SixApart recently released a plugin that adds tagging to Movable Type.
The tagging is only done by the author of the post so you don’t get the benefits of social tagging like you do on delicious. However, I think it is useful for creating simple categories without having to think much about it. If the tag is already used, it gets associated with other posts. If not, voila!, a new category. Much easier interface and probably meets the needs of most bloggers who are casual about their categories.
I have a bad habit of stashing links to stuff I want to blog here and there (well, mostly here) and then never getting around to posting about them. In an effort to circumvent my usual behavior, here are a few slightly dusty links.
Extreme Usability
Great post about the benefits of pairing a usability/interface person with an engineer to rapidly iterate improvements in design. I’ve had the same experience when working side-by-side with our web admin.
Password Design Pattern
Good tips on designing password protection systems. Directly related to my earlier post today.
IBM Gets Folksy
Post about how IBM plans to implement folksonomy tagging to its massive intranet operation.
Have you ever wanted an xml document that contained the entire set of species for a paticular kingdom? The Integrated Taxonomic Information System is the site for you.
The goal is to create an easily accessible database with reliable information on species names and their hierarchical classification. The database will be reviewed periodically to ensure high quality with valid classifications, revisions, and additions of newly described species. The ITIS includes documented taxonomic information of flora and fauna from both aquatic and terrestrial habitats.
Excellent use of the web to deliver data to the research community. What they don’t have yet (as far as I could tell) is an RSS feed listing new species as they are discovered. That would be extra nifty.
IAWiki has a page listing thesaurus design tools.
Did you know there is a faceted classification listserve? I didn’t!
Tanya has posted a rather ingenious solution for creating a faceted classification system for posts in MovableType. This gets around the built-in functionality of MT that only allows one level of categories.
I love this closing line from her entry:
This is additional evidence to back up my observation that most problems in life can be solved with the creative use of regular expressions.
I’ve set up a basic analysis of High Context using MTWordStats.
I’ve blogged just over 22 thousand words and have been writing at the 10th grade level, which is too high for content targeted at the general public. Luckily, I’m not targeting them. 🙂 No big surprises in the word frequencies. I do wish there were a filter to block articles and common verbs.
Anyone aware of tools or plugins that will do a rudimentary content analysis on weblog posts? A plug-in for MT that calculates simple word frequencies in posts would be very useful in identifying potential categories.
Update: Found WordStats over at MT Plugin Directory. I’ll give this a shot this evening. Note to self, google before posting.
The Drupal group weblogging software (open source) appears to have excellent taxonomy support. I need to dig into this further and get a demo up and running but it looks very promising.
From :Column Two: Death of keywords:
To me, this really highlights the challenges (futility?) of the so-called “semantic web”, where everything describes itself, cross-linking happens automatically and accurately, and search engines only return useful results…
If we can’t get even simple keywords tags to work in practice, what hope is there for RDF, and the rest?
My own opinion is that any acitivity or tool that requires consistent, similar, behaviors across the entire Web (such as accurate keywording of web pages) will not happen.
However, that doesn’t mean the keyword metatag is dead. It can still be an effective tool for a collection of content whose authors/owners are willing to invest time and effort into for accurate searching and indexing. The Web might evolve into small, organized, clusters of content that create semantic islands in a chaotic sea.
C. David Gammel, CAE 