http://scuttle.org/

A GPL del.icio.us clone written in PHP/MySQL.

Working hard (with beer), originally uploaded by Ben Werdmuller.

The things we do for Elgg – after a hard day presenting and consulting, we retired to the bar to do yet more project work. It’s a busy life! (Photo taken by Dave on my slightly grainy Nokia phone.)

Bill Fitzgerald put me onto this talk by Danah Boyd: Identity Production in a Networked Culture: Why Youth Heart MySpace. It’s a good overview to the cultural issues surrounding teens on MySpace.

It’s a small Internet: I’m already familiar with Danah through her excellent archive of Ani DiFranco lyrics, although I had no idea she was in academia. My girlfriend is deaf and can hear music but not lyrics; these have been invaluable, and Ani’s road team have kindly used them as a reference in order to provide set lists and transcripts so she can listen along at gigs. As it turns out her PhD research is “on how people negotiate a presentation of self to unknown audiences in mediated contexts”, which is obviously a very interesting topic to me – I will read her blog with interest.

Another interesting post is on knowledge systems and collective questioning – sometimes you don’t want to know about the collective questioning of your community. I think this has implications for our future plans with tagging; it’s definitely something to think about.

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Dave and I are pleased to be in New York State talking about Elgg and the Learning Landscape. We’re very happy to have been invited and hope to foster an interesting conversation about the role of this approach in a K12 setting.

I hope we can provide a useful contribution to the policy and technology decisions here. It’s useful for us too – I’ve already been put onto the Schools Interoperability Framework, and it’s really important to learn from the experiences of teaching professionals. These conversations lead directly into Elgg development.

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http://www.sifinfo.org/sif-specification.asp

Further to my previous post about algorithms for authority, Folksonomies: Tidying up Tags is an article in D-Lib Magazine that talks about the problems and possibilities involved with modern folksonomies.

At the moment, many investigations of tag data are in progress, including how tags can be used for searching. As a consequence, development in this field tends to confine itself to methods for improving the quality of the user-contributed tags for this purpose. In practice, this involves promoting commonly-chosen tags above single-use or infrequently used tags by various means, such as user interface enhancements, synonym use and so on. It is possible that the data collected through folksonomy tagging is more complete than we had imagined. Achieving more from that data may be a question of developing an appropriate set of algorithms; in other words, revisiting the data with another aim in mind might reveal usefulness in some categories of “sloppy” tag.

As someone said recently (I can’t remember where), if 2005 was the year of tagging, 2006 will be the year of filtering …

http://www.kottke.org/06/02/oh-what-a-year

Jason Kottke decides not to be a full-time blogger for another year, in part because writing a blog all day long just isn’t that interesting. A lesson for us all: don’t blog for the sake of blogging.

Shel Israel, on his Naked Conversations blog, has an interesting comment about Technorati’s filter by authority feature. It seems to have been inspired by Google, in the sense that authoritative blogs are considered to be the ones more widely linked to, an approach to which Shel responds:

Big numbers do NOT necessarily mean you have the biggest influence. If you have a political blog and you have only three readers but they happen to be the US, Russian and Chinese heads of state, your numbers may suck at Technorati and PubSub, but you most assuredly have great influence. [...] It has been using the word “authority” where it should be using the word “popularity” pretty much since it started.

The question, then, is how to extract actual authority, rather than popularity, from usage. This has to be algorithmic: if you ask ten randomly selected people which sources have the most authority, their lists are likely to differ. So we need to standardise on what authority actually means, and then somehow turn that into a function that we can apply in real time to actual weblog usage data.

The problem, of course, is that authority is necessarily subjective, because everybody’s needs differ. The best search engine is then one that takes your requirements into account and tailors results accordingly, but for a wide variety technical reasons this isn’t realistic – can you imagine building separate results pages for 20,000,000 users? Although a certain amount of customisation per user is possible, the main trunk of results for a wide-reaching search engine needs to be a best fit for all users. Somehow you need to build a base that roughly orders everything so it can be searched easily, and then allow each user to fine-tune the results to their liking. Unless you have a relatively small number of sources, it’s impractical for a near-instantaneous search to poll the entire sphere of all possible resources for your requirements each time.

A personal search engine is different: you take the sources you trust and manually add them to the database. The resources tab in Elgg can be used like this, as can any RSS aggregator, although depending on how you’re searching, it’s best to use one with full-text search capabilities across your subscriptions (which will probably appear on the next Elgg roadmap). Perhaps we could use this data to provide a two-tier search engine: users subscribe to content they’re interested in, and then this usage data is combined with the content links to provide a richer, dynamic idea of how important a source is. But this is flawed too – are all subscribers equal? Should we apply more weight to the US, Russian and Chinese heads of state – or professors at research institutions, for example – than John Doe in Islington? Do we give people the option to flip between both models? Google’s link-based model works – or gives the appearance of working – because so many websites are static and informational. The blogosphere is fluid and almost entirely opinion-based; how do you go about modelling that?

We’re back to the question of how to define authority. Findability has a thread of ideas; Clay Shirky has a post about the nature of authority as it relates to Wikipedia. Perhaps some of you have different ideas?

It may surprise you to learn that my main computer – the one that 90% of Elgg code was written on – is a Toshiba Satelite Pro A10 laptop I bought for