Listing entries tagged with tags

the big picture   10.05.2005, 7:26 PM

Though a substantial portion of our reading now takes place online, we still chafe against the electronic page, in part because today's screens are hostile to the eye, but also, I think, because we are waiting for something new - something beyond a shallow mimicry of print. Occasionally, however, you come across something that suggests a new possibility for what a page, or series of pages, can be when words move to the screen.

I came across such a thing today on CNET's new site, which has a feature called "The Big Picture," a dynamic graphical display that places articles at the center of a constellation, drawing connections to related pieces, themes, and company profiles.

Click on another document in the cluster and the items re-arrange around a new center, and so on - ontologies are traced. But CNET's feature does not go terribly far in illuminating the connections, or rather the different kinds of connections, between articles and ideas. They should consider degrees of relevance, proximity in time, or overlaps in classification. Combined with a tagging system, this could get interesting. As it stands, it doesn't do much that a simple bullet list of related articles can't already do admirably, albeit with fewer bells and whistles.

But this is pushing in an interesting direction, testing ways in which a web publication can organize and weave together content, shedding certain holdovers from print that are no longer useful in digital space. CNET should keep playing with this idea of an article ontology viewer - it could be refined into a legitimately useful tool.

Posted by ben vershbow at 07:26 PM | Comments (1)
tags: CNET , Online , browser , cluster , constellation , design , folksonomy , infoviz , internet , layout , magazine , news , newspaper , ontology , page , print , publishing , tagging , tags , visualization , viz , web

human versus algorithm   09.29.2005, 3:40 PM

I just came across Common Times, a new community-generated news aggregation page, part of something called the Common Media Network, that takes the social bookmarking concept of del.icio.us and applies it specifically to news gathering. Anyone can add a story from any source to a series of sections (which seem pre-set and non-editable) arranged on a newspaper-style "front page." You add links through a bookmarklet on the links bar on your browser. Whenever you come across an article you'd like to submit, you just click the button and a page comes up where you can enter the metadata like tags and comments. Each user has a "channel" - basically a stripped-down blog - where all their links are displayed chronologically with an RSS feed, giving individuals a venue to show their chops as news curators and annotators. You can set it up so links are posted simultaneously to a del.icio.us account (there's also a Firefox extension that allows you to post stories directly from Bloglines).

Human aggregation is often more interesting than what the Google News algorithm can turn up, but it can easily mould to the biases of the community. Of course, search algorithms are developed by people, and source lists don't just manufacture themselves (Google is notoriously tight-lipped about its list of news sources). In the case of something like Common Times, a slick new web application hyped on Boing Boing and other digital culture sites, the communities can be rather self-selecting. Still, this is a very interesting experiment in multi-player annotation. When I first arrived at the front page, not yet knowing how it all worked, I was impressed by the fairly broad spread of stories. And the tag cloud to the right is an interesting little snapshot of the zeitgeist.

(via Infocult)

Posted by ben vershbow at 03:40 PM | Comments (0)
tags: Publishing, Broadcast, and the Press , aggregator , algorithm , bibliography , blog , blogging , bookmarking , del.icio.us , delicious , folksonomy , google , journalism , media , news , newspaper , search , socialsoftware , tag , tagging , tags

"imaginative keyword conversations" - playing flickr on public screens   09.23.2005, 1:41 PM

A wonderful hack of public space in Amsterdam. And on the top floor of the PostCS building no less, with breathtaking panoramic views of the city. Kim and I had the pleasure of spending two days there this past January at "A Decade of Web Design."

The diners in bar/restaurant/club 11 will be subjected to the wrath of fellow visitors SMSing whatever keyword they want to the installation that pulls photos from the online community flickr and projects them onto Restaurant 11's huge panoramic screens.

(via Smart Mobs)

Posted by ben vershbow at 01:41 PM | Comments (0)
tags: Games , SMS , amsterdam , cellphone , flickr , hack , keyword , mobile , photo , photography , postcs , publicart , socialsoftware , tagging , tags