Elsewhere

Why is it that superheros are always orphans? Batman, Spiderman… even Superman’s parents are adoptive, not natural.

Perhaps they can’t really be “super” if some kind of perceived authority exists over them. Are there any superheros that are just estranged from their parents, but not orphaned? How about fully functional nuclear families?

I recently discovered a couple iTunes tricks that I’ve found quite helpful.

* In iTunes, you can create Folders in the playlist panel, which you can use to organize your playlists. For example, I’ve got folders for “Artist Specific”, “Genre Specific”, “Moods & Themes”, etc. This navigation aid enabled me to create many more playlists than I otherwise would.

(Unfortunately, folder organization does not transfer to the iPod, where all playlists are still listed in a single alphabetical list; seems like it would be trivial to implement this, but whatever, I can live with it.)

* When creating Smart Playlists, “Playlist Is…” is one of the filter options. This allows you to filter the Smart Playlist contents by the contents of any other existing playlist. Terribly useful: you can now build playlists-upon-playlists. My favorite is to create “Best” lists–take a given genre or playlist and create a new Smart Playlist which contains only the 4- or 5-star rated songs from that list. When your collection gets large enough, why waste time shuffling among 3-star songs? This trick lets you stick with the good stuff without sacrificing your existing organization.

IM (a.k.a. IP, Instant Pestering) should be like email, newsgroups, IRC, and the telephone. It shouldn’t matter what client you use, they should all interoperate (and not just the open source flavors, but all of them). And that’s all I have to say about that.

Now that I can finally make some time to blog about South By Southwest Interactive, it feels like yesterday’s news. The blogosphere has already covered it and moved on. Nevertheless, some thoughts:

* The panels, while informative, primarily function to give you things to talk about at the parties and an excuse to chat with the panelists. Networking at the parties is what it’s really all about.

* Not all panels (or keynote speeches) are created alike. I walked out of one panel and almost slept through one of the keynotes (a good blogger does not a good speaker make). But Craig Newmark’s keynote and some of the other panels made up for it.

* Social differentiation, apparently, is human nature. During the web awards, a brief video clip poked fun at a kid whose home video of himself pretending to be a jedi leaked to the Net. A room full of nerds making fun of another nerd. Not cool.

* Overall it was very blog-centric and I guess that’s OK… I was mostly there to get some insight into the business side of the web and meet some cool people, both of which were accomplished, along with some bonus schwag including a CD opener a few guitar picks with dot-com logos printed on them. Schweet!

South By Southwest Interactive was a blast. I’ve got more to say, and will get to it when I can, but first order of business was to follow up on all of the great new contacts. Having taken care of that, I couldn’t resist contacting one of my old professors about what I learned at the “Tagging 2.0″ panel. What follows is a lightly edited version of the email I sent him.

Some recent developments in new web services seem very much like accidental leaps toward a Semantic Web, especially a new feature called “tagging” on services like Flickr and del.icio.us . You’re probably already familiar with this–users label objects with one or more terms that describe or are related to the object, and can also search all users’ labels for terms or keywords to find any objects that anyone else labelled with those terms. Basically, community-created and searchable metadata. Not quite the semantic web, especially since these services are mostly self-contained and independent of each other (there is no universal standard), but it’s definitely a step in that direction.

I just returned from the annual South By Southwest interactive media festival in Austin, Texas, where I attended a panel called “Tagging 2.0″. The panelists were Adina Levin, Prentiss Riddle, Rashmi Sinha, Don Turnbull (University of Texas), and Thomas Vander Wal.

One highlight for me was Sinha’s position that the act of tagging is a natural cognitive process–associating meta-concepts with objects–and should be made as fast, easy, and intuitive as possible for the user, in isolation of other users, in order to maximize the cognitive purity of the metadata and thus improve the aggregate wisdom of the community; and that the “Wisdom of Crowds” is a very real phenomenon, given the right conditions (otherwise it can become mob mentality). Of course this can lead to a very messy universe of non-standard metadata, but, she argued, that is a problem which should be handled during the search stage, with different methods of sorting through the data depending upon the type and context of the search, rather than burdening the user with the cognitive overhead of trying to standardize their associations.

Tagging is especially interesting because it’s a user-generated, bottom-up approach, rather than a top-down approach, which our class determined would be an obstacle to a real semantic web (who’s in charge of creating and standardizing any given folksonomy?). An implemention that follows Sinha’s suggestions also sidesteps the unusual user burden that was another potential obstacle to adoption of metadata tagging.

Thomas Vander Wal presented a graph that represented the three entities–object, metadata, and identity–whose triangular relationship forms the “folksonomy triad” (object-identity=interest; identity-metadata=vocabulary; metadata-object=definition). Adding a fourth entity, community, produces a “dual folksonomy triad” (object-community=culture; metadata-community=terminology; identity-community=affiliation). It went by pretty fast so I’m a little sketchy on understanding this part, but I think the idea is that you need all of these entities and relationships represented in an implementation in order to fully realize a comprehensive, usable system. (Not all web services that use tags currently have all of these features implemented.)

Dr. Turnbull, who is working on an “open source web content classification system”, referred to tagging as “lightweight semantics” which, I think, is a very appropriate term. I had the pleasure of informally chatting with Dr. Turnbull at an afterparty. He’s a very personable guy with an appreciation for how practical information sciences complement more theoretical computer sciences; his department at UT, the School of Information, is separate from the Computer Science department, somewhat reminiscent of the distinction between the UW Computer Science and UWB Computing and Software Systems programs.

Also, You’re It! A Blog On Tagging has a more comprehensive and much more concise summary of the panel session as well as lots of other interesting blog posts about tags.

“State Capital, Austin, Texas”
Originally uploaded by dten.

Turns out, Austin is a pretty cool little town. Though I’m not much the bar-going type, at least there are plenty of choices, and lots of live music.

But mostly it’s the people–open, friendly, polite, helpful, upbeat, at least in our limited experience. The men are men (cowboy country), the women are women, and when you smile at the pretty girls, they smile back.

I compiled these links for a friend to follow-up a conversation tonight and, well, why not share?

A List Apart: Getting started with AJAX
It’s a little technical and assumes some knowledge that I don’t currently have but can probably be inferred from the context.

YubNub
A toy, but a sign of things to come in web interoperability, a.k.a. convergence.

Videntity
Single sign-on and identity management. An old idea that’s still waiting for the right implementation. This is getting closer. (Thanks Dan.)

So I finally meandered over to Google Video tonight and checked out a few of the Popular picks.

I enjoyed it. I might go back. It’s certainly a nice alternative to the ad-spamming mind-numbingness of most TV.

Then I looked for some way to rate the video so I could start building my list of favorites, improve my recommendations, and help other people find it. Failing that, I looked for my recommendations. I looked for the user comments so I could see what kind of discussion the video generated. I looked for the tags so I could find similar videos, or the user profile of the person who uploaded the video for a little more context behind its creation.

None of these things were present (there is a Find Similar feature, but it seems to work from matching keywords in the descriptions, and not very well at that). No community, no social features, no personalization.

In the age of MySpace, Flickr, del.icio.us, blogging/Technorati, Last.fm, Netflix, and even Amazon, people expect social features.

What is Google Video planning to do once Yahoo! gets its video act together? Given Yahoo!’s recent strategic shift toward user-generated content, that seems more likely than ever; in fact a Yahoo! acquisition of YouTube would make quite a bit of sense.

Google’s “math first, questions later” approach is great for search, reference, and utility services, but hamstrings it when it comes to digital media, especially user-generated content.

Of course, I have my own pet theory on what they are really up to… but that’s for another entry.

Preparing to head to Austin next weekend for South by Southwest Interactive. I am so stoked. Having recently committed to re-focusing my career and talents on digital media and social technology (Web 2.0, semantic web, etc.) this is a fantastic way to get a jump start. A big congregation of people who are not only interested in the same things I am, but are out there actually making them happen.

Geek-out, big time. I’m in.

So much to try to learn, to catch up on, to prepare. Climbing up onto the shoulders of giants… and looking for ways that I can contribute–today, next month, next year, next decade. It’s a little overwhelming and exhausting, yet inspiring, energizing and exciting. I think that’s what a good career is supposed to feel like.

Let’s do this. Ping me if you’re gonna be there too, we’ll hook up.