Internet Alchemy

As I mentioned a few days ago I’ve been working on changing how posts are tagged here. Now, for each post, you can see how everyone else has tagged it in del.icio.us. This is much cooler than seeing just my tags. I find it quite astounding how many of my posts have been bookmarked and even more astounding the huge variety of tags used. They’re also informative. For example, somebody thinks this belongs in the bad-ideas bucket. Cool.

Microcomments. Made possible by Web 2.0.

For those more technically minded, I did this via a custom wordpress plugin (download here) which fetches the RSS feed for a given URL and parses it looking for the tags described by the RSS taxonomy extension. I collect all these together, count how many of each I have and spit out the list. It caches lookups so as not to hit del.icio.us too hard.

Cool! Thanks to Danny (site down at moment – hurry back Danny!) I got quoted in BusinessWeek

Here’s something that occurred to me whilst enjoying Shelley’s Cheap Eats at the Semantic Web Café posting again. I added tagging to this site using Jerome’s tagging plugin for WordPress and then hacked around with Tom Gilbert’s del.icio.us plugin to fetch a list of my bookmarks for each tag. Now when I click on a tag I get to see recent thing I’ve written together with things I’ve bookmarked. Useful. In fact, so useful that I keep coming across things that I’d forgotten about. Sometimes I don’t even remember bookmarking them in the first place.

Here’s my revelation: I don’t actually visit del.icio.us all that often. For me, del.icio.us is a write-only environment. I fire and forget. I’m bookmarking because I might one day want to go back and use find it but in practice I rarely do. I seem to remember that the last time I did try to find something I’d bookmarked, I couldn’t remember the tags I’d used or even if I had bookmarked it and I ended up with Google anyway.

Part of the problem is that I’m not consistent: I seem to have things bookmarked under web-services, webservice and webservices. But I thought that was the mantra of folksonomy: no controlled vocabularies.

Looking at my tagcloud I can see lots of tags that never realised their full potential such as sidebar (I thought perhaps I could tag useful Firefox sidebar extensions) or stats. These languish, barely used, because I can’t remember them or why I thought they were useful.

My inconsistency and bad memory aside, the fact of the matter is that tagging systems and folksonomies are great for organising, but boy do they suck when it comes to finding something. Google still wins hands down – I just have to plug in the keywords (tags!) that are relevant to me now, rather than those that were relevant a few months ago. This is an area where controlled vocabularies win too: they’re designed for locating things quickly, not for ease of categorisation (e.g. Dewey, dmoz etc).

I think there’s a solution and it’s a web 2.0 thing. In the same way that Google desktop inserts results from my hard disk into any Google web search, I want all the pages I’ve bookmarked to be searched and shown first whenever I search in Google. Maybe I could do this as an extension to Google desktop, but a better solution would be for Google to allow me to register my RSS feeds with them. Then, they could subscribe to my feeds to learn what I’ve recently read or bookmarked and show those at the top of any search results. That would be extremely cool and infinitely useful!

I recently added tagging to this weblog. But, as Om Malik writes, all is not well in the tagging world:

So this is where I lose the plot – I tag my post, Technorati benefits, and despite all that, my tags help spammers who clog my RSS readers gain more readers. That’s absolutely rotten! So essentially the spammers can write a script, generate tags, stay high on the Technorati listings and fool people into visiting their sites. By tagging I am helping this scumbags, the RSS-link blog spammers. This is clearly not going to help Technorati (or infact anyone’s reputation) as a good search tool.

This is a variation of comment spam but instead of them visiting our sites and defacing them, they deface Technorati and then we all link to them! How perverse can we be?

My tags don’t link across to anyone partly for this reason and also partly because there are so many places I could link them to that I don’t want to favour any one of them.

While we’re on the subject, I’ve decided that I’m going to change the tagging system here. Rather than me assigning tags, I should be
allowing others to tag them à la flickr. Think of this as microcomments – anyone will be able rate or categorise my postings, perhaps making associations I hadn’t thought of. Because they only link within my own site, spammers will have no
reason to abuse them.

Should be do-able with a few tweaks to the templates provided I can get the permissions right.

I bought a Garmin eTrex Legend last week so off we went geocaching at the weekend. Our first ever geocache was All Aboard at Lamport Railway just to the north of Northampton. We often walk there but I never knew there was a hidden cache a few metres from the path. The walk is along the route of the railway that used to connect Northampton with Market Harborough which was finally shut down in the eighties. Some enthusiasts have painstakingly restored some of the track and now run steam train trips up and down it. The smell of smoke and steam and the thunder of the train as it trundles past is a great nostalgia trip. There’s only about 1.5 miles of track which was recently extended with the aid of a grant to rebuild a bridge over a stream. Unfortunately they’re limited by the abandoned Kelmarsh tunnel to the north and urban sprawl to the south so I think it’ll forever be a tiny view back in time.

The cache itself was fun to find, although I misread the GPS and scrambled down a bank in the wrong place. When we finally found it there were all kinds of interesting items in there and a very full logbook. We took a baseball card and left a 1916 british penny. Plenty more caches around here and when we’ve got a bit more experience we’ve got just the place to set our own!