraries books everything_is_miscellaneous taxonomy maps mashups web2 ]

I gave Midomi a quick whirl this morning. It searches for songs based on melodies you hum to it. Fun idea, but it took me six tries before it got one right. It thought my rendition of the opening of Beethoven’s Fifth was the 59th St. Bridge song by Simon and Garfunkel, and it thought my rendition of the 59th St. Bridge Song was Oh Daddy by Fleetwood Mac. Midomi offers to play the matched portion of the song (recorded by users, which is rather charming), and in no cases were the match and the matchee recognizably the same, except presumably in some computer algorithmic sense. It did get, “Doe, a Deer” right. Unfortunately, that’s the one song whose name is embedded in its melody.

I’m no Mariah Carey, but I’m within the bell curve of normalcy for singing on key. Even so, I played the opening notes of the 59th Street song on my keyboard, with my mic laid on top of it. That apparently is Only a Dream in Rio by James Taylor. And Beethoven’s Fifth on the keyboard Midomi thinks is the melody to How Deep Is Your Love.

If I’m missing the point, I’m sure you’ll set me straight. [Tags: midomi everything_is_miscellaneous music search]

Eric Scheid (in an email) notes that LinkedIn now is enabling users to pose questions to their social network. Only members can respond. They’re also limiting how many questions you can ask per month. Interestingly, you’re only allowed to give one answer to any one question. Lots of interesting results may accrue… [Tags: linkedin social_networks everything_is_miscellaneous ]

Seb Schmoller notes a research project by Steve Graham at Durham University exploring how many institutions now routinely use software to sort customers/users/citizens. Stephen writes:

…in the UK, software now organise everything from call centre phone queues, the prioritisation (and stalling) of Internet traffic, the identification and tracking of those deemed ‘risky’ or ‘threatening’ on commercial shopping streets, people’s access to premium (electronically-tolled) areas of urban roads, the allocation of financial and insurance services, the geography of shops and bank branches, and the experience of energy markets.

His project will explore how software is being used to sort us, the social assumptions behind it, how those assumptions are embedded in the code, and the practice’s social and political implications.

Great topic.

[Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous taxonomy seb_schmoller steve_graham sociology ]

Mitchell Baker has posted a draft of the Mozilla Manifesto. (There’s discussion of it here.) Here are the principles:

1. The Internet is an integral part of modern life — a key component in education, communication, collaboration, business, entertainment and society as a whole.

2. The Internet is a global public resource that must remain open and accessible.

3. The Internet should enrich the lives of individual human beings.

4. Individuals’ security on the Internet is fundamental and cannot be treated as optional.

5. Individuals must have the ability to shape their own experiences on the Internet.

6. The effectiveness of the Internet as a public resource depends upon technological interoperability, innovation and decentralized participation worldwide.

7. Free and open source software promotes the development of the Internet as a public resource.

8. Transparent community-based development processes promote participation, accountability, and trust.

9. Commercial involvement in the development of the Internet brings many benefits; a balance between commercial goals and public benefit is critical.

10. Magnifying the public benefit aspects of the Internet is an important goal, worthy of time, attention and commitment.

There isn’t a sentence in it with which I disagree. And that’s the problem. It’s not disagreeable enough. I can imagine all sorts of organizations that I think are doing harm to the Net signing onto the first five principles without even checking with marketing first. The only two that would give anyone pause are #6 and #7 (although the telcos would have to do claim that—as per #5—making international phone calls counts as “decentralized participation worldwide”). Even then, they could say they are happy to have other people doing open source work, because that’s part of the balance that #9 endorses.

So, I guess I’d be more enthusiastic about the principles if they had more bite. Name the threats to principles #1-5. Declare that its openness in process and standards should make open source software the first choice to be considered when organizations serving the public good are making software decisions. Denounce the use of software patents. I hate to be, well, disagreeable about a set of principles I agree with, produced by a group I admire and whose software I use and am grateful for every day, but imo the manifesto needs to be more than a pat on the back and a big group hug. [Tags: open_source mozilla digital_rights everything_is_miscellaneous]

Richard Sambrook of the BBC is at a Davos meeting that doesn’t permit live blogging. He does report, however, that:

One internet entrepreneur said “The challenge isn’t content anymore. It’s organising it, the architecture of content is the new challenge.” He was referring to sites like Flickr and Facebook.

[Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous richard_sambrook davos07 ]

JP Rangaswami points to a Wired interview with Josh Madell of Other Music, a NYC music store’s site that’ll sell you songs without restrictions on how you use what you’ve bought. Josh says, for example,:

The nice thing about selling digitally is that the space limitations are much less restrictive than at the physical store, where we constantly have to delete items for space reasons, and also you are never out of stock of an MP3. The thing about iTunes, which is by far the most successful digital store so far, is that despite the cool factor they have been able to hold onto, they are really closer to Best Buy than Other Music in terms of the shopping experience. That’s great for some people, but we feel there is a real need for great indie download shops with a curated selection.

JP also points to a funny Other Music video that’s an ad in the sense of making Other Music look as over-the-top horrible as possible. It is, as RageBoy comments, durn gonzo. [Tags: music drm other_music jp_rangaswami josh_madell digital_rights itunes everything_is_miscellaneous]