P. S.: Post Scriptum

I suddenly relised I don’t have the time to do all the things I was interested in (and keep what remains of my mental sanity). So out of need I decided to make the following offer.

The technorati tag plug in gives the possibility to have technorati tags, and for each tag a different page. What instead it does not offer is the possibility to have also an rss feed for each tag. So I offer 20 € for whoever makes the necessary changes to the plugin so that side by side to the tag page (here available at http://blog.pietrosperoni.it/tag/… ) I can have an rss feed of the entries in my blog with each tag (possibly at http://blog.pietrosperoni.it/rsstag/…).

The changes will have to be open source, so that they can then join the mainstream wp program. And be on that plugin. I know 20€ is not a lot, but I reason that for the right person this is a simple hack that might take half an hour. For me it would take ages (mainly because I need to understand how wp is working, and it’s not that trivial).
Oh, yes, I can pay via paypal. Or buy you something via Amazon, LJ, Flickr. Whatever.

And now to comment the above:
It’s interesting how the spreading of open source software also means the opening of a whole new market of people helping each other. I could never have made the above offer if I was using blogger, or lj.

Addendum: Since the new release of wordpress 2.0 includes the possibility to use categories as tags, the above offer is no longer valid. Sorry.

I have to say that I amvery impressed with Wikka. Wikka is a wiki software that I just installed on my web page. It is simple, yet full of plugins. Open source (or I would not consider it). It also permits to integrate freemind mind map inside it. More than this: for each page the administrator, (ehm, that is me!) can decide who is allowed to read, write and comment. I installed it about one week ago, and I avoided to make it public until I would found a way to deal with wiki spam. I already have too much spam on this blog. Finally I found what I think is the perfect solution:

1. only registered user can comment and modify the wiki. It might not make it very fast, but at least I know who said what.
2. I inserted a plugin such that to register people must write a password in the ‘registration code’. But the password is written on the same log in page.
3. To write spam in the wiki they have to manually register. Which I feel is fair. I have no anger toward those that manually spam. Are the mechanical ones that ought to be stopped.
4. If the spammers write something that automatically register, I will change the registration code.
5. And if they write something that automatically grabs from the page the registration code I change the context (the phrase in which the code appears), making their software useless. I will move from:
   • registration code:”pippo pluto” to
   • registrati0n code:”pippo pluto”

As you cannot code for something that blocks all permutation of the word “Viagra”, so you cannot code for something that codes for all the permutation of the phrase: “Registration Code”. Ah! And this is the revenge of the mass!

I think the idea is so brilliant that I will look if I can find a similar plugin for wordpress.

The next think that impressed me in Wikka was the use of rss. It is actually very easy to integrate an rss in a page. Maybe it is the same in other wiki engines, I don’t know. But on wikka it is absolutely trivial. You just need to write {{rss url=”http://the.rss.net/address.rss” cachetime=”30″}} and the rss gets taken shown, and cached for 30 minutes. Now 30 minutes cache is what del.icio.us requires from you if you are going to connect an rss to your homepage. So now I have started to integrate all sort of rss from delicious to my web page. Check for example my Tag Cloud page. With the rss from my personal bookmarks tagged with tagcloud, rss from the popular page in delicious delicious/popular/tagcloud, and the rss from technorati (i.e. people who have blogged on Tag Clouds).

And all this is in the floating right bar. So I still can use the rest of the page as place for me to write content, and notes…

And as notes taker this wiki is slowly becoming. I started moving my Reading List to the wiki. And I added to the reading list, the rss of popular reading lists. You see, how it all comes together.

But this is not all! Wikka (and they should pay me after a post like this!) gives the possibility to set the privacy for each page. That is for each page you can chose who can read it, who can comment on it and who can change it. In this way I can use this not only as my personal notes but as the notes for project that I might be sharing with other people.

Come and say hello: http://wiki.pietrosperoni.it

I think the time have come to write my third, and hopefully last contribution to the topic of tagclouds.

I have been hearing a lot of talk on how users should not use too many tags in linking to url. I also am the maintainer of the mindmap maker, and I often look at some of the maps generated (available to everybody). There is a number of people who tend to use an average of between one and two tags per URL. Their maps are often very ordered. No clustering, no hierarchy. (Forgive me if I don’t put a link to such a map, but since I am going to bash this way of using delicious, I’d rather bash a method than a specific human being. Just go to the list of maps and open a couple, odds are one of them will be of the type I am describing). This way of using delicious uses tags as folders, just with the modification that every now and then you can put an URL in more than one folder at the same time. A bit like big bookstore might carry several copies of the same book, and store them in more than one place (and the Tao Te Ching, ends up in New Age -God knows why- and in Religion).

Of course tags tend not to fit exactly. My Tag Clouds and Cultural Change will be under Tags or Folksonomy or Sociology… Whatever you chose you probably will not put it under Ajax. And yet most of the analysis was done studying the spreading of the term Ajax.

Let’s make a few simple calculations. Continue reading Tag Clouds are hard to Spam

As I predicted a service on the net that offers an rss feed of blogs with a certain keyword / tag has appeared. It is It’s a Tag world from Stephane Lee.

The system seems still in its infancy (the name needs to be shorter, for start, to be used as a tag itself) , but by offering the rss feeds of blog entries they give a really valuable tool to the blogphere.
Now, either Technorati starts offering the rss feed itself, or sues Creative Mobs (enstranging a big part of the blogsphere), or accepts to coexist with another, potentially aggressive, competitor.

And indeed, it’s a tag world,
worse than that:
it’s a tag eat tag world!

Pietro

P.S. The system has also a certain humor and pragmaticity, the general tag page is called: ‘Guten Tag’ (german for ‘Good Day’). And each tag, has, in its header, a link to the equivalent Wikipedia entry (which works fine only in English, unfortunately, but still…).

Thanks Stephane.

I keep on being hunted by a nightmare:

Think about a post. You write a post, and this is in answer to some other posts, some other web pages, done by someone else. And your post will often be answered by other people. In a sense no post is an island. Given a post you can see all the post that answered it, or reviewed it. This through the trackback list. And they themselves has other post that answered them. And so on. But this does not work only one way. You can also go backward in time (which in fact is what we usually do when we follow the links.) You read a post, then you read the post that post is refering to, and so on. And in my dream this is a sort of tapistry, where each post is a node that links together different threads. So each post is not just contained in a thread, but connects to many threads that work through it.

Now think about a discussion group. In a discussion group each post is part of a tree. Each post can be answered by many posts, but it has only one father. One post it is itself answering to. And because of this structure it is possible, and actually easy to generate the classical hierarchical structure, that you can see pretty much everywhere in discussion group. (i.e. the Healing Dao discussion group)

But if you look closely you will notice that discussion groups are actually not having really a tree structure. Posts do yes have one father, but they refer to many other posts. They might not explicitly link to all the posts they refer to, but they surely refer to many posts. This is because in discussion groups there isn’t usually the need to link to all the relevant posts. After all the readers are generally a filtered group of people. Also often a person will use one post to answer a whole bunch of other posts, especially inside a closed community, where everybody reads everything.

Yet the hierarchical way in which posts are written in a discussion group is really useful. You can in an instant perceive how many people answered, what where the thread departing from that post, etc.

Now look at a post in the blogging world. It refers to many other posts. It explicitly links to them. And if it is succesful it will have many posts linking to it themselves. Now forget a moment about the upward link. Each post posts that link to it. In a sense they are replies to it. The link to those posts is saved in the trackback list. And each of those posts itself will have certain posts that refer to it.

Are you starting to see it?
Each post is in a sense the root of a tree, whose branches are the posts that refer to it, and whose sub-branches are all the posts that refer to the branch posts. In a sense nothing new. But now, if you see your posts in this way, you can also wish not to display just the immediate trackbacks, the posts that refer to your posts. But also their trackback too.

And here is the first part of my dea. Since each post is available in feed format, it should be possible to fetch, for each post, not just the trackbacks, but the trackbacks trackback. The post that refer to the post that refer to your post. Which means seeing the tree starting from your post up to depth 2. And in theory it should be possible to reiterate the process, and go deeper and deeper.

Why is this important? Well, when you read a discussion group, it is often useful to see the hierarchical view.

Example
Title of the post 0:
BLAH
Content of the post 0:
blah, blah, blah, blah,
blah, blah, blah, blah,
blah, blah, blah, blah,

blah
Blah.
-Trackback 1
–Trackback to the trackback 1
–Second trackback to the trackback 1
-Trackback 2
-Trackback 3
–Trackback to the trackback 3
—Trackback to the trackback to the trackback 3
-Trackback 4
… and so on.

It might seem an expensive research, but when we read a post, and it has a certain number of trackbacks, it is quite important to see which of those lead to other posts and which didn’t.

And now we go to the second part of the idea.
In a sense there is no reason why the whole tree view structure should only work one way. I mean, each post links to many other posts. Each of those posts link themselves to other posts. And here we have another tree. This time a tree that goes backward in time.

So I think that for each post it should be possible to see both those views.

• All the entries that are linked from it, and the entries that are linked to those entries, up to a specific depth.
• All the entries that link to it, and the entries that link to those entries, up to a specific depth.
• And maybe combine the two view having the first entries, in the format of one entry per line, above it. The later, again in the format of one entry per line, below.

I think this view would greatly increase the ability to see the local structure of the blogsphere. Of course the brothers of a particular entry (the entries that share the same parents) should also be available on the side. As well as the entries that are generally linked from the same offspring. But this is making it unnecessarily complicated. So let’s forget it for the time being.

So, we have reached the conclusion that each post uniquely defines two tree of other posts. The tree generated by it, and the tree that generates it. And I claim that we should work to be able to visualize those trees.

Doing it on Tagsurf
So, where did the idea came to me? Essentially working on tagsurf. Because, you see, tagsurf is maybe the first place where it would be really easy to visualize all this. You have many posts. There is the possibility (although I am not sure if it works right now) to send trackbacks from post to post. So each post does not need to have only one parent, but many. Many. It is true that, as it is now, trackbacks are not used inside the system. The reply is a different thing than the trackback. And each post only belongs to one thread which started with the first post that was not written as a reply to something. So there are quite some changes to be done, to let this vision ground in that system. But is is possible, and comparably easier to do than more generally in the blogsphere.

Those are the changes that I see have to be made to make it possible:

• Make sure that it is possible to send trackbacks between different posts.
• Organize all the reply so that they also send a trackback
• Make sure that each time a post A sends a trackback to another post B, this is also stored inside A
• Add a view down in time page, that from each post gives you that post, and all the posts that reply (that is trackback) to that post, and so on
• Hack this page so that the post appear in a hierarchical way, where it is very clear who is answering to what. Generally the way in which livejournal handles comments is a good way
• Since you stored all the trackback in both directions, organize a page view up in time, that from that post shows you all the posts that entry was answering to. And since they were themselves sending trackback to other posts, add those other posts as subbranches.
• Make it very easy, given a certain post to use those two views, and try taking away the usual thread view. All the information should still be there.

Once the idea is in place you can then cross the idea with the idea of the tag, you could, for example, investigate one tagsurf entry (blog entry), and one tag. Then only the entries that contain that tag will appear in the two tress. And if an entry does not have that tag, then all its subbranches would be excluded, even if they have the tag. (Thanks Andy for this idea)

Doing it on Technorati
Another one that has all the information to generate those views would be Technorati. Of course I would rather see it in a decentralised way. But it would be so easy for them to do it, while to do it in a decentralised way might be such a nightmare, that I am absolutely hopeful that they might make it before. Think about it. A Technorati page: investigate blogsphere local structure. You pass an url to this page, and the said structure appears. Up to depth… say 3.

Update: BN (in the comments) points out to BlogPulse’s Conversation Tracker, as a limited solution to what I was suggesting. It still has many limits, but it is surely a step in the right direction. Beside is good to be reminded that Technorati isn’t the only service to observe the blogsphere.

As I posted the previous entry, I went to technorati to check if it was being pulled. And what I discovered was that technorati was only pulling the first tag in the list.

I make quite an effort to add all the tags that I think might be relevant. This both to improve visibility, and to better categorise the content. I like to make a copy of the same tags in my p.s.blog delicious account. And then see the whole thing as a mindmap. But for the mindmap to really work it is necessary to that if two entries share some content they should also shar at least a tag. So I use many tags. And the mindmap comes out really nice.

Not only this, but I feel that each post belongs to multiple tags, and should be present in multiple pages. For example this entry belongs to both the tag ‘technorati’, and the tag ‘mindmap’, ‘delicious’ etc.

Investigating a bit further I discovered this post, where a similar problem was presented. In that case technorati was pulling the information from the list of categories in the rss feed. Now the problem is that, in wordpress (other tag!), the list of categories is defined before, while the tags are defined after. And although this might seem like a minor problem, it actually means that often we don’t add all the categories that we need. In a sense it should be possible to just ask that wordpress uses tags as categories.

And then post the tags as:
<category>firsttagname</category>
<category>secondtagname</category>

So the end result of this is:
my posts are not appearing in the technorati page where they should: tag, technorati…;
my posts are appeariung in the technorati page where the shouldn’t :General, English…;

And I haven’t got a clue how to fix it.
Pietro

UPDATE:
I did send a mail to teachnorati, and I got this answer:
Hi Pietro,
Your tags must occur within the boundaries of a post, a div of class of storycontent in your case. Technorati should treat your Dublin Core subjects in your Atom feed as tags.
SECOND UPDATE:
After various tests, I realized that technorati does not parse the html, and I usderstood what the mail meant with Technorati should treat your Dublin Core subjects in your Atom feed as tags.. Since the author of the plugin explained that for a couple of more month he is not going to be able to fix it, in the meantime I downloaded another plugin: Technotag. That gives me the possibility to add <tag>tagname</teg> And that’s makes a tag automagically. Let’s hope that this works!

THIRD UPDATE: it works. And as I keep on making small hacks to the plugins that I use, I slowly learn how they work

FOURTH UPDATE:correction, it only worked for the first tag. But I hacked a bit the code and now it works fine on all. I shall send an email to the author, to pass him the change.

Before it would make a tag on every <tag>tagname</teg>, but all the tags would all point to the same address: The one generated by the first tag. Corrected. The new code is available here.

Rss is somehow one of the best ideas. You can have your content, stripped of form BS being redirected all around. This gives a one to many structure. Now we need the opposite. We need to be able to pull the content from many sites in the same place, and check it. A many to one structure.
Most of you will say, “But we already have that, it’s called an aggregator. Just look at bloglines.

Yes, and no, that’s part of it, but it’s not the whole story. We need to have a page that posts all the content from everywhere in a single page.

And again I can hear: “but we have that too: it’s called a technorati tag“.

Again I will repeat: Yes, and no, that’s part of it, but it’s not the whole story. We need to pull the information from the technorati pages to our aggregator.

This is the idea: we need an rss feed of a technorati tag. As we can get the rss feed of a del.icio.us tag, we need to have it for all the blogs. The time have passed to add to your friend list ALL the blogs that might have information of interest. We need to be able to add that rss to our bloglines.

So, either technorati will start releasing the rss, or I predict that:

• a) other services will start competing with technorati offering that info
• b) anonymous hackers will start scrapping the info from technorati to offer the very valuable information.

See also:semanticweb, tags