Puzzlepieces – tag ‘ia’

It seems that practically every city has a slightly different way of indicating pedestrian and/or vehicle signals. I especially noticed this, what with my recent trip to Europe. Essentially, they differ in the ways that the signal changes to inform you of whether you should proceed. The way I see it, a good design maximizes the information provided, the ease of comprehension, and minimizes cost. The least information given are signals that have two values, “go” and “don’t go.” If you don’t actually see the change from “don’t go” to “go,” it means that you have no idea how long “go” will remain the state, and whether it is really appropriate to go.

A ternary system is better than a binary one, because at least you have an idea that it will soon change to “don’t go.” I love when they replace a ternary pedestrian signal with one that counts down. Everyone has their own speed, they know how long it will take them to walk across the street, and knowing the number of seconds remaining, can properly evaluate whether or not to proceed.

One option that I found recently (via information aesthetics) is the Marshalite, a traffic signal that is essentially an analog clock, with the traditional traffic indicators of red, amber, and green around the circle. Apparently it was used in Australia for decades. I think it is fantastic, providing people with perfect information about the current status and how long until it will change. I think we could do a lot worse than switch to these everywhere. Some might argue that this is not simple to understand, but I don’t believe that. The Wikipedia article suggests that this method can’t cope with changing durations, but I have no doubt that it could be modified to handle that.

I attended Abandoned by Canada: Torture Surviver Speaks Out tonight, run by WPIRG and AWOL. The depressing part of of it all is that not only did Canada, a supposedly decent country, violate its own basic laws, not just in turning a blind eye, but in initiating torture (by proxy in Syria, etc.), but that it continued to do it when it realized those involved were innocent, that they continue to to defend this action, suppress information about it, and that is likely continuing today.

Sniff browser history for improved user experience - Niall turns what was first revealed as sort of a web browser privacy problem, into a pretty neat feature. Depending on your perspective, this is either very elegant or very inelegant

Long Bet Winner: Weblogs vs. The New York Times | Workbench - this is rather amusing. I remember back in 2002 when Dave Winer made this bet for 2007, a date which seemed impossibly far away. Of course, nowadays the “we” in weblogs is almost always dropped.

The conclusion is that technically blogs beat the New York Times, but at any rate Wikipedia beat both.

Via Sam.

The Waterloo Conference on Social Entrepreneurship took place this weekend, although I missed out on Sunday’s portion. The first thing that amazed me was finding out that the idea for this conference occurred less than two months ago. The opening keynote was by George Roter, co-founder of EWB. EWB is quite active here, seeing as it was founded by UW graduates, but I learned a lot that I didn’t know, and I was very impressed with both George and EWB. Another presentation I attended was on how to talk to the media (sending press releases, etc.) which was quite interesting.

Why Facebook Shouldn’t Fear OpenSocial - I’m supposed to be studying, so of course it’s a good time to do some blogging.

Anyhow, I agree with Josh that the idea that the competition now being Facebook vs OpenSocial is silly. Facebook is doing an absolutely amazingly fantastic job pleasing users, developers, being innovative, and soon, generating profit. Their upcoming “Beacon” plans seem as brilliant as their previous ones. The only bad thing I have to say about them (from a business perspective), is that they have been way to slow getting their advertising products out. In the long run, that may not make much difference.

OpenSocial is not competition in any sense of the word. It’s just a little specification to standardize some web services, which is a good thing. And assuming it gains the traction it is expected (the supporters actually follow through), then Facebook will just join it too, and they haven’t lost anything, really. In fact they’ll have gained additional developers and applications.

Facebook would have to be really stupid to act any other way, and from what I’ve seen, they are anything but. Except their HR, I’m not so in love with that.

Is it just me, or is MySpace sitting on their laurels? Just copying Facebook isn’t going to do it, and besides, they don’t seem to be copying them very well or quickly. I thought being the major player was supposed to count for something, like having resources.

One last comment on OpenSocial… while it is certainly good for developers that there will be a common API, let’s not forget that this simply means it will be easy to have an application run on multiple websites… separately. Having an application that seamlessly uses more than one social website simultaneously will still be an enormous headache. So there’s plenty more to be done there.

Update Nov 5. After reading a few things elsewhere, maybe myspace isn’t doing nothing, they just decided to let Google deal with all their advertising, and hope to make enough from that. But since that will likely be almost all of their revenue, might that not be a bad idea?

Truly social profiles - hmn, it would be kind of neat if instead of filling out your profile, it was created by summing and averaging data given by your friends

NextPath - 13 Things I Wish I Learned in College - yes, I realize that I’m still in “college” (in Canada we call it University ), but there are a few good points in this…

1. Getting to the Point

This is a very, very important skill. I can’t emphasize this enough. It’s not just that it is important, it also seems to be something that few people can do well, when in fact everyone needs to learn how to do this well. The director of my program at university is a great and intelligent guy, but I recently heard him speak, starting with a five-minute disclaimer that he was going to have to be brief on that occasion. Essays and papers for school that give wordcounts (or worse, pagecounts) are hardly improving our ability to get to the point.

2. Making Proper Presentations

This is also very important. Many of my courses involve giving presentations, and this is good. However the assumption is clearly that practice makes perfect… and this is true, once you’ve learned how to do something. The problem is that how to give good and effective presentations is never taught at all, so people give a poor presentation, and then the next time, give another poor presentation. I consider myself a pretty good presenter these days (I definitely wasn’t always), but I’m still learning and know that I always will be.

9. Taking the Initiative

This one is very tricky. University is a set of required courses, which have set durations, set textbooks, and set assignments with set questions at set lengths. There is almost never any room to initiate anything, so the only people who ever do so are the ones who don’t sleep because they’re volunteering for student societies or other volunteer activities.

Via del.icio.us.

Once upon a time (okay, 1995), Ward Cunningham invented WikiWikiWebs. They spread all over, even slowly creeping into the commercial world. In 2001 it was thought that using one would help speed up article-writing for Nupedia. Today they are known as wikis, and that particular one has grown so popular that it is not only known by virtually every internet user, its popularity relative to other specific wikis is so much greater that to almost everyone, Wikipedia = Wiki = Wikipedia.

Wikis are a very useful type of website for many applications. Not all, of course, but many. When thinking up a name for a website using a wiki, a convenient name is “Wiki”+”topic”, e.g. Wikitravel. Of course, doing so presumably makes your website the definitive wiki for that topic, despite the reality of others e.g. World66. [hmn, upon writing this I find that these two examples have now decided to work together… cool]. You can see their relative popularity on Alexa; how much of the greater popularity of Wikitravel do you think can be attributed to its name online?

The strategy these days seems to be (1) pick a topic, make a wiki for it and (2) call it Wiki[topic]. The difference, I think, is that now the naming is very deliberate, rather than convenient. I think it is working very well, too.

Open[Topic] is the other name I wanted to mention. While there are many open sourceish projects around, it seems that people are getting better at marketing and are calling just about everything Open Something. I’m personally a strong advocate of OpenSearch, and I do think that some of its success can be attributed to the name.

Identity systems have been proposed and built for years. Marc Canter will tell you how great things would be today if we’d been supporting the Sxip technology years ago. Today it seems like the momentum behind OpenID is really going forward, and that it may indeed be poised to succeed more than any previous system of its kind. How much of its success do you think can be attributed to the name?

This post was provoked by the mention of Wikileaks as I listen to the radio.

work seems to be keeping me rather busy

Yesterday I got around to fixing a several-month-old bug with my University of Waterloo search engine. Turns out the problem was Yahoo having changed their query parser. The query I was sending used to be

search terms (site:example.com OR site:example2.com OR ... site:exampleN.com)

however example.com wasn’t showing up on the results… the fix was adding a space before the ending parentheses.

search terms (site:example.com OR site:example2.com OR ... site:exampleN.com )

I wish Yahoo would publicly document all of their advanced search syntax, including the maximum query length.

I’ve been meaning to do another OpenSearch Update post. I’ve recently started adding some of these to del.icio.us. Noticing lots of non-English blog posts on OpenSearch lately, which is very cool. Today someone asked about including thumbnails. I’ve replied suggesting Media RSS but asking for consensus (although my email still needs to be moderated).

Lots of neat stuff in the mapping space lately. Thanks to Mikel Maron, Virtual Earth now has georss feeds.

So for years I’ve been largely ignoring the social networking websites. Or to be more accurate, reading up on them a lot, but not actually using them. Among other things, I don’t want to waste my time, nor provide a lot of my personal data to some walled garden. Regarding the latter, PeopleAggregator has been out for a while, and I hadn’t gotten around to congradulating Marc and Phillip. Anyhow, Facebook came to my school (this year I believe) and I’ve found that I’m actually using it. Not much, but more than I’ve ever used another similar site. Unlike the first generation of these websites, it actually has a point to it. I’m still resisting uploading photos to it (if I annotate those photos, am I ever going to be able to export that? highly unlikely) and I don’t like using it for messaging, because it won’t be searchable and integrated with my email or instant messaging services. Amusingly enough, I do think Facebook will actually succeed in making money. Hmn.. I guess I don’t have any major point to make here..

some definitions of ‘tag’

tag (noun)

A string (text) that is associated with something else (eg a book, web page, even another ‘tags’). The specifics depend on the implemenation, but a ‘tag’ usually may not contain spaces, and often may only contain [A-za-z] or even [a-z], but sometimes it can contain anything, such as quotation marks or non-ASCII unicode characters. When referring to a ‘tag,’ one is usually referring to a specific string, but sometimes one is actually referring to a set of normalized ‘tags’; i.e. with plural words stemmed.

An XML or HTML ‘tag’… these are the basic building blocks of XML

tag (verb)

To apply a ‘tags’ (see first noun definition) or multiple tags to something

To apply any type of metadata (such as ‘tags’ see first noun defintion) to something… this may or may not be done using ‘tags’ in the XML sense.

does this clarify the situation? gotta love the last defition

Update December 5: Tag formats: Can�t we all just get along?

By an odd coincidence today is the first day I looked at the Michael Fagan article on Wikipedia… and apparently several hours ago someone added me to it. Checking the user’s IP address through IP2Location lets me know the user is in Toronto. So confess, who was it… Matt?

Also today my dad sends me photos on Flickr of me, from tuesday, that I didn’t know about

Marc’s Voice: The GoingOn Network - what a coup for Marc. this may just be the first DLA (or social networking service) I actually use or recommend.

I’m trying not to buy food (both because I’ve spent a lot lately, and since I’m leaving San Francisco I don’t want more food than I can eat), but I ended up getting some sushi anyway. Since it was so late in the day I got the last that that vendor had; eight pieces of something (started with ‘f’), for just $3.00. Not bad.

17-Apr-05 16:22:33

I was a little reluctant to post this one. Since it was taken from one of the windows of the Coit Tower, I presume there are about five million identical photos online. But I liked it. The rear shows the financial district, prominently the Transamerica Pyramid.

16-Apr-05 16:30:49