Thursday, March 30, 2006

figuring out the future of geotagging now that geobloggers.com is officially gone #

It's official: Geobloggers changes direction and no longer functions as a mapping service of geotagged flickr photos. It was great service while it lasted. I certainly miss it. The old geobloggers.com aggregated information about geotagged photos and made that information available in its interface (auto-refreshing google maps) and through an API. It made effective use of google maps. In response to the announcement, I posted a question: I’m wondering whether you would be willing to donate your code for geobloggers.com as a mapping service or put it out as open source so that others in the Flickr community might step up to the plate and take it over. Anyone out there willing to create a service to replace what geobloggers.com did? N ot a small task, and maybe one that will ultimately be provided by Flickr. There are other mapping services of geotagged flickr images -- but none that I know of that aggregates the geotagging information and making it available via an API. (I just posted essentially this writeup on the GeoTagging Flickr group to see what others think.)   Posted by Raymond Yee on 3/30/06; 4:44:29 PM from the Web Technology dept. Discuss (1 response)

Social Bookmarking: Some of My Own Technical Next Steps #

For the first followup to Social Bookmarking: A First Take, I planned to describe how to make social bookmarking more of a seamless experience for myself. I wrote: I've become an avid user of del.icio.us and potentially many other systems. I'd to be able to integrate the reference storage, discovery, sharing with my writing and teaching processes. I'll write more tomorrow about how I in particular would like social bookmarking to fit in a scheme of seamless use and reuse of digital content. Two days ago, as I began to tally the features I wanted in an "ideal" social bookmarking/bibliographic system, I saw that pursuing such an ideal would be too large of a task to complete in a day or two. Today, I switch gears to identify a small project with a minimalist set of features that I can implement quickly. The next programming task to improve my own del.icio.us is to add a UI to my Ecco->del.icio.us script so that I incorporate richer methods of tagging my bookmarks and downloading references from del.icio.us. The user interface would be in wxPython, allowing for easier integration down the line with Scholar's Box and Chandler. (I sketched a preliminary UI design: my desk at work; sketch of a delicious uploader). Specifically, this UI will have the following features: I will be able to select text in various contexts (Ecco outline and HTML to start with), the URLs will be extracted and presented in the interface for tagging en masse as well as a single form to fill in titles, descriptions, and notes. In the future, I'd like to bring up the previous tags that I've used and make it easy to apply those tags to selected references. On the flip side, I'd like to do (within this interface or with another one) searches on del.icio.us and bring them back in a number of formats. It would be nice, for instance, to be able to quickly format a reference as HTML or wiki markup or OpenDocument so that I can paste the reference in various places. Developing this interface also gives me an opportunity to explore the potential of incorporating autotagging systems such as Tagyu and tagthe.net. Looking at del.icio.us the last couple of days convinced me that there is greater activity and potential around del.icio.us itself (let alone the entire area of social bookmarking) than I had previously understood. Here I list some questions and areas for further exploration: I think that I will ultimately need my own object store in addition to flickr, del.icio.us, Refworks to keep track of all my objects and references. Alternatively, can I just make del.icio.us into that central database? How far can del.icio.us be extended? Specifically, I've been analyzing whether we can shoehorn bibliographic metadata into del.icio.us while still honoring the spirit of the application. In other words, if I want to cite a book in del.icio.us and want to stick in things like author, title, isbn, etc, how should I do so? In terms of the mechanics, I've been thinking about geotagging in Flickr as a precedent (See Flickr: GeoTagging Flickr). Indeed, Rev Dan Catt (of the geotagging fame) wrote about this type of tagging in geobloggers: Advanced Tagging and TripleTags. (Others have had a similar notion: others have this idea: Sci-Fi Hi-Fi » Blog Archive » Meta Tags: The Poor Man’s RDF?). So I should go ahead and stick in 'bibliotagged' and things like biblio:author=William_Shakespeare into delicious? The specific tags are not clear; is the fundamental concept ok? Such shoehorning of metadata comes from a desire for to have an an online database of references. I wish one of Refworks, CiteULike, or Connotea could fit the bill -- but none has a public API as far as I can tell. (Connotea seems to have a currently undocumented API: SourceForge.net: connotea-discuss) -- though Connotea does not seem to have a lot of places to stick extra data in. CiteULike has a lots of useful fields but no API. Its future is under discussion. See REST API for CiteUlike?: "Any API should make it possible to use a service like CiteULike to completely replace applications like Endnote."; RestfulApi - CiteULike - Trac and (CiteULike-discuss) Project status I've started to look through the a long list of tools developed around del.icio.us: Complete Tools Collection. I was surprised to find only a few things that I wanted to follow up with. Firefox/del.icio.us synchronization deserves a closer look: Dietrich Ayala | Foxylicious - Firefox and del.icio.us bookmark integration. I will have to try Cocoalicious: A Cocoa del.icio.us Client for Mac OS X -- since it seems to be a good desktop tool. When it comes time to mirror del.icio.us to a local database, I can take a look at MySQLicious - del.icio.us to MySQL Mirroring [ nanovivid. Is it time to look at del.icio.us competitors that also have APIs? I've been curious about RawSugar (though I must admit that I don't quite grok it) and Simpy - tagging, social bookmarking and personal search engine.   Posted by Raymond Yee on 3/30/06; 2:10:58 PM from the Web Technology dept. Discuss

my very own copy of the Python cookbook #

Python cookbook Originally uploaded by Raymond Yee. Off and on for the past couple of weeks, I have been walking around with my copy of Python Cookbook. Reading it has helped me to understand the newer aspects of Python, including Python generators. Even though I am able to read the book online and download the code for free, I still like to have the paper version in my hands. I suppose it's a bit like flipping through my favorite Chinese cookbooks and daydreaming about what to coook. I only hope that I can move beyond daydreaming to actual programming!   Posted by Raymond Yee on 3/30/06; 9:49:33 AM from the dept. Discuss (1 response)