Archive for February, 2006
Friday, February 17th, 2006
How things have changed: I began writing the Journalese blogging software package years ago, partially because I was sick of the Livejournal community and couldn't find software that met my needs, and partially as a programming exercise. Now, the Journalese package has essentially deprecated itself - it's a sprawling mess of hacks, kludges, screwups and experiments, and it's only a matter of time before the journal database is so large and so congested that the journal takes forever to load. Also, there's software available now that's simply better than Journalese, and I've long since moved on to other projects (read: I'm tired of fiddling with this).
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Thursday, February 16th, 2006
If you're not familiar with Flickr, you should check it out. It's a photo community that allows people to assign keywords (or "tags") to every photo they post. Flickr keeps track of which tags are closely associated (e.g., 80% of people who have photos tagged "red" also have photos tagged "school"), and when you search for a tag, it will also present you with related tags.
With that in mind, I've begun developing the Flickr Walkabout. It's far from done, so bear with me. Basically, you enter a word, and the Walkabout returns tags related to it. Then it builds a sideshow from photos tagged with those related terms. As the slideshow plays, you'll see a list of the related tags to the right of the images - you can click on one of those, and it will return a series of related tags for that word. It will build another slideshow, with more related, terms, with more slideshows, with more related terms … you get the idea.
Try it out. As I've said, it's far from done - keep your search term simple (a single word, no spaces, something general like "girl" or "red"). Enjoy.
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Monday, February 13th, 2006
A new toy: the Google Walkabout.
Basically, the Walkabout is a "limited term search" tool. Instead of coming up with searches on your own, you are provided with a series of random terms to "prompt" you. You choose which terms to combine and search on.
I stole the interface from the interactive Johari window at kevan.org. The terms, of course, are related to my interests. I might add a way for users to add their own terms, but not yet.
Bored, restless, kind of depressed and a little sick.
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