Social networks

/ net stuff

There’s been a lot of interest lately in social software. A related phenomenon is the way the Internet can make social networks explicit.

I like playing around with this. I recently created a FOAF file (see my badge-zone). And there’s a brilliant “FOAF explorer” (where you can see I really need to flesh mine out).

One problem with FOAF is that it’s nerdy, and while I think it’s a good approach, not everyone will bother putting FOAF files on their websites (oh wait–not everyone even has a website). Friendster answers that–it approximates FOAF’s functionality, but lets the user sign in and point to friends rather than post a file with arcane formatting. It would be nifty if Friendster could read FOAF files, and conversely, if Friendster had an interface for feeding information into FOAF files.

None of this is particularly new. Six degrees did roughly the same thing as Friendster back in 1995, I think. But the Internet is big enough that network effects make the idea more viable. It’s also interesting trolling through Friendster–so far, the only friends I’ve found in there are part of my fire-freak circle of friends, so all the same faces keep popping up. It would be interesting to find someone from a different circle there and be the point of intersection between circles.

Later: Seems that Ben Hammersly had the same idea.

Spider

/ movies

Saw Spider last night. Interesting movie. It’s by David Cronenberg, and I’ll pretty much see anything from him on spec. Some parents had brought their kids (perhaps expecting Spiderman–children should never be brought to Cronenberg movies).

The movie, like its protagonist, moves very, very slowly. A madman sent to a halfway house in his hometown gradually recollects (and partly re-invents) his childhood, and the events that caused his madness, or were precipitated by it and exacerbated it–the movie is not clear which. The storytelling was very affectless–I don’t quite feel as if I got inside the character’s head–but is very atmospheric. Ralph Fiennes did an excellent job in what I’m guessing must have been a very difficult portrayal of the title role.

Natural keywords and categories

/ net stuff

Adam Kalsey has done some fine work on creating lists of related entries for Movable Type based on the contents of your blogs.

Not to undermine it, but this still doesn’t go far enough towards discovering natural relations between entries, and won’t work unless we write in a restricted style with a restricted vocabulary–that goes against the grain of blogging, which is personal and spontaneous. If I mention Donald Rumsfeld in one blog entry and the Secretary of Defense in another, clearly they’re related (although the person with that title can change, making that equation more complicated). How can this be made to work?

The first problem is extracting potential keywords from “noise” words. A first-order effort would be to have a canned list of noise words, and filter those out–this would be a simple, fast process. A second-order effort would be to filter out any words that are used very frequently by the blogger–this would be much slower, and perhaps should be handled asynchronously (the results of this could be used to refine the first-order noise-word list to speed things up in general).

The two Big Bens of Blogistan (Trott and Hammersley) have worked out the ingenious more like this from others. This has the germ of something interesting: using an outside reference.

Something like the Open Directory already represents a pretty extensive hierarchical library of keywords. To take my prior example, the first hit for a search on “Donald Rumsfeld” at dmoz is found in the category “Regional > North America > United States > Government > Executive Branch > Departments > Defense”. That gives you some excellent keywords to take home. (It also seems possible that if a candidate keyword generates scattered search results, it might not be a good keyword, and should be added to the noise-word list.) The most specific are at the end, and “Defense” is a very useful keyword to equate to Rumsfeld. It gets better: that category contains subcategories with very useful terms (Armed Forces, Defense Agencies, Department of Defense Field Activities, Intelligence, Joint Chiefs of Staff, Office of the Secretary of Defense, Unified Combatant Commands) as well as related categories (Science > Technology > Military Science; Regional > North America > United States > Government > Military > Installations > Pentagon). These could be used to generate a high-quality list of “alternative keywords.”

So the process of finding and using alternate keywords would go something like this:

  1. Create potential keyword list
    1. Winnow out noise words
    2. Winnow out other frequently-used words
  2. Search dmoz or other directory for keywords
  3. Collect categories for search results, as well as subcategories and related categories
  4. Assemble new list of alternative keywords
  5. Search blog corpus for alternate keywords, create links when found

The process of constructing a list of alternative keywords clearly involves a fair amount of work–but that’s what we’ve got computers for. And it obviously won’t always be perfect–but that’s what we’ve got brains for.

Getting older

/ personal

Yesterday, I received the alumni magazine from my high school. It contained a small picture of an alumni get-together, with people from my graduating class and the classes one year ahead/behind.

I was shocked. There were faces in that picture that I simply couldn’t recognize (not possible in a graduating class of 69 people)–and when I read their names in the caption, I was doubly shocked at how much those people had changed. I mentioned this to Jenny, and she just said “fat balding guys?” That nailed it.

Time has been kind to me. I’ve certainly changed and aged, but physically, I don’t think I’d leave anyone from back then wondering.

Next year will be time for my class’ 20-year reunion. I won’t be there.

eDonkey on Mac OS X

/ technology

Has anyone out there successfully installed edonkey on OS X? If so, how? I spent way too much time trying to get it to work and failing.

Oh Lazyweb, I invoke thee!

Demon of the Derby

/ movies

Saw Demon of the Derby (which, interestingly, is not in the IMDB) last night at the Alamo. This is a documentary about Ann Calvello, a roller-derby competitor who started in the late 40s and was still competing in the late 90s.

Ann’s an amazing person: someone who never quit, who never gave a fuck what anyone thought about her, who never got the message that getting old means taking up crocheting and staying in, who never quit wearing outlandish clothes, spiked heels, and unreal hair colors, and, sadly, who never got out of the sun, and is left with skin like leather. She demonstrates that sometimes the trivial and even ridiculous can become legitimized and even sanctified just through time and cussed endurance.

If you get a chance to see the movie, stay through the credits, which are hilarious themselves and are interspersed with some great clips, like Ann saying “the reason I don’t wear red lipstick is because it makes my face look like a baboon’s ass!”

After the movie, I chatted with some local roller girls (Riff Scandel and (I think) Cat Tastrophe), who had a bout on Sunday that I, regretfully, had to miss. But their next one is June 8, and I’m marking my calendar, hell yeah!

Know your secretaries

/ current events

In the Sunday NY Times, Maureen Dowd pointed out the tension between the Secretaries of State and Defense. Yesterday, Peter Jennings made an interesting flub, where he referred to “Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld.” And that night on the Daily Show, John Stewart did the same–though I suspect he was doing so intentionally.

The Daily Show also had a wickedly funny “debate,” juxtaposing clips of Governor GW Bush with those of President GW Bush speaking on foreign policy, etc. Especially funny the way they showed one smirking at whatever the other was saying. Governor Bush sounded…rational by comparison, although President Bush did a better job of reigning in his beavis-and-butthead speaking style where he laughs at his own inanities.

Anniversary

/ personal

It was one year ago today that Gwen and I met. The best thing that’s happened in my life over the past 365 days.

Apple Music Store

/ music, technology

As rumored, Apple has created a store for downloadable music, which ties in with a new version of iTunes.

They apparently have a library of 200,000 tracks from the five big labels. So far so good. They’re charging $0.99 per track. Not good. In terms of an hour’s-worth of music, this works out to be about as much as buying the CD, perhaps more–except you don’t get the CD, booklet or full-quality audio for that matter, but do get restrictions on how you can use your downloads (although the restrictions are admittedly pretty liberal, and easy enough to circumvent).

This does seem like an improvement over some of the existing for-fee music-download services, and the integration with iTunes looks pretty slick, but the pricing is outlandish ($0.25 per track would be my limit), and the pay-per-track pricing model is a bad idea. A monthly-fee all-you-can-eat model is one that I could get behind.

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