I was intrigued by an offhand reference to a ‘neat new service’ and consequently poked into infostripe. It’s a consolidated touchpoint for sharing your social media participation and identities in a compact and dynamic manner. Similar to some extent to about.me, it draws upon a certain amount of your digital narcissism. The biggest difference between about.me and infostripe appears to be in the flavour: about.me takes a very aesthetic-centred approach, where infostripe is deeply rich in content and concise presentation. About.me demands more manual creation of the information used to describe you, where infostripe attempts to automate this process by building a profile based on what you are contributing to the social mediashpere.

One of things that immediately strikes is that much in the way that RSS and RSS readers distanced readers from the author’s blog, infostripe is extracting a wider collection of your digital breadcrumbs and flowing them into a uniform presentation that allows the browser to avoid having to trawl the net for your activity. All of this pushes the bounds of privacy and the boundary between our private and public worlds, but at least in this, the service is rather transparent in this.

The lead developer is in Ottawa and I am of course pleased to see more solid Canadian vision and product deployment. Intriguing and worthy of some more investigation.

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Reuters released the API for their Calais web service last week. I dabbled with it quickly last week, and then was reminded about it earlier today. I took a closer look and come away very impressed and thoughtful about the application of this technology. Calais accepts text and quickly extracts a variety of meta data about your content or as they phrase it : “automatically annotates your content with rich semantic metadata.” Currently it attempts to determine references to:

• Entities: city, company, continent, country, industryTerm, MoneyAmount, Organization, Person, ProvinceOrState, Region and URL;
• Events/Facts: acquisition, alliance, bankruptcy, businessRelation, buybacks, companyEarningsAnnoucement, companyEarningsGuidance, companyInvestments, compantLegalIssues, jointVenture, ManagementChange, merger, personPolitical, personPoliticalPast, PersonProfession, PersonProfessionalPast, stockSplit

This is a rather rich collection of metadata — and they target expanding from here. They have released the API, which is rich and simple, along with a couple demo applications to experiment with. A web-based application allows for an immediate glimpse of the potential. As an article today on Calais at ReadWriteWeb explains, there’s a as much in this for potential users as for Reuters itself. The need to refine and evolve the semantic tagging capability requires constant application of the technology and going the route of offering this open API to Calais.

As a test, I grabbed the article from RWW and had results in about 1 second.

The screen also includes the embedded RDF below this demonstration output.

As a rather unique business proposition they are also offering bounties to private developers to accomplish certain tasks. The first is a 5K bounty to develop a WP plug-in to take advantage of the service.

For historical research, a service such as Calais offers an ability to quickly reverse the normal search process. Rather than searching for words of interest and dispatching a robot to wander about and return matches to the parameters you define, you could simply browse through a list of identified terms. They have been semantically identified and allows for serendipitous discovery rather than targeted searching. Combining the meta terms with a frequency count, you could allow terms to rise to the top and potentially have an additional browsing reference.

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Check out AideRSS — an exciting new tool to help manage information overload. It takes your existing RSS feeds, ranks posts and returns a list weighted by perceived quality.
Wonderful paradigm shifting technologies are supposed to streamline our lives and allow us to rise to new creative heights. The promise of the paperless office was to provide electronic communications to free us from distractions and the minutiae of the deskbound cubicled-existence. Mobile technologies were to unchain us from the physical offices to let us quickly complete necessary tasks while simultaneously participating in those pasttimes that we want to. You could ‘seal the deal’ while watching your son’s soccer game for example. But, for all the promise, we now deal with more information and have to find ways to cope with greater engagement in more tasks than we have ever faced.
Humans are compulsive animals and where there is time freed, we seem to fill it ever more completely than before. We now struggle, more confused and overloaded by information fed from a greater number of sources. RSS feeds were to be the panacea for having to go to multiple websites to find current information. They would consolidate disparate sources in a single viewer and strip out extraneous components into a simple concise stream. Yet, those who have embraced RSS have had to develop techniques to quickly scan and separate the chaff from the wheat. RSS generate a lot of noise and if you are using a reader to consolidate your feeds, you know how addictive they can become. They can suck us into reading all the latest posts hoping for the find, but also in adding (oh so conveniently) a feed from an author that posts a single intriguing article. Thus far, most of the techniques that have developed have been manual. But there is hope on the horizon.
Ron Neumann pointed me to <a href=“http://www.aiderss.com” target=“_blank””>AideRSS the other day and having poked around the service a bit, colour me impressed. The premise behind AideRSS is that their proprietary PageRank engine grades post value relative to previous posts on that blog. A numeric value is applied to all the posts from the feeds you wish to track and a ranked RSS feed is made available to you. Thus you can subscribe to the single feed from AideRSS (I so want to shorten this to ARSS — that can’t be good) and it will subscribe to all the feeds for you. You decide how many and of what quality (good, better best) posts you want to read and AideRSS complies.
The service is currently free and despite apologies for their slow speed, I found the service quite fact. The dashboard at the site is usable as an RSS reader itself and has thoughtfully employed sparkiines to visualize how the current post’s PageRank compares to historical performance of the blog…thus returning a ‘blogtrend’.
The next step for such a service has to be in developing greater personalization. There is a talk of a recommendation engine that may actually push feeds. But, the PageRank value is currently a perceived model value as opposed to a value weighted to your interests, needs or wants in particular.
However, this is one huge step in conquering what is becoming an avalanche of information, a haystack in which we may find that little nuggets we seek, but increasingly weighted towards missing out posts that we might truly value.

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Sorry for the drought of postings of late. Things get in the way.
There’s a unique concept hotel opening at Gatwick in July. Modeled on the compact sleeping spaces that I have always associated with Asia, they provide what they term ‘cabins.’ The Yotel provide upscale, high quality space designed around human dimensions. The standard or premium cabins offer 7 square metre spaces that pack in a comfy bed, a washroom and entertainment facilities. The cabins are fitted out in what appears to a light airy style and offer the ultimate in convenience.
I love this concept. Unless you are entertaining in a hotel room, there has always seemed to a lot of wasted space. Efficiency and luxury seem to be a potent combo. Cabins start at 25pounds/4 hours and make lots of sense. It will be interesting to see how successful these become.

Thanks to Peter Rukavina for pointing this one out.

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My attention was drawn to a new Fortune Magazine initiative called the Corporate Org Chart Wiki. It bills itself as in early beta and clearly experimental. It claims to seek to ‘tap the collective knowledge’ of the community and to collect and share enterprise organizational charts. Its collaborativity certainly marks it as a wiki. Unfortunately it seems overly open to the abuse that has been associated with many of the public wikis existent today. There’s no authentication, nor any sort of transparent versioning that I can find. Its a nice little flash app and it functions efficiently. It allows a user to draw relationships and add nodes visually and relatively intuitively. It allows an observer to gain a quick appreciation of the organizational structure.
However, I wonder what the objective of this exercise is? If it is to do what it claims to be attempting, i.e. provide a publicly accessible repository of org charts for publicly traded companies, I wonder if there are not better means. I am reminded of LinkedIN, which attempts to basically accomplish a similar thing, although in a less visual manner. LinkedIN however, ensures a substantial data integrity through some form of authentication that you are who you say you are. It also leverages the fact that everyone is part of some web of interaction, whether business, personal, academic or otherwise. While I applaud fortune for the graphical approach to visualization of the org chart data that they provide, the low level of authentication seems to be a huge issue. The apparent failure of the experiment seems to be all to evident for all to see. I note on cursory examination that someone has made themselves CEO of Apple. I wonder if they can trace that self-promotion?
I wonder what the actual object of this experiment is? Maybe its about something less transparent that what it appears to be? It is an interesting foray into visual social network analysis, but I wonder whether it would really be rather more effective to screen scrape corporate sites to create such charts and perhaps allow modification as a means of verification. Interestingly, the visuals and the principle itself remind me of GENI which allows for interactive genealogy and which I blogged on earlier this year.
So I am left wondering why Fortune magazine has gotten into digital interactivity research. Don’t misunderstand me, its rather cool that they have. But I question what the research question is here. If it was merely to start to build a repository of corporate org charts, which are super fluid by nature, there is definitely more effective means to accomplish this and to ensure that these actually have some factual truth.

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Experience the thrill! — 7Mb WMV file of the lift off

Went through a wonderful spate of feelings watching the live coverage of Space Explorations’ attempt to launch their Falcon 1 Space Vehicle –demoflight2. As you may or may not know, Space X was one of the winning contractors to provide private space delivery systems. Unlike government sponsored agencies, such as NASA or the ESA, SpaceX was founded by the chap that made a bit of money selling PayPal to eBay. They have failed on a previous launch attempt after a fuel leak and this subsequent launch went as far as 1:02 when they went into a terminal shutdown procedure.
I got word earlier in the day that they would be making this launch from Kwajalein. After an hour and 3 minutes they have just alerted us that they will make another attempt tomorrow. I can only imagine the disappointment of those closely involved in the programme.
Its quite fascinating listening to the mission coverage. Its different than a NASA launch. There is much more visible (audible) detail in the checks and commentary. One gains a greater appreciation for the complexity of as simple (its designed to be that way) system as Falcon 1. There are a lot more female voices in the launch crew and when the shut down happened, it was as clockwork, with the only frustration evident being some lapses in proper address and completeness of instructions. You started to hear the frustration after a while.
The idea behind the Falcon 1 and Falcon 9 (heavier lift system) are to provide a private alternative to NASA’s delivery. The Falcon 1 is a compact vehicle designed to deliver small satellites into LEO. Falcon 9 is much larger and is designed to replace the space shuttle with the ability to ferry people back and forth to the ISS.
Last year the first launch attempt failed when a fuel leak led to an abort in the first minute of flight. They have since been trying to conduct a successful launch nd have emphasized that they are extremely detail focused and are taking as conservative approach as possible to the launch procedures. We await to hear what happened today and see if they can get off the ground tomorrow. The webcast should be available.

Update: 20 March 2007 — 8:14EDT:
Well, 54:02 minutes watching another launch attempt. This one got much more exciting and they were hosing the engine area and it seemed like all was good to go. We went back through a terminal abort with the clock stopped at T+10s. They are back into scramble mode and we await some indication as to whether we are scrubbed for the day. LC has just come back to control to ask for a recycle to T-11m and go for another try today.…looking possible. They are polling for opinions. Looks like they are aiming for an open window at
One of the more amusing happenstances is that all mikes remain open (whether they are supposed to be or not I am unaware), but somebody was expressing some thoughts in a rather frank way for a little while when it aborted.
The cameras were also a little more unstable today and were losing picture every 15 seconds. They did switch between cameras more today which was appreciated and after the abort they have been zooming and panning over the lower part of the launch pad. Cool.
Looks like we are going to go for another attempt real fast. They hve emptied and are now in the process of refilling the tanks. Sounds like LC is a little anxious and pushing VC a little much. VC is pretty cool though and doesn’t push back. Sounds quite solid. LC is running through all the steps and seems to stumble a little (certainly I would expect as LC has all the steps to master and everyone else is much more focused this is certainly excusable). I think that we are about 11 minutes from reinititiation of the countdown, but that only by reckoning. They mentioned that there was rain moving in, but hasn’t been mention of that since about T-13 or –14 first time through. It is certainly looking a little greyer in the sky there. It was so pretty nice and blue.
Count has started again at 20:54:00 my time…we are go again. Clock is running. would love to actually have a list of these steps…we are step 110. They all sound good to go to terminal count.

Update: 21:41: WOW! That was sure worth the wait. Launch went swimingly and there was a great camera pointed straight down so you watch the liftoff from a wonderful vantage point. Moisture forms on the lens for a while, but as you clearly change atmospheres it dries out and the shape of the flame grows much wider. Then we reach first stage separation which happens as it should. Huge cheering when that happens. The camera is then pointed right near the second stage engine which glows and glows hotter and hotter, but everything seems to have been running watched for a few minutes and then lost the feed. Don’t think anything bad happened. Will await further news. What a great ride!

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In my research into nineteenth century Canadian drinking habits, I very quickly learned that the temperance folks had a special enmity for the custom of treating. The crusade against this special social practise informed much of the pamphleteering and petitioning of legislative bodies. You can see the threat: if you have a lot of friends, and the members of group want to maintain the respect of their peers, the rounds just keep on coming. It was often the exuberant nature of the bar that so threatened the well being of the average Canadian. The warm surrounds of the tavern, the good company of friends and the intellectualizing influence of alcohol. The temperance folks figured that they might be able to somehow beat this custom out of Canadian bar behaviour. There are however some customs that simply do perpetuate and certainly treating is one of them.

So lets take that into the internet age…not constrained by the need to be physically present, the Frog Pub chain has introduced TextToPint. You can now purchase a round for your friends online. Its pretty simple. You pay for the round online and are provided with a simple code that can be text’d to your buddies and they can redeem it from their ‘genial host.’ Brilliant. Good for the pub. What will the temperance folks say???

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In the process of doing some a quick market survey I was struck by the tendency of some software publishers to coin unique acronyms to establish their technological credentials. To be honest I am not unfamiliar with this process and did my own fair share of this in another life, but I was surprised when seeing it from the other side.

The basic proposition is this: You find yourself in a marketspace with a number of competitors that, in the eyes of your potential customers, basically accomplish the same task. Higher, faster, cheapper, more efficiently are all wonderful things, but are open to direct comparison and the actual business case is much too complex to address using such simple descriptors. So, what to do? The answer is to describe earth-shattering proprietary process using clever acronyms, some of which may actually contain real words, that suggest that you have a scientific basis for differentiation.

The reality is some of these terms and descriptions of process or method are quite valid and simply expressed in a rather abstract way. Others one suspects are actually ‘full of sound and fury, signifying, not much of anything actually real.’ How can one cut through the marketing smoke?

Examples to follow…

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I have been of late explores various means for the automated longitudinal matching of census manuscript records. Its a huge challenge and I seem to have spent as much time identifying potential problems as opposed to identifying potential solutions. This is not say I haven’t pondered a couple solutions, but the list of challenges remains much longer and seems to be growing much faster — but, all this means is a more challenging research problem, demanding some innovation in methodology. Fun!

But there is a paradigm shift happening. One that I have been participating in, and certainly embrace, but am seldom always cognizant of. The idea of online collaboration continues to permeate more and more of our everyday tasks. Emerging from specialized research objectives such as the SETI@Home initiative, which sought to use excess personal computing capacity distributed around the world, to other efforts today that take advntage not only of excess processor cycles to the idea of carrying out manual tasks through engagement of the masses in specific tasks.

I started playing with the Google Image identification programme a few months back. If you haven’t tried it, it basically involves matching you with a random online user and you spend 90 seconds typing in words to describe a picture displayed to both users. You quickly type words that come to mind until both users type in the same word, at which point the engine accepts that that word is likely to be a relevant descriptor. The key to participation is that the exercise if fun, fast and you can hop on at anytime and given the global scope, you will quickly be paired with an online user. Moreover, you have the small satisfaction of being part of a bigger exercise of improving the descriptors attached to Google’s image search repository. This little ‘game’ also clearly illustrates one of the downsides of Google’s repository, as these descriptors are determined through a process which renders them simple rather than more specialized. as I ‘play’ I realize that I may recognize the image as a particular movie poster, but also think that my online partner may not catch the subtleties, so I may resort to simply choosing a predominant colour as a suggested word, rather than the name of the movie or say an actor in the movie. As a result I choose the more obvious descriptor word to encourage faster match. The objective in the Google match is to match words for the highest number of images during the 90 second period, which may not achieve the best descriptions. However, the process does deliver some basic descriptions terms that an automated process would miss. The key is making it fun for the participants.

Down this same vein, Kris Inwood pointed me at a census initiative, Automated Genealogy. Working down this same premise of trying to funify a process requiring mass user intervention, at Automated Genealogy, the site is a meeting point for genealogists to signup for and manually enter into a database manuscript census records. The hope here is to engage that vast army of genealogists out there to contribute time to help their fellow genealogists and have access to records which benefit their own research efforts. Collaboration at its best. Additionally they have begun a similar process to match Canadian manuscript census records between the 1901 and 1911 censuses. This is the same task that I have been ruminating over developing an automated process for. At AG they are using automated means to do simple matching and then allowing users to refine the match where human discretion is required. This is a clever approach to a real world research problem. As to progress, the published results indicate that they have transcribed 93.15% of the entire Canadian census for 1911 and 99.99% of the 1901 census with 55.15% of the proofing carried out on this one.

This is a great example of this emerging trend to mobilize individual efforts en masse to assist with processes that in the past would have been carried out by a small group of specialized researchers. Both processes recognize that tasks can be divided and appropriate and different resources applied to varying stages. Mass collaboration on simple tasks made fun!

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Now talking about serious luck ;-) From Michele comes this absolutely amazing story, one which I am sure is just making its way to all the major news outlets, but so visually stunning. Apparently a rabbit farmer in Germany has managed to breed a super sized German Gray rabbit. He has further convinced the North Koreans that this is the staple livestock to ‘meat’ their dietary needs. I attach pictures as this has to be seen to be believed. The BBC has picked it up in video as well the Times. The rabbits weigh in at about 7kg and are more than three times the size of the average rabbit offering surprisingly nutritious and fat-reduced meat. Amazing.

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