My friend w came back from Halloween festivities a year or so ago and found this msg on her Panasonic microwave.

She says there is no “child’s portion” setting.

Odd. [Tags: odd]

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David Berlind suspects Microsoft muscle and money is behind the official opposition to the Commonwealth’s standardizing on the OpenDoc format. And David makes the right point bluntly:

All Microsoft must do to prove its point — that Massachusetts has some anti-Microsoft agenda designed to keeps its products off its procurement lists — is call Massachusetts’ bluff. The company doesn’t have to lift one engineering finger. All it must do is issue a press release announcing that it will support for ODF.

Call, raise or fold, Microsoft. [Tags: microsoft DavidBerlind opendoc]

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When Pres. Bush accepted the letter of resignation, how do you think he explained to himself and to her the reason she wasn’t accepted? Since I can’t imagine what he was thinking when he proposed her, I can’t imagine what sense he’s making of it now.

“You would have made a great judge. If only they’d gotten to know you the way I do, Harriet, instead of being rushed to judgment.”?

“You were a victim of Washington insiders who’ll do anything to damage this presidency.”?

“Gosh, Harriet, I guess the Senate just isn’t ready to have a woman on the Supreme Court”?

And so we march on to a new nomination by a man who takes Clarence Thomas as a model Supreme Court Justice. Be afraid. Be very afraid.

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Reddit has turned up The Case of the 500 Mile Email. Pretty bizarre and some nice detective work. [Thanks to Greg for the link.]

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Joshua Schachter of del.icio.us spoke twice at the Berkman Center yesterday. I blogged the first session, but I was moderating the second so I couldn’t. Both sessions I thought were excellent: Joshua is a low signal-to-noise communicator, he’s working on important issues, and I find his point of view unpredictable (which is a good thing).

Here’s some of what I thought was especially interesting. (Warning: Miscellaneous list ahead:)

Delicious is adding social networking. You’ll be able to designate people as members of your “network” so you can keep up with what they’re tagging and you’ll be able to create groups within which bookmarks can be kept private. Eventually, Delicious may disambiguate tags in part by weighing your groups’/network’s use of them more heavily. In any case, the addition of social networking will create yet more unintended consequences…something to look forward to.

Delicious is not going to go after the enterprise market. Instead, eventually Joshua will make an open source version available. I was surprised by this since I’ve been talking about tagging with a fair number of large companies who are excited about it and would buy a version of Delicious for internal use. Joshua thinks he couldn’t charge enough. I think they’d pay substantial sums for it.

Joshua’s elevator pitch says that Delicious is about remembering stuff. I continue to think its success is due to its social nature. The disagreement is one of emphasis only. But if I were his marketing vp, I’d tell him to market the tagstreams, not the bookmarks or the tags. Of course, I have no data supporting my view, but I was never that sort of marketing vp (i.e., reality-based).

The rate of tag spam seems incredibly low: A couple of incidents a week. (Tag spam means someone tags a page with hundreds or thousands of tags so that people will come to it.) In part, said Joshua, that’s because tag spam brings you no google juice.

He is not using stemming software that recognizes “blog,” “blogging” and “blogs” all have the same stem in part because there is meaning to the variants and in part because he hasn’t found any that’s good enough.

A little thing: I learned last night that if you use the tag “for:someone,” that bookmark is sent to the Delicious user with the name “someone.”

By the way, the evening session will be available as a podcast sometime soon. I’ll let you know. [Tags: delicious JoshuaSchachter berkman tagging]

Beth Kanter did an excellent job live-blogging the evening discussion. Thanks, Beth!

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Reader2 lets you list books you’re reading or plan on reading, tag them, search by tags, etc. Here’s its explanation of why you would use the site:

* You can easily find new and interesting books through user-defined categories, searches, and popularity among users.

* You can find users with similar book taste and see what they read (if you want this thing to work, you’ll need to add 10-20 books first).

* You can keep track of your friend’s books through RSS feeds.

* You can export books list to your site / blog.

Class assignment: Compare and contrast with LibraryThing and Berkman’s H20 .

(Thanks to Ian Forrester for the link.)

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[I wrote this before Joshua's double talks at Berkman today - I thought both were excellent - and came home to discover I never posted it. So here it is, in non-reverse-chronoogical order.]

In preparation for Joshua Schachter’s appearances at the Berkman Center (Plug: at 6pm, he’s the guest at a “Web of Ideas” discussion to which you’re invited) I checked his own page at del.icio.us. He has his bookmarks grouped into headings that tell you a lot about him. So does his tagcloud. Same for the rest of us. And, I’m guessing, the subheadings do not necessarily match what we would have listed on a profile page under “interests.” For example, Joshua has headings for ephemera, food, and time. As we create tags, discovering the subheadings we need may tell us something we did not know before about our interests, just as my college buddy Hank in his junior year looked over the courses he had taken and said, “Gee, I guess I’m interested in China.”
That del.icio.us tags and subheads are public of course influences which ones we list. For example, I didn’t want to use del.icio.us to track pages I was visiting when researching large screen TVs because, well, I’m not proud that I was researching large screen TVs. The rest of you may not be as small-minded and vain as I am, of course. [Tags: tagging JoshuaSchachter berkman]

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Liz Lawley blogs Karen Schneider‘s presentation to librarians on blogging ethics. Sounds like a great presentation. [Tags: KarenSchneider LizLawley libraries blogging]

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Joshua Schachter of del.icio.us is giving a lunchtime talk. His presence has sold out the small conference room at the Berkman Center so we’ve moved to a bigger room.

What follows are paraphrases of what he said; I am certain not only to have omitted much but to have gotten stuff wrong, so before you get pissed at Joshua for saying x, you might want to check that he in fact didn’t say y and I said he said x.

He built delicious in 2003 to manage his own links. He had been using a text file, but twenty entries into it he had already introduced a tag into it.

Currently at delicious: 5M links, about 10M posts, on average about two tags per item. About 500,000 unique tags. Growth in tags is slow.

The Chinese firewall blocks delicious now.

Hard core tech pages have gone from 25% to 17% over the course of this year. “So interests are starting to broaden.”

Q: How would you describe delicious to a layperson?


A: It’s a way to remember stuff. Links initially but we’re adding some new types.

Q: How do you improve performance, i.e., latency time?


A: We’re continually upgrading. At times scrapers/spiders are half the load.

Q: Delicious is aggressively without a user interface, so I think of it as a pipe instead of as a consumer destination…


A: I’ve finally hired people who have a different sense of user design than I do. We’ve done a round of UI testing — the one-way mirror, etc. That was an entirely terrifying day. Once they figured out the point and got through the URL, people like the interface. It does what it does without a lot of jokey stuff, etc.

The API: People do get value out of it, but it’s also a political statement that it’s your data. Plus I’m lazy.

Q: What’s the financial model?


A: The same as any other advertising-backed discovery engine, like Google. The people who are using it are paying us with information. Ten times the number of people are on the site but not signed in than those who are signed in.

Q: What about the August spike on Alexa?


A: Everyone had it. Don’t know why.

If I had imported the categories out of DMOZ, people would have said “Screw this” and would have left. Tagging is the easiest thing people could do and get any signal out of it all. People tag things “read later” which is useful to them but not to others.

I’ve spent too much time working with fuzzy models of the world to need discrete taxonomies. There’s no such thing as a perfect categorization. There is value in controlled vocabularies, but that doesn’t really map to the task. I’m not trying to categorize the web but helping people find stuff later.

Q: I found people because only 4 of us were using the “Africa” tag. How about making that more explicit?


A: I wrote the code to do that but it wasn’t pleasing. It tended to be dominated by people who have more tags overall.

Q: Is this compatible with the Semantic Web?


A: It’s easy to express your tags in RDF. That’s easy. Doing OWL is as hard as everything else is, namely, impossibly hard.

Q: What’s the infrastructure?


A: Mason (?), SQL [did he say "mySQL"?], lots and lots of replicas of the database for scaling, which isn’t good. The data still fits on a single disk. The search engine is a full text store and the recommendation engine is a database I wrote by hand (BerekelyDB).

Q (me): Which are you going to push, the individual or social uses?


A: You won’t use it if it’s not useful to you. But we’ll put in more social structure. Group tags are coming — tags that are lightly permissioned. You’d tag it as for a group, e.g., “groupname: tag.” (Example: nptech, a tag used by people in the non-profit tech field.) In the case of people collectively organizing around a tag, I think you want to amplify that. We’re trying to put in privacy now; it’s a little bit of a challenge to do and keep it fast.

I worry about systems that stay in stealth mode. There’s stuff you’re not learning. We generally push code out to the live site 2-3/week.

Q: Say more about group tags and privacy…


A: Items can be private. If it’s tagged for you or your group you’ll be able to see them. The items won’t be visible (in order to avoid problems with totalitarian governments.)

There are 8 people at Joshua’s company now.

Q: Why “tags” instead of “keywords” in coming up with the terminology?


A: It was inadvertently clever. I wish I could say I did it intentionally. Typically, when keywords are used, you don’t see a list of the aggregated keywords. Maybe it is a slightly new thing.

Q: (me) Will we see typed tags, e.g., for events you get a field for time and a field for place?


A: I would like to store more rich datat types but that won’t happen immediately, e.g. contacts and events. You can make a date tag now: “date._____” There’s stuff about the url, stuff about the post, stuff that belongs to you. E.g., if you bookmark an Amazon url. I could go get the bookcover, the price, etc. Then how do you represent them. We have to figure out how to do that once we’ve got performance up.

Q: As delicious scales, certain tags become meaningless. E.g., the “china” feed is pretty useless. But if I could specify subsets or groups…


A: You’d create a group and let people in. It will be implemented as a tag, so you could get a feed of (say) “berkman” and “china.” (With your inbox you can map tags, i.e., this person’s “china” is that person’s “asia.”) We have something called “the nework” coming; I originally called it “friends” but that was somewhat creepy. You identify people as being in your network and get feeds from them. [A group will be an established set of people who opt in. A network is a set of people you designate; they will not know they're a member of your network. I point out that flickr tells you. Joshua says that every time he gets a notice from some random person that he's been added as a contact "I want to rip my face off."]

I’m not trying to build up the delicious community. There are plenty of communities.

Almost no one subscribes to a person/tag. Most subscribe either to a person or a tag. So, if you bookmark something and someone else has notes (nee “extended”) on that thing, you’ll be able to see them in your inbox. (“Inbox” is badly named, Joshua says.)

About a third of people who create accounts never come back.

Q: Do people use ISBNs as tags?


A: Not many. Amazon is one of the top bookmarked things. The number one bookmarked site is delicious itself.

Q: Tag spam?


A: In general it’s not that big a deal. Every couple of days, and they pop right out as outliers [or as "outliars"? :)]

Q: Are you building systems to monitor the trends of what people are doing?


A: Right now it’s not hard to identify the outliers. It’s not our focus. But my background is in analyzing bulk data.

Q: How about letting your users see that data?


A: I’m generally wary of this. If I publish the most clicked-on list, then it becomes a high score list that people will try to get on.

Q: Do you think there is a niche for something that is delicious but with more structured data?


A: That’s faceted classification and there are other people doing it.

[Tags: berkman JoshuaSchachter delicious]

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They agreed with [Tim] Bray that the number of pages is increasing dramatically, finding that the size of the Internet seemed to double between October and November, 1995, going from 1.3 million to 2.6 million HTML documents.

Tim also noticed that average page size had remained consistent at 6,500 bytes. (From “The Dublin Core and Warwick Framework: A Review of the Literature, March 1995 – September 1997″ by Harold Thiele.) [Tags: internet TimBray OpenText]

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