Mashing Without Code

It’s got a great search engine, and it will map your selec­tions on a rental by rental basis, or will present all (unfiltered) list­ings in the area of the list­ing you have chosen. … : Daft.ie for data Dapper.com to cre­ate a dymanic RSS feed Yahoo Pipes to geo­code and out­put a fur­ther feed Yahoo Maps because that’s what Pipes works with The first step is to con­struct the tar­get prop­er­ties from daft.ie. … View­ing the My Daft page then provides non-paged view of your prop­er­ties and gives the data (albeit in a rel­at­ively unstruc­tured form) needed to build a cus­tom feed from.

Comparing Word Clouds

Tak­ing a look at a chart of com­mon words and their fre­quency of use is a first attempt at this. tapor.jpg A sim­ilar chart was cre­ated show­ing me words that appeared only in one or the another and I was imme­di­ately struck by the fact that cam­pus didn’t occur at all in the McMas­ter announce­ment, where it was the most fre­quent word at Guelph. … By choos­ing to upload only the text of the announce­ments them­selves (And thus help the tool know just what is import­ant to me) I can get the res­ults I want to con­sider. tapor2.jpg Voila! … I want to con­sider this fur­ther, but I am far more a visual thinker, and while these bar charts are pleas­ing, and take a wealth of data and dis­till it to a very nice sum­mary, I want to take it one step further.

Keeping a Few Social Network Tools in Your Kitbag

How­ever, as I laid out the map, I was in manual mode and although aided by the visual, the grow­ing com­plex­ity of the chart sug­ges­ted that my free-form approach had really skipped the pos­sib­il­ity that all this won­der­ful graph the­ory that I am vaguely aware of might actu­ally have a role to play. … The res­ult­ing list in DOT looked some­thing like this: digraph unix { node [shape=rectangle, color=orange, style=filled]; “Ulster Uni­on­ist Party (UUP) 1921–1972″ -> “Uni­on­ist Party of North­ern Ire­land (UPNI) 1974 — 1981″ ; “Ulster Uni­on­ist Party (UUP) 1921–1972″ -> “Alli­ance Party of North­ern Ire­land (APNI) 1974 — 1981″; “Ulster Uni­on­ist Party (UUP) 1921–1972″ -> “Prot­est­ant Uni­on­ist Party (PUP) 1960s — 1971″ ; “Ulster Volun­teer Force (UVF) 1966 -” -> “Shankhill Defense Asso­ci­ation (SDA) 1969 -” ; “Ulster Loy­al­ist Cent­ral Co-ordinating Com­mit­tee (1974 -)” -> “Ulster Spe­cial Con­stabu­lary Asso­ci­ation (USCA)” ; “Ulster Loy­al­ist Cent­ral Co-ordinating Com­mit­tee (1974 -)” -> “Ulster Volun­teer Ser­vice Corps (UVSC)” ; } A simple start and as you can see, DOT is not too com­plex. … In a per­fect world, this would actu­ally be applic­able to my dis­ser­ta­tion work as well, as opposed to squir­rel­ing away a few pre­cious hours of time I should be spend­ing on writ­ing about Cana­dian tav­ern­keep­ers ;-) Hope­fully this provides a little bit of insight a to what tools are eas­ily access­ible to take rela­tion­ships and rep­res­ent them visu­ally — tools which don’t demand that you learn the finer points of graph the­ory, but do in fact allow you lever­age them to appre­ci­ate the intric­a­cies of large social networks.

Noise in the Bloggosphere

As I read through my RSS feeds in Google Reader today, I was once again struck by the increas­ing num­ber of famil­iar head­lines. By this I don’t mean sim­ilar themes con­tinue to be explored (although true — Hil­ary is clearly a bad, bad, bad woman and John McCain throws kit­tens into wells), but rather that …

iSync: Slow Sync but Steady Progress

One of the things that makes OSX such a com­pel­ling choice for day to day com­put­ing is the con­sist­ency of inter­face between applic­a­tions and their abil­ity to share information…not just data, but con­texts and pref­er­ences and thus recog­ni­tion and adapt­ab­il­ity to user pecu­li­ar­it­ies that anthro­po­moph­ise the laptop.

…It used to be sync’d daily with Out­look using XXX, but it has more lately been used for a par­tic­u­larly addict­ive little game that is use­ful when sit­ting wait­ing for an appoint­ment or other short delays.

Semantic Tuesdays

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 …

Eyes and Ears on Site

Inform­a­tion Aes­thet­ics, a con­sist­ently click­able and not­able blog, has Fernanda Vié­gas report­ing back from the InfoVis Con­fer­ence in Sac­re­mento this week. She has pos­ted a geat sum­mary of the key­note address by Mat­thew Eric­son. Brent Fitzger­ald blogged yes­ter­day about the panel that he, Fernanda, Mar­tin Wat­ten­berg and Hans Rosling are present­ing as well. Tak­ing a …

Taming the RSS Beast

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 …

Social Confusion?

Tim O’Reilly’s key­note at the Graph­ing Social Pat­terns con­fer­ence seems to have read­ily accep­ted the term ‘Social Graph’, recently applied by Mark Zuck­er­berg to his Face­Book ser­vice. Read­ing Sean Ammirati’s cov­er­age of the talk reminded me of my own reser­va­tions about this term. When I first heard it I was a little con­fused. The immediate …

A Tiddly for your Notes

I seem to have been post­ing much on the sub­ject of note-taking as of late. It’s the sea­sonal thing. What I sud­denly real­ized amongst my plaudits for tech­niques and for tools was a gem of a concept that Geof­frey and I have been rumin­at­ing over for the past year or so: Tiddly­Wiki. In case you …