Puzzlepieces – Michael Fagan’s Blog

I mentioned a little over a year ago that I’m now keeping track of what I read (using LibraryThing). I enter the book, the date I finished it, and a rating out of five stars, but I’ve been thinking for a while that perhaps I should do some reviews as well, especially for the good ones.

I recently read The Race for Timbuktu: In Search of Africa’s City of Gold by Frank T. Kryza, about some British expeditions in the early 1800s. Overall definitely interesting, and I was surprised to realized just how recently Europe had zero clue about what lay within most of Africa, Given how shortly after these expeditions most of Africa was colonized.

The main flaws of the book were jumping back and forth between different expeditions in different years, especially in the first half of the book. There are some excellent maps included, but most of them are far too small to actually read much, so I’ve located some of them online:

1. Africae nova descriptio by Willem Janszoon Blaeu, from page xix
2. Africa by Sidney Hall, from page xx

The third map from the book I would have also liked to have found; I contacted the British Library for help (mentioned in the book as the source) but they were not able to find it. I’m sure I could get it eventually, but that was the limit of how much work I really wanted to put into this.

Aside from the maps being too small, I would have appreciated having more maps that showed the kingdoms and cultural groups with their boundaries, as it becomes difficult to follow this well given the number of times and places described.

It occurs to me that I’ve hardly mentioned OpenStreetMap on this blog, despite that it’s often an obsession of mine, as people who’ve met me in person would quickly confirm. As the Wikipedia of maps (no other explanation works nearly as well), it is open, easy to contribute to, and I believe, will eventually be the source used for most general mapping applications. Even today it gets quite a bit of use, and growing.

Anyhow, Mikel Maron posts on the Map Kibera blog (Some notes on Map Kibera mapping) about some of the amazing work he organized mapping Kibera, Nairobi, one of the largest slums in the world. It’s interesting how a project that began as a counter to the high-priced Ordinance Survey maps in London has become (among many other things), among the best in maps of the developing world, and and an important resource in humanitarian efforts such as Haiti.

I myself have contributed to the project wherever I am living (or have lived), with lots of contributions around Bellevue, WA, a bit in several places in Toronto, and last week a ton of very detailed and localized mapping in a small section of Florida.

In an earlier post complaining about excessive noise I briefly mentioned the trends within music. The Loudness Wars: Why Music Sounds Worse : NPR has more interesting details on this include some real stats (sadly using only the top song from each year rather than some sort of average). There’s a Wikipedia article now, Loudness war. Some more anecdotes can be found in an article from the Times Online.

The comfort for me in all this is that people seem to be really realizing that this is a problem and ruining the quality of music, and so maybe we are or soon will hit a peak and then trend back to something more reasonable. Don’t even get me started on people using earbuds whose music can still be heard by others.

Leaf Blowers

Last week I was also reminded of something that’s been bothering me for years, leaf blowers. I’d describe a leaf blower as something that accomplishes the same thing as a rake, but with the added benefit of costing more, taking much longer, requiring more effort, using gas or electricity (cost and pollution), and making a ton of noise. A quick search online for ban “leaf blowers” shows that I am very far from being the only one with this opinion. It appears that a lot of people are working to get them banned, and in some places have succeeded. Let’s hope that spreads.

I did my usual Facebook check and there are tons of anti-leaf-blower groups, with fewer than a couple hundred people in most of them. The Clean Air California website seems to be aiming to ban them statewide or even US-wide. Here (sorta) in Toronto I see an article on a motion to ban them in 2007 which failed for what seems like pathetic reasons including industry lobbying, 6 years after the previous attempt to ban them.

Looking at the leaf blower issue turned up the Noise Pollution Clearinghouse, which seems to be perhaps the American equivalent of the Canadian advocacy site I linked to in my previous post. Last year I attended a lecture at Town Hall Seattle by Gordon Hempton who started the One Square Inch of Silence project, not a bad idea but more significant for it’s symbolism than the one particular place. I don’t have any real conclusion here, I’m just complaining in my usual, not-really-doing-anything-about-the-problem way.

Update: a number have people have pointed out some small errors and some additional APIs that I should look at; until I get this post updated, please check out some of the great user comments at the bottom

As part of a project I’m working on (more on that later), I wanted to be able to take some text (probably in the form of a web page) and get a list of the important entities/keywords/phrases.

It turns out that there are actually quite a few companies that offer a service like this available freely (at least somewhat) through an API, so I set out to try them all out and assess their quality and suitability for my project. Most of these APIs are provided by companies that do various things in the NLP (natural language processing) realm and/or work with large semantic datasets. Many of the APIs provide a variety of information, only some of which is the set of entities that I’m looking for, so they may have good features that are excluded from my narrow comparison.

Using the APIs

To evaluate the APIs I wrote a script to make use of each one (scroll to the bottom to see it in action). They were fairly similar but the code to handle each one is slightly different. In many cases they offered multiple response formats but I opted for XML for each of them which made things simple enough, and I got used to using SimpleXML in PHP. The main difference between them all is simply the XPath expression needed to pick out the entities. For each API I grab the entity, any available synonyms (minus some de-duplication), and the self-reported relevance score for that entity, if available. If not already sorted by that relevance, I sort them.

An additional issue was that although most of the APIs accepted a URL as input, some required the actual content, in either HTML or plain text. When accepting content from a web page, the service needs to be smart about ignoring web navigation, ads, etc. when determining what is important, and they vary in ability to do that. Alchemy (one of the APIs tested here) also has a web page cleaning API which can be accessed on its own. Results from the Yahoo API were of such low quality that I actually ran the input web page through the web page cleaning API before sending it to Yahoo, and it is those results which are evaluated here.

Most of the analysis here is based off a sample of eight web pages including Wikipedia articles, news articles, and other pages with a lot of text content from a variety of subjects. I have not yet done any analysis of how the quality of the response for each API is affected by the length of the input document.

The APIs

The APIs I tested were, roughly in order of increasing quality,

• Yahoo: Term Extraction
• OpenCalais: API
• BeliefNetworks: Recommend Concepts
• OpenAmplify: API
• AlchemyAPI: Named Entity Extraction
• Evri: REST API: Get entity network about some text

Comment on this post to let me know if I’m missing any.

API terms

Most APIs today have limits on both how much they can be called, and what you can use them for. Here they are ranked roughly by “most usable terms and limits” to least:

Evri

Currently no API limit; essentially no requirements

AlchemyAPI

30,000 calls per day (although more may be available); commercial use is definitely okay

OpenCalais

50,000 calls per day, 4 calls per second; one must display their logo as-is; if you are syndicating the data it needs to preserve their GUIDs; see details

BeliefNetworks

2,000 calls per day, 1 call per second; essentially no requirements

Yahoo

5,000 calls per IP per day; non-commercial use only

OpenAmplify

1,000 “transactions” per day; note that one call is 1-4 transactions depending on the input type and whether you want all or a subset of the output; commercial use is definitely okay

Please note the standard I-am-not-a-lawyer and that this is just a summary. Please read the terms of service yourself.

Languages

Although my project is English-only for now, ideally there would be support for other languages. All the samples I used were in English so that is what is being used to evaluate the quality, but here is the full list of what languages each API claims to handle:

Yahoo

English

OpenCalais

English, French, Spanish

BeliefNetworks

A white paper on their website claims that their technology can support multiple languages, but most likely only English is currently supported

OpenAmplify

English

AlchemyAPI

English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, however some important features are only available for English

Evri

English

I have not done any research into similar APIs which are not available for English at all, but if you find one, please let me know and I’ll make a note of it here.

The response from OpenAmplify and AlchemyAPI will also include the language of the input document. For AlchemyAPI this includes 97 languages, not just the ones that the API can handle. If you’re just looking for good language identification, there are other resources for that, some open source. My ancient Language Identification page still has some useful links there.

Number of Entities and Relevance Scores

For the purposes of my project, I see the APIs which return more entities from the document to be more useful, all else being equal. BeliefNetworks allows you to specify the number of entities returned (supposedly up to 75 but it actually returns 76), and as such always returns that number, which is almost always more than any other API. Yahoo returns up to 20 entities (which isn’t documented), which is often the least of any API. Here I list the APIs sorted by number of entities returned from most to least:

1. BeliefNetworks
2. AlchemyAPI
3. OpenAmplify
4. OpenCalais
5. Yahoo
6. Evri

There are a couple of important caveats here, however. This is based off of a very small sample, so other than BeliefNetworks returning the most, the list could be off. Beyond that, OpenCalais has a fairly small limit on text length (100,000 characters, presumably including the HTML tags) and if the input is too long, it returns no entities at all, just an error message. The ranking above excludes those examples. OpenAmplify has a limit of 2.5K, however they just truncate the document instead of failing (although this counts as an additional “transaction”). Oddly, Evri returned an error of “rejected by content filter” for this news article and returned no entities. Evri’s ranking in the list above is unchanged with or without the inclusion of that example.

Relevance Scores

All of the APIs, with the exception of Yahoo’s, include some metric with each entity rating its relevance to the input document. This is important as every user of any of these APIs would most likely want to establish a minimum relevance threshold for actually making use of the entities. The number of entities comparison above is based on no threshold at all; obviously changing the threshold would affect the comparison. AlchemyAPI and OpenCalais use scores from zero-to-one, however Evri, OpenAmplify, and BeliefNetworks have their own scale. I haven’t yet done any work to normalize all these scores and I think that most likely the best practice would be to independently determine your own threshold on a per-api basis depending on your own needs.

Semantic Links

By semantic links I simply mean that the entities returned have some sort of links or references to additional information about those entities. Although not necessarily required for my project, this may be very useful. Two of the APIs, Evri and AlchemyAPI include this information when they successfully map a found entity to an entity in their own database. Evri provides a reference to the entity in Evri’s own system, whereas AlchemyAPI links to a variety of other sources: the website for the entity, Freebase, MusicBrainz, and others.

In addition to or instead of these semantic links, Evri, AlchemyAPI, and OpenCalais have their own systems of classification and label entities with things like “Person” and “Religion”. See Evri’s most popular ‘facets’, AlchemyAPI Entity Types, and OpenCalais: Metadata Element Simple Output Value for specifics of each. OpenAmplify is even more basic but provides broad categories such as “Locations” and “Proper Nouns”, and entities may be listed in more than one of these broad categories. Yahoo and BeliefNetworks provide no additional context.

Additional Information

Some of these APIs provide a wealth of information that I disregard entirely but could be useful to others. For example Amplify returns a lot of information about the sentiment being expressed about each entity, information about the person who authored the document (e.g. gender, education), the style of the document (e.g. slang usage), and actions expressed within the document. OpenCalais also extracts events and facts from a document, as well as other details per entity such as the ticker symbol for entities which are public companies. AlchemyAPI can extract quotations from the document. Note that this is a summary and not a complete list of all the data that these APIs return.

Synonyms vs. Duplicates

The better APIs here, at least as far as I’ll be using them, succeed at recognizing that “Smith” referred to throughout an article is the same as “John Smith” mentioned in the first sentence. I want duplicates minimized, and for each entity to have as many valid names/synonyms as possible. The APIs differ here significantly.

Evri is definitely the best, followed by AlchemyAPI. Unfortunately AlchemyAPI sometimes misdisambiguates (ooh, no results on Google or Bing for that word yet) which results in incorrect synonyms, however that isn’t a huge problem for me. An example is the article I referred to earlier where AlchemyAPI confuses a Canadian military unit for the British monarch it was named after. Yahoo and OpenCalais fall into the middle. OpenAmplify and BeliefNetworks have a fair number of unmerged duplicate entities. For my purposes, I don’t care if the synonyms come from the input document or an external database, which is what Evri and AlchemyAPI probably use.

Taking a look at each API

Yahoo

This was the only API that I was aware of until recently, and I’ve blogged about it before. The input format is plain text, so since I’m using URLs as input, I have to first extract the text, strip the HTML, and send that. As I mentioned above, the quality was so poor when using web pages as input that the text must first be scrubbed of web page navigation, etc., and I used AlchemyAPI to do that. Even then, the quality was still poor and the API returned things that I would describe more as long phrases than as entities. Given that, not to mention the maximum of 20 entities, and the non-commercial restriction, I don’t see myself making use of this API.

OpenCalais

This API also accepted content rather than a URL. The content format must be specified in the API call. I simply retrieved the URL, and passed all of its content (with HTML) on to OpenCalais. They suggest making sure to remove web page navigation, but without me doing this, that didn’t present a problem. What was a problem was the short maximum document length. To actually use OpenCalais you should make sure to truncate documents before making the request, which is work that I haven’t yet implemented myself. Even when results were returned, the overall quality was mediocre.

The default output format is RDF, which is very verbose and includes a lot more information than I needed. I opted for the Text/Simple format which is actually XML.

For free API users sometimes the response comes back as “server busy” and I experienced this myself sometimes while trying it out.

BeliefNetworks

This API has a simple output, and is somewhat unusual in its functionality. Unlike all the other APIs, where the entities are extracted from the input document, with BeliefNetworks it seems they find entities which are related to the document but not necessarily actually in it. This produces some interesting results that are sometimes good but overall less related than I’d expect, and in one of my examples, completely unrelated and bizarre. Given that, and the frequency of duplicate entities, as mentioned, I would describe the overall quality as mediocre, although usually better than OpenCalais.

OpenAmplify

The most notable feature of OpenAmplify is all the additional information they provide, as described above.

They take input either as a URL or the content itself, and “charge” an additional transaction if you call them using a URL. I used URL input but also tried submitting the HTML, submitting the text (HTML stripped), and submitting the text after putting through the AlchemyAPI web page cleaning, and in all cases the results were about the same or worse.

OpenAmplify notes that they may not be able to follow all URL redirects (although I didn’t test this with any of the APIs), but this issue can be avoided by following the redirects yourself before making the request. As mentioned earlier, they only look at the first 2.5K of input. They also accept RSS/Atom as input, which is a nice feature.

Although I’ve set up my script to remove duplicates it currently misses removing some duplicate entities from OpenAmplify as the entity may be listed several times in the response but with different relevance scores.

One problem I found was that the entities returned usually consisted of a single token (one word) which just made them less useful. Overall, the quality was okay, generally better than BeliefNetworks.

AlchemyAPI

Other than the occasional misdisambiguation, AlchemyAPI is quite good.

Evri

Evri’s API is also quite good, with the biggest flaw being that it doesn’t return very many entities.

Overall Quality Summary

Overall, Evri and AlchemyAPI were definitely the best and most suited for my purposes. The quality of Evri’s was the best across the small sample, although not in all instances, and it didn’t return as many entities as AlchemyAPI. Interestingly these two APIs are also the two which include semantic links and have the least restrictions and high API limits.

OpenAmplify and BeliefNetworks are the runners up. OpenCalais fared poorly in my evaluation, but I suspect it would do better when looking at all the rest that their API. Yahoo’s API unfortunately just wasn’t good enough to use when any of the other APIs are available.

I’m convinced that trying to build a similar service myself is not worth it at all. One thing that I haven’t tried yet is combining these APIs together in some way, although that could potentially improve the results quite a bit.

You can see the script in action (until I take it down) at http://faganm.com/test/get_entities.php?u=[any URL].

On the US Gov’t “Going Google” - very true. Google has had great success, and thus they are a problem.

Yahoo! Will Kill MyBlogLog Next Month - of all the services Yahoo’s been killing, this one is just sad. MyBlogLog was pretty innovative and just as useful today as it always has been, despite years of nothing new. At the moment, you can still see it on the side of this blog’s homepage. Via Scott Rafer

Well, I’ve updated the ‘ol resume. And my actual resume spells it properly. I can’t reference the old one as apparently I set it to not be indexed by search engines.

Basically I updated all the information, restructured things a bit, reworded a bit, and removed the section on “soft skills” (e.g. communication and team skills, etc.). Having that section always seemed odd. Of course the resume itself seems odd… distilling myself into a list of concrete things certainly makes me look far more boring than I’d like to think I actually am. I feel like just a five-minute conversation would be far more useful than the resume, but then again nobody has the time, which is the whole point.

I made some slight tweaks to the styles and added some light hResume (already used hCard). It’s pretty basic, as I prefer to have it work with or without CSS, without javascript, and print black-and-white onto one regular sheet of paper.

Anyhow I’ve been massively overwhelmed by support since the layoff. Fortunately little things like this don’t bug me much

As an aside, it looks like I’m in good company, Don Dodge was laid off as well.

So I got laid off from Microsoft on Wednesday. I wasn’t really bothered about the job, as I wasn’t happy with it already and had been looking to find something else for quite a while. The unfortunate part is that it affects my immigration status and so I can’t stay that long right now in the US, where many of my friends are. But I had been planning on returning to Toronto within a year or so anyhow.

The Details

Since a lot of people have asked me, here are all the details I’ve got. There have been three rounds of layoffs at Microsoft this year (this is supposedly the last). I knew people who had been laid off in both prior rounds. In those cases they were all relatively new employees, but that is partly the bias of me being friends with people my own age. In those rounds we also lost several members of my team.

My manager found out on Monday, and I was told on Wednesday. I’d figured it out earlier on Wednesday due to the odd nature of the meeting invitation. Anyhow that was Wednesday and by end of today I will be fully out having taken my stuff from my office and returned all work property. Various things like my work e-mail and building access ended on Thursday or today. As to why I was chosen, I presume it is a combination of having low seniority (been at Microsoft a bit over a year) and my record (my annual review wasn’t stellar, long story), although I didn’t ask and I’m not really interested.

What Now?

I’ve got a couple of weeks that I can stay around Seattle to look for employment, otherwise I’ll head home to Toronto. Even then, if I find a job in Seattle it will be much easier to return that it was for me to get here to begin with.

That’s pretty much it. I’m not really sure that I want a job at all right now (whether in the Seattle area, Toronto area, or otherwise), but for the time being I’m considering all options. If you’re really that eager to hire me or have something else in mind, let me know.

So I already knew that despite asbestos being banned in Canada (among many other places), we still export it to countries with poor health and safety regulations, which I find pretty horific. I was watching a CBC news segment on a flight a couple ago of days about it which brought it back to mind. For one thing, they pointed out that only around 500 people are employed by this in Canada. This seems like a pretty clear-cut case of us doing the wrong thing.

So I figured there must be a petition on this, so I’d just go online and find it and sign it. Not so simple it turns out. There are, and have been, lots of petitions. As recently as the last few weeks, there is a new petition, but it seems like only companies can sign it; I’m not entirely sure what the point of that is. Here is a petition received by the government in 1997 along with what I would describe as an extremely pathetic and predictable government reply. The reply basically says that we tell other countries to use it safely, and it’s not our fault if they don’t listen and die as a result.

Finally I find the Ban Asbestos Canada website, which includes a broken link to an actual petition, and I managed to figure out what the real link is supposed to be. So go this petition page and from there you can enter in a few details to send a letter to all of the federal party leaders. If I were them I would also add on the relevant cabinet ministers (Health, Trade, Natural Resources, Public Safety, maybe a few others), and the MP and MPP for the riding that includes the remaining asbestos mine.

Oh, and I checked Facebook too. There are at least seven petitiony groups on this (of course), but the largest has only 230 members.

Last week Google replaced thier base maps in the US, no longer using data from TeleAtlas. The new data isn’t from OpenStreetMap either. I think we are finally starting to figure out where it all came from: MapDotNet : Blog : Google voice recognition software used in street data collection process?

Yahoo!’s Term Extraction Web Search is about to be discontinued. very sad

wait, nevermind

Imprint Online - So long Waterloo… - I never quite got around to finishing my series of concluding blog posts about the University of Waterloo, but this article raises a lot of points that I’d planned on discussing.
Overall, the school itself seems to be quite poor on educational quality and absolutely terrible in terms of the administration. Since I haven’t attended any other Canadian university, I can’t really compare them, but if they are all that bad, then that would be pretty sad.

There are some excellent people who work there. Several, anyhow. But overall the administration is a black hole of not-caring. They will hardly do anything to help students, although they are more than happy to take credit for anything that students do. This was going to be a slightly more intelligent criticism, but I haven’t the energy right now.

The Point Blog » Blog Archive » Company to Donate to Charity if Patent Litigation is Dropped great idea from Desire2Learn. They’re an educational software maker in Waterloo with a pretty neat product fighting BlackBoard’s completely pointless patent.

I’ve been working (for a long time, but more lately) on both reducing what I see in my email and newsreader as well as differentiating the two.

I’ve decided that my email (Gmail) is for personal communication, as in mail that people specifically send to me, and important computer-generated emails like bill payment reminders. My newsreader (Google Reader) is for news and alerts that while interesting to me, are not crucial. This aligns with the fact that I always check my email first, and that if I had to, I could just mark newsreader items as read without any real consequences.

I am using three things to do this: one policy and two web-based tools.

Policy-wise, I examine more closely what emails I get. In the past I might have deleted an email from some company or website that I wasn’t interested in, but now I take the extra time to go to their website and either unsubscribe completely or uncheck certain parts of what they send me.
I already use my newsreader to subscribe to feeds when possible, but a lot of sites still only have email newsletters. There are a few services which will allow you to convert emails into RSS feeds and I’m finding MailBucket to be the best. I create a filter in Gmail so that all mail from the newsletter are automatically marked as read, moved to my archive (so they don’t show up in my inbox) and forwarded to that-newsletter-name@mailbucket.org. That way, I don’t have to give these websites an alterate email, they still use my gmail address, and I still archive all those emails in Gmail, but I will never see them there unless I want to. Instead, I subscribe to http://mailbucket.org/that-newsletter-name.xml in my newsreader, and I see all the content there. Perfect.

Getting items from my email to my newsreader is one step, but then there are many feeds I read for which I am only interested in some of the items, not all. For these, I create a Yahoo Pipe that takes in a particular feed and filters it by excluding items which match various criteria or only including items that match. I unsubscribe from the original feed and subscribe to the filtered version, immediately reducing how much stuff gets into my newsreader. Very nice. There are some minor drawbacks to this, such as that anything which uses my newsreader’s data won’t be perfect, such as Google Reader recommending feeds to me based on what I already read, and for Google Reader’s crawler telling websites how many people have subscribed to their feeds. Either way, tiny problems compared to the great benefits.

New Craigslist Search Features (by Jeremy Zawodny) - it’s great to see the work that Jeremy’s been doing. I’m most excited to see that I can now do decent boolean queries using ORing and phrases on Craigslist. I will definitely be using this.

Yahoo! Search Blog » Blog Archive » Fighting Duplication: Adding more arrows to your quiver - another item I meant to blog last week. It’s good to see the search engines finally agree on something that’s been needed for years.

Official Gmail Blog: Four changes to Gmail contacts - I meant to blog this a while back, but Gmail finally adding contact merging was infinitely needed. Glad to see it’s there.

LendAround - I got an email from LendAround, who saw my earlier comments on borrowing websites and gave me an invite to the beta site. Like many of the other applications out there, they are only used for a dedicated good (in this case, DVDs), but the site is quite well done (autocomplete in data entry, good design, facebook integration), and according to them, will expand beyond DVDs eventually. Once they’ve expanded to allowing goods of any sort I’ll give them a real try-out.

WhiteHouse.gov’s New Robots.txt - geeky, but this perfectly symbolizes the differences between the two administrations

Welcome to the Washington State Department of Transportation - so just about all public institutions are far removed from those they serve. The WSDOT is a rare exception, and they do an excellent job. I read their blog, which is written as a real blog, not just PR. They talk about how they care about the issues. Last week when their was flooding I could immediately see photos of that online. Today I’m looking at a series of slides they just posted assessing the current state of Washington’s transportation, given several recent problems. These guys are with it.

in response to those who thing I only (and always) critisize the design of everything, I present an example of something extremely well designed: the lids of liquid laundry detergent jugs. I would link to something, but I can’t seem to find a good link for this…

…was the creation of the internet. The web’s been around well over a decade and practically every newspaper seems to still think it was the worst thing that could have happened to them. The important thing about newspapers - as I naively thought - was reporting on the news, not the physical manifestation of that on dead trees. Newspapers would have to be pretty silly to let non-news organizations usurp them completely on news, right?

geoupdater - does something very similar to what I was working on.

I’ve got my location set in FireEagle, which I update via the site and Dopplr. I also found an app that turns FireEagle into geoRSS which allows me to include the updates in friendfeed and plot my location easily on a map, which I will shortly be adding to my personal homepage.

This tool (via Ogle Earth) will read from FireEagle and post updates to services like Facebook, and via an RSS feed that includes past locations, allows you to pull in updates to friendfeed, etc. Not bad.

Hossein (link goes to his English blog) is known as the father of the Persian blogosphere. I met him a couple of years ago (old link takes a while to load), not too difficult since he also lived in Toronto. Anyhow he’s been arrested in Iran on obviously fake charges. Considering that Canadian journalist was beaten to death after her arrest in Iran a couple of years ago, this is not exactly good.

Free Hossein Derakhshan // Libérez Hossein Derakhshan is a Facebook group that seems to be acting as an early petitiony-type thing. I wonder if the Canadian government can be persuaded to actually do anything about this at all.

Goal: find an online tool which allows me to list things that others (friends and neighbours) can borrow, and let me view things that others have listed

This doesn’t seem like an impossible goal. One problem is that most of the websites for this seem to be for only books, movies, etc., few work for just any miscellaneous items. The only thing that matches is Neighborrow. The site isn’t particularly well-designed, but I could live with that.

How this should really work is that I should be able to state my location as the source for all my items, and be able to search geographically. Instead I have to join “neighborrowhoods,” which can either be public or private. This isn’t as good as arbitrary locations, but it would do, except that there are no public neighborrowhoods for my location and it costs $$ to create one, versus private groups (which are not what I want) and are limited to fifty people. I thought that Facebook applications might be another good place to look, but there seem to be only media-sharing applications plus one that matches my idea but is broken and has no users.

So for now, I’ve listed most of my borrowable stuff on neighborrow, which can sadly only be seen if you join the private group I created which so far includes just me. bleh