Multi-tool Twitter

Half a year ago I moved to Amsterdam. Great city, many interesting people, many cultural events, vast amount of bars, ... How to find your way around, how to meet great people, the right places to eat, the places to buy honest ingredients, ..? I put my money on Twitter and got lucky. Twitter got me in touch with new media researchers, promising entrepreneurs, social events, #blog08, ... it even got me interviewed in a large newspaper. Twitter is a multi-tool and I like it! 836 tweets in 3 months got me connected with 50-60 people. 15 of them I actually met in real life. NRC / nrc next journalist Marie-José Klaver interviewed me about the role of Twitter in organisations, specifically about its role as a knowledge management tool.

Now we're getting somewhere: Thinkbase

Thinkbase allows people to visually explore the relationships that Freebase can expose. Thinkbase employs the Thinkmap visualization software to visually represent the semantic relationships between objects on Freebase as an interactive mind map. Each object on the map is represented by an icon that corresponds to the type of object it is. For example, person, place, movie, song, or artwork. The site uses a two-pane display, putting the relationship map in the left pane, and the Freebase entry for the active node in the right pane. Every node on a Thinkbase map and be expanded to see concepts related to that object, or collapsed to clean the graph of relationships you're unconcerned with. Every map you create can also be linked to via a dynamic share URL. Thinkbase is a usefull visual front end to the Freebase database that exposes the semantic relationships that such a database can reveal in a compelling way. Tools like Thinkbase can help us start to think about what type of questions we should be asking by clearly showing the type of semantic relationships that databases like Freebase excel at finding.

knol = a unit of knowledge, according to Google

oSkope visual search

Beautifully made.

Are we ready to make information find us?

Google's Marissa Mayer on semantic web, video retrieval, cross-lingual search

CIVR2007

Is everything miscellaneous?

DiiGo and Grupthink... tools for tag drafting

Remember the item on tag drafting, well, here's Diigo, with communities sharing bookmarks, clippings, annotations, ... The name "Diigo" is an abbreviation for "Digest of Internet Information, Groups and Other stuff." Diigo (dee'go) is about Social Annotation. By combining social bookmarking, clippings, in situ annotation, tagging, full-text search, easy sharing and interactions, Diigo offers a powerful personal tool and a rich social platform for knowledge users, and in the process, turns the entire web into a writable, participatory and interactive media. The social annotation service introduced by Diigo allows users to add highlights and sticky notes, in situ, on any web page they read. Imagine a giant transparency overlaying on top of all the web pages. Users can write on the transparency as they wish, as private notes or public comments. And they can read public comments on the transparency left by other readers of the same page, and hear their "two cents" and interact with them. Grupthink is a similar kind of tool, with a much better name as far as I'm concerned, but less useful. Grupthink caters for communities sharing answers to more or less open-ended questions, like: "Can all ideas be expressed using language?"

Dogear or Donkey ear?

Turning down the corner of a page of a book: Dogearing. In many languages it's not the ear of a dog, but the ear of a donkey that is used in this verb. Hence why I, a cloggy, didn't immediately grasp why IBM chose to call its social bookmarking tool Dogear.

Excellent work by Quintarelli, Resmini and Rosati: FaceTag

Have a look at their site for more information.

Google can index almost anything...

We want an interface as clean as Google's...

[designer to reference user] Could you give me an example of an interface that you really like working with to inspire me in making an interface design for your application?

[reference user to designer] Well, if you can make it as clean and simple as Google, I would surely enjoy working with it.

Dear reader, how many times are you part of such a dialogue? Well, I must admit that I quite often find myself in the position of the designer in a similar dialogue. Do not misunderstand: there is nothing wrong with the user's answer. I do understand what they mean with clean and simple, an interface cannot be any cleaner and simpler, because it would be an empty page and therefore not an interface any more. The interface might appear clean and simple, but so is the functionality delivered by it. It suggests that search needs no more than entering one (maybe two words) and hit 'search'. Followed by some brilliant mechanism that understands exactly what is entered and delivers results precisely geared towards the user's expectation ordered to the user's conception of relevance.
Sweet dreams!

PS I do not dislike Google with some sort of passion, I actually think they are the example to anyone active in the arena of web marketing.

Search engine technology terminology can be funny, really!

Taken from KinoSearch.

Where were you all this time when I needed you?

Quite some time ago a colleague of mine asked me:"Are there any tools to easily label documents with multiple values, like some sort of drag and drop kind of thing, me not having to think of directories and structures?" Typically making gestures like he was actually moulding it with his hands, like he uses to do when he talks about tools. When I answered there weren't any yet, he looked quite disappointed. So, here we are December 2006 with Tag2Find offering me a Beta test version. I installed it like a child opening a Christmas present, full of desire. After having tried it for some days my general conclusion is: These guys are on the right track, but they must push the idea to the full envelope of its potential. Meaning:

adding tags works quite well, the usability could be improved, but can wait a bit, the first big thing to improve is the usability of searching and navigating after having added the tags.

I'm envisaging some sort of semi-transparent desktop feature showing the tag cloud, maybe in a sidebar or as a web part on a portal. Not having to start Explorer to get to files, but directly starting from the desktop. The next step could be dragging and dropping files on the clouds on the desktop to tag files.

Think with the end-user in mind, the type of user with the desktop loaded with files seemingly without structure, these are the masses you should be aiming at, I'd say.

For more advanced users it would add value if the tags were visible in Explorer, mash up Explorer with Tag2Find. The development of the tool will definitely stay on my radar. Cheers Marc Stein and colleagues from Linz (Austria)!

Quaero: full stop

Quaero, the french/german R&D collaboration came to an end even before results were visible for public. Both countries' spokesmen stated that goals conflicted and further collaboration was not useful any more. Next to conflicts between goals, there were also technological difficulties. The idea was to build a web search engine for multimedia. Probably the idea will come to an implementation as many other research projects are taking place, e.g. Multimatch as well as commercial projects. The German partners of Quaero will commence by a project called Theseus. The French will also proceed so they say. A Thomson (France) spokeswoman said:

"The two projects were never one."

Jim Egan wrote on diplomatic traffic:

Quaero is an outgrowth of the “1791 Drill Regulations” mentality Napoleon tried to eradicate. Amazingly, this multimedia vacuum cleaner still cannot organize and index what little it lifts from the cultural carpet. In contrast, Blinkx (“the world’s largest video search engine”) trumpets that it now has over 6 million hours of searchable TV and viral video content. Competitors such as the long-toothed T. rexes MSN, Yahoo and Google, plus aspiring adolescents Ask.com and Accoona, are no doubt thankful the distracted French government expensively sired such a transparent, predictable and beatable foe. Designed to fight the last war, Quaero will not become a step-change and thus ensures U.S. internet search hegemony for years to come. Unless, that is, France’s elected leader finds inspiration and creatively disrupts the nature and cadence of competitive EU digital initiatives. To begin with, President Chirac should correct an out-of-step viewpoint revealed at an Elysée Palace speech last January. There he stated “Tomorrow, that which is not available online runs the risk of being invisible to the world.” Unfortunately, this is already the case for what exists online. Despite years of effort, search engines reach only 2% of the internet’s vast, growing and largely unexplored data jungle.

Peter Sayer published on Techworld:

Jean-Louis Beffa, chairman of the executive board of the French Agency for Industrial Innovation (AII), said the consortium ran into a problem with technology, and must now reshape the project. The French company leading the Quaero project, Thomson, wanted to concentrate on managing multimedia resources, while the leading German partner, Empolis, is focused on knowledge management, said Robert Havas, director of AII.

Furthermore Havas said:

Although France and Germany failed to agree on a focus for their work on search technologies, "co-operation between France and Germany is working well" in other research areas.

Thanks for sharing that thought with us Robert, that's really comforting.

Grand Opening as a finale of a grand project: Sound and Vision

Facet Maps... easy navigation

Build your own facetmap.

Search and navigation interface

Try it yourself.

Google has made us smarter?