Fluidinfo and social tagging

Posted on April 3, 2011

For the past few weeks, I’ve been messing around with Fluidinfo as a result of the O’Reilly Fluidinfo Writable API Competition. My entry to the competition can be found tucked away over here. Fluidinfo was started in 2009, so it’s still early in what it plans to do, but I think the competition is one way for it to get the word out and raise its profile.

What is Fluidinfo? It’s sort of hard to describe, because it’s potentially different things to different people. One of the obvious comparisons is to Wikipedia, so I’ll use that as a starting point. Where Wikipedia has articles, Fluidinfo has objects…

Wikipedia has an article on George Orwell’s 1984. The article describes the background of the book, has information on the principal characters, the book’s themes and so on. The article is informative and people who read the article also have a chance to edit it, but that’s probably the extent of their interaction with the article.

Fluidinfo has an object on the same book. On this object, users can add tags they think are relevant, such as whether they read it or whether they thought it was any good. The object in Fluidinfo doesn’t have a synopsis of the book or information on the characters, but there’s nothing to stop someone from tagging the object with this information.

Fluidinfo is more or less built on the idea of shared data. Most companies build their own databases, which are walled gardens. These databases are their intellectual property and they can decide who has access to the data and what sort of limits they want to place on it. But with Fluidinfo, a bookstore might tag the 1984 object with how many copies they have in stock and have another tag that show which shelf it’s on. They could extract this data from Fluidinfo and send it to their website, making it useful for their customers. They could also extract the data to their inventory system, making it useful for their employees. They could also tag the object with the name of their supplier, making it more useful still. It’s not a walled garden because anyone can read the tags placed by other users. Someone browsing Fluidinfo can find out which users thought 1984 was a good book versus those who didn’t think highly of it, or they can find out if their local bookstore has copies of it.

While Fluidinfo’s objects are very different from Wikipedia’s articles, there are some other differences as well. The first difference is the scale or scope. Wikipedia has been around for years and has millions of articles. Fluidinfo has been around a couple of years and has nowhere near the number of objects (thousands, maybe tens of thousands). This is probably also tied to the number of users. Wikipedia has a very large and active user base and thousands of new articles are created every day. If I had to guess, I think the Fluidinfo user base might be a few dozen people at the moment – I don’t have this information, so I’m basing it one the number of usernames (namespaces) I’ve seen when browsing objects. Still, every venture starts small. Even Amazon and Google probably had a few dozen users at some point.

Another big difference between Wikipedia and Fluidinfo right now is how difficult it is to find things in Fluidinfo. Objects are actually identified by an alphanumeric sequence. What makes them easier to find is the about tag. When I was looking for the object for 1984 earlier, I did a query in the Fluidinfo Explorer, which was fluiddb/about matches “orwell”. It would have been easier if I could have just typed orwell or 1984. This is due to Fluidinfo’s alpha status. In their faq’s, they note that text matching isn’t available yet, but should be in the future.

Every object in Fluidinfo has an about tag. This is basically the “name” of the object. Fluidinfo will still identify objects by the alphanumeric sequence, but people (users) will undoubtedly use the about tag to find things. As an example, Fluidinfo identifies the 1984 object as a78d77ce-a055-40e3-97a9-de4223858bd8, while the about tag is much easier to understand: book:nineteen eighty four (george orwell).

As an aside, there’s a very good blog that’s largely about the about tag. It’s written by one of the earlier and most active users – he was responsible for entering the Guardian 1000 books into Fluidinfo. A lot of the posts, at least the ones that most interest me, are the ones that talk about the conventions of adding data to Fluidinfo. Anyone who has spent a fair amount of time at Wikipedia probably knows about disambiguation pages and redirects. They solve a lot of the clutter and organizational issues – someone searching for Mercury might be looking for the element, the planet, a car brand, or the mythological character. The author of the About Tag blog has spent a lot of time on these ideas and his blog serves as sort of a style manual for the about tag.

I think Fluidinfo has a lot of promise, but there’s a lot of work to be done. For my part, I’ll probably be seeding it with some more new objects (books and movies, probably) and maybe writing an app or two to pull stuff out of Fluidinfo, just to show what can be done with it.

Errors

Posted on August 21, 2010

During the past week this website has been down for a database problem. It turns out some of the tables crucial to the running of WordPress required “repair”. Apparently, there is even a “REPAIR TABLE” command in MySQL. I’d never had to use it before, so I didn’t know it existed. Pretty handy thing to have. The tables are repaired and the blog is working again. I’m still not sure why it happened, but if it happens again, I’ll know what to do.

Now I have to clean out the spam queue.

New theme

Posted on August 1, 2010

I’m working on a new theme. It’s sort of work-related, but mostly because I was getting tied of the old theme and couldn’t find one I really liked. Like cigarettes, rolling your own theme seems simple until you try it.

Calling it a beta version is giving it too much credit, but it’s a good experience.

Haiku to go

Posted on January 31, 2010

Last year I bought the domains gottahavacuppamocha.info and gottahavacuppamocha.mobi, but haven’t done much with them. A few weeks ago, I set up another WordPress blog at the .mobi site, but one that only has the haiku.

Since starting this a few years ago, I’ve seen over 600 films and done a review haiku for each one. I’ve toyed with the idea about putting them in a book, and that may still happen one of these days, but until then it seemed like a good idea to create a separate site just for the haiku. This way, a person can read through the haiku, without having to read the other posts.

The site, http://gottahavacuppamocha.mobi/haiku has over 200 haiku at the moment and I’ll be posting more in the days and weeks to come. Since I’m also learning about iPhone apps, it’s possible there may be an “app for that” in the future.

Photos. Galleries.

Posted on June 19, 2009

It’s been quite awhile, so I updated the gallery to the latest version of ZenPhoto. It’s supposed to work well with WordPress via some plugins. At the moment, it’s only a few photos, but I’ve got a ton more photos to process and add. Plus, there will also be some 3d stuff, graphic design, and so on.

I recently got a flatbed scanner that also does film and slides, so the plan is to convert old photos, slides, and maybe negatives, into digital form. Even if they don’t end up being posted (to protect the innocent ô_o), it will be nice to get them scanned in.

Hopefully this will also give me incentive to come up with another theme to unify the look of WordPress and ZenPhoto. At the very least, the thumbnails can be pulled into WordPress like this. It’s a start.

WordPress 2.8 upgrade

Posted on June 11, 2009

WordPress 2.8 came out yesterday afternoon and I just finished the upgrade. For the past few versions, WordPress has become one of the most user-friendly pieces of software I’ve seen. It seems well thought out and well-constructed.

WordPress has a tool called Upgrade in the Admin panel, which allows people to easily upgrade or reinstall the WordPress code. No FTP needed, since it’s as simple as clicking a button. However, it’s not problem-free.

I have this blog for myself and a test blog I use for work. I logged into this blog and there was nothing new – there was no notice about the new version. Logging into the test blog, there were two banners mentioning the upgrade. Upgrading the test blog was virtually effortless, but I was puzzled by the lack of a notice on gottahavacuppamocha. The Upgrade tool said the blog was using 2.7.1 and that it was the latest version. On a hunch, I clicked on the Re-install button. WordPress 2.7.1 was reinstalled, but when it finished, there was a notice about the 2.8 version. I clicked on the button and let it upgrade. The upgrade went easy, but I had to trick WordPress to do so.

Still, WordPress is far more user-friendly than MediaWiki. MediaWiki is easier to setup, but WordPress is easier to maintain. WP isn’t perfect, but it’s damn close.

Rating:  

MediaWiki and image gallery columns – mini-tutorial

Posted on March 16, 2009

I’m mainly noting this for posterity, because I couldn’t find a quick answer online and finally figured it out after a day or two.

Last year I setup a MediaWiki site for work to take the place of a site one of the resident’s had setup. The site’s overall look-and-feel has to comply with standards from the School of Medicine, and this year they’ve redesigned everything. I like the school’s new design concept, since the old one was starting to feel dated. Still, it takes work to convert a site from one theme to another.

The previous design took up almost the entire width of the browser window, which means MediaWiki could easily accommodate 6 columns of image thumbnails. The downside is it’s hard coded into the MediaWiki code. It’s a variable, but not one that’s documented. Normally, variables that are meant to be changed in MediaWiki are meant to be included in the LocalSettings.php file or the includes/DefaultSettings.php file. However, in the includes/ImageGallery.php file is $mPerRow = x; near the beginning of the file, where x is the number of columns. It can be set to whatever is appropriate, so I set it to 4 for the new layout.

The moral of the tutorial is that it pays to look in unusual places if you are hunting for some hidden variable.

Time for an update

Posted on February 14, 2009

Gottahavacuppamocha will be down for a bit for maintenance and upgrades. The files are being backed up as I write. WordPress has a new version out with some security improvements and other enhancements. I might try out a new skin to mark the occasion :-)

Also, I want to see if there are any better WordPress plugins for Twitter. For regular posts, it sends a tweet to @lafnlab whenever I post something on the blog. However, it doesn’t do this for posts that are scheduled, such as the Review Haiku posts. :-( Since there are so many of those scheduled (’til the end of March, at the moment), it would be nice if the blog would send a tweet for each new post.

Twitter killer kicks the bucket

Posted on December 2, 2008

SixApart buys Pownce

Just as well, I guess. There’s too many social networking sites/apps, it’s hard to decide which ones are worthwhile. Since SixApart is a competitor to WordPress, I’m not interested in transitioning to their service.

Artificiality

Posted on June 15, 2008

I guess it’s kind of funny that I saw this article over at Yahoo, because I’ve been thinking about artificial intelligence and language lately.

From what I understand, AI experiments with language have had problems getting computers to figure out the difference between “time flies like an arrow” and “fruit flies like a banana,” and similar puzzles. Giving them a vocabulary isn’t so hard, but getting them to realize the idiosyncratic rules is an issue. I wonder if having them diagram sentences and do conjugations would be helpful.

In thinking about formulaic language, some formulas are pretty much set in stone, while others are flexible. Actually, set in stone is a good example of a formula that’s set in stone. It doesn’t literally mean what it says, but most people will recognize it as a metaphor for something rigid. The phrase isn’t set in rock or set in concrete it’s set in stone. Other formulas are more basic. The basic sentence in English is subject+verb, such as Jane swims. However, it’s very rare for us to use sentences so simple, because they don’t convey a lot of information. We use articles, adjectives, prepositions, adverbs, clauses, and so on to get our ideas across. Still, many of those are defined by some basic patterns. Nouns can be bare, but are often preceded by adjectives or articles, so we have adjective+noun and article+adjective+noun as formulas. It’s elementary grammar, but it’s formulaic language nonetheless.

With the language problems for AI, I wonder if they don’t gve them the rules of grammar, or if they don’t tell them the functions of each word. This would be a problem, since some words can function as verbs, nouns, or adjectives. For example:

1. I like to surf.
2. The surf was great.
3. It’s a surf shop.

In the first example, surf is an infinitive verb, a noun in the second, and an adjective in the last. It’s easy to see where a computer might get confused.

Another possibility is that the computers are given the rules and told the various functions of words, but they are bad at predicting – they’re not able to apply previous knowledge to new words. I don’t know for sure, but it seems reasonable.

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