Very Cool News Visualisation

Too cool: this infoviz tool for showing the density of news stories across the world. I think I got it via InfoDesign, but can't be sure...

Online Beginning Perl Book

Via Tanya at Pixelcharmer, via Kasei, a link to a beginners' Perl book (online pdfs). I've never really fully revved up my Perl learning experience, although I know bits and pieces, so this might help...

Topic Maps Blog

From Bond University, a blog on Topic Maps.

UPDATE - via Peter Van Dijck on a SIGIA posting, TMTab, a topic map plug-in for Protege is available. Must get around to downloading them both and having a play at some ontological/taxonomical mapping.

UPDATE - 14/04/2004

Via Peter again (via scale|free), here's TM4JScript, a JavaScript topic maps tool for browsers (I think you can ontologise your favourites with it???). Sounds nice, must play with it when I get the chance.

Two interesting bits & pieces - email social networking/trust and online rss newsreader

Via Clay on Many-to-Many, the introduction of LOAF, which uses a bloom filter (some whizzy algorithm) to essentially give you an overview of your email social network. It compares the details of contacts that you have sent one or more emails to against your incoming mail and against the contacts of your contacts - (sort of a -1, 0, +1 scale) - the result: contacts you don't know even via others, contacts you only know via others and contacts you know yourself (and via others). I can see this being useful - although the level of detail that you get through probably isn't anywhere near enough to base any major decision upon.

The most excellent bloglines, I have just discovered - an online rss newsreader. hotmail for rss.

I'm not feeling too hot, so apologies for the Yoda-like grammar

Community Article

Via Tom Smith, here's an interesting looking book (from the first flick through) on online community building by NAIMA.

Atom Autodiscovery

I'm hoping I've used the correct format for Atom autodiscovery:

<link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml" title="Atom feed" href="http://marktsinfoblog.blogspot.com/atom.xml" />

How much does my weblog own me?

Luckily not too much

18.75 %

My weblog owns 18.75 % of me.
Does your weblog own you?

Vade Mecum: FOAF/trust/reputation

Just using my blog as an aide-memoire, here's a bunch of FOAF stuff to look at in the light of my More Trust Links posting on 09/02/2004.

• FOAF-A-MATIC - excellent wee FOAF rdf file generator


• IBM XML Watch - decent intro to FOAF


• FOAF Vocabulary specification


• Trust and Reputation in Web-based Networks - one way of doing it!

As well: a weighty academic piece that I've scanned very quickly: Rational Decision Making Using Social Information (Google HTML of a Word Doc). Noted the use of the term "Polyanna Effect" in this document, which is something that strikes me with early adopters of these kinds of models: ask users to "rate" someone and they usually will rate them highly (even, perhaps if they don't think that much of them!). I get the feeling that this might be exacerbated on the Web by the lack of "identity" of users within a defined social context.

Also came across Paolo Massa's Blog, which has some very interesting related stuff on it.

More trust links

A couple of FOAF/RDF links from Eric Vitiello:

• A module for defining relationships in FOAF
• A module for defining trust relationships in FOAF

I'll have a closer look at these later. I'm just pondering things at the moment from an object, subject, attributes and connections perspective in the light of my golden rules...

XFN - representing human relationships in links

Very interesting this XFN stuff - the non-symetrical relationships are particularly interesting. XFN appears to be an instance of the small world semantic web - tiny, personal ontologies as opposed to the grandiose, joined-up vision of everything espoused by some. I might bung some if this up on my blog roll. Other wee bits of the semantic web (small "S", small "W") on here include the Atom feed for subscribing to my bosts, as well as the GeoURL details which allow me to see other bloggers nearby.

Social Network Analysis in a Business Context

Much like Valdis Krebs' stuff, this SNA stuff from Rob Crosslooks interesting - like so many other pieces I have just browse-read it so far. What I'd like to see are some arguments for selling this sort of insight through a business.

Metadata

Via InfoDesign, must remember to read these two: User-Centred Information Retrieval and Living with Topic Maps and RDF.