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goffburd's journal recently regarding the semantic web and how it's going to become more important in the near future. Rather than entering näive plain text searches to try and find what you want, there should arise a variety of more accurate ways to home in on information, largely based on website owners sharing their online databases. And the great thing is, most of you are already contributing to these databases without knowing it. Which is precisely why I have a nice map here 
that takes Livejournal's online database of people, Google Maps' public programming interface, and someone else's ingenuity, and you get this kind of niftiness. (You'll have to click the links at the top to see anything useful. Go here if you want to see your own.) Two services which can talk a common language combine to be more than the sum of their parts.
This example is just the tip of the iceberg really. The online bookmark manager del.icio.us takes all the bookmarks that people add in various categories and shares them with other people, so you can see what's currently interesting, what's related to the web pages you look at, who looks at similar sorts of pages, etc. It's cool in itself, but because it is doing the whole semantic web thingy and publishing its data in an easy-to-process format, other sites can freely work with that information to make something else, as populicio.us does, showing popular links on del.icio.us from the last 24hrs. A similar situation exists for Flickr, a picture sharing site: at the simplest level you can subscribe to it and see images posted every day that match a certain keyword, and on a more bizarre level you find the images from there used in odd toys like this one.
And this sort of aggregate data, collected from many people all contributing a small amount each, can play a part in social science too. Moodographer, which charts something seemingly irrelevant, namely the mood choices above these posts, shows a distinct correlation between these moods and world events.
It's all quite interesting, and as more and more sites process data and freely pass it on, we'll see both more entertaining uses and more practical uses of the technology.
goffburd's journal recently regarding the semantic web and how it's going to become more important in the near future. Rather than entering näive plain text searches to try and find what you want, there should arise a variety of more accurate ways to home in on information, largely based on website owners sharing their online databases. And the great thing is, most of you are already contributing to these databases without knowing it. Which is precisely why I have a nice map here that takes Livejournal's online database of people, Google Maps' public programming interface, and someone else's ingenuity, and you get this kind of niftiness. (You'll have to click the links at the top to see anything useful. Go here if you want to see your own.) Two services which can talk a common language combine to be more than the sum of their parts.This example is just the tip of the iceberg really. The online bookmark manager del.icio.us takes all the bookmarks that people add in various categories and shares them with other people, so you can see what's currently interesting, what's related to the web pages you look at, who looks at similar sorts of pages, etc. It's cool in itself, but because it is doing the whole semantic web thingy and publishing its data in an easy-to-process format, other sites can freely work with that information to make something else, as populicio.us does, showing popular links on del.icio.us from the last 24hrs. A similar situation exists for Flickr, a picture sharing site: at the simplest level you can subscribe to it and see images posted every day that match a certain keyword, and on a more bizarre level you find the images from there used in odd toys like this one.
And this sort of aggregate data, collected from many people all contributing a small amount each, can play a part in social science too. Moodographer, which charts something seemingly irrelevant, namely the mood choices above these posts, shows a distinct correlation between these moods and world events.
It's all quite interesting, and as more and more sites process data and freely pass it on, we'll see both more entertaining uses and more practical uses of the technology.
