Boxes and Arrows has a new article on A Controlled Vocabulary:
A controlled vocabulary is a way to insert an interpretive layer of semantics between the term entered by the user and the underlying database to better represent the original intention of the terms of the user.
Using a controlled vocabulary can make searches more meaningful by interpreting what a user enters so that it makes sense for the underlying database. For example, 'dress pants' and 'trousers' might really be the same thing, but why make users guess which one you used?
Giving power to people who traditionally haven't had much power, tends to make those with power nervous.
Arnold Kling has an article at TCS-Tech Control Station about how companies are responding to the interactive and creative power that the Internet and the web have given large numbers of people. He says:
There is a striking generation gap between media empires that were built before the Internet and those that grew up as Web businesses. Companies that were formed on the Internet treat Edge Power as a feature. Traditional media companies treat Edge Power as a bug.
Why the whole thing is more complicated than we want it to be.
``Free as Air, Free As Water, Free As Knowledge''
Talk originally given in 1992
from Shifted Librarian
Google Labs has two new projects--Google viewer and Google WebQuotes
A TextArc is a visual represention of a text--the entire text (twice!) on a single page. A combination of an index, concordance, and summary, it uses the viewer's eye to help uncover meaning.
Check it out.
34N 118 West is an exercise in interactive storytelling using Tablet PCs and global positioning software. The story itself changes depending on how participants move around the landscape, providing different pieces of narrative in relation to where a person is standing.
Check out the AgoraPhone project. It's a sculpture on the MIT campus which anyone can call up (the phone number's on the web site) and talk to passersby.
Another conference blog. This time blogging the Supernova 2002 conference, held December 9-10, 2002 in Palo Alto, California.
Supernova 2002 is (was):
...a new conference exploring the distributed future. With the bursting of the Internet bubble, businesses, end-users, investors, and technology vendors face a bewildering array of challenges. Yet a common theme runs through the fundamental questions facing software, communications, and media. That theme is decentralization.
The CAPTCHA Project. is a program at Carnagie Mellon to develop a program that can generate and grade tests that most humans can pass and that current computer programs can't.
Purposes of such tests include verification for online polls, catching worms and spam, preventing attempts to break passwords.
One of the new expansions of blogging is moblogging (mobile blogging). Here's someone blogging a marathon, while, you know, they're running in it.
Check out Moving Images at the Internet Archives for a really nifty collection of ephemeral films--advertising, educational, industrial, and amateur films. The films are particularly noteworthy for the view they give of the times in which they were produced.
Barbie has a weblog
12/4/2002 Have You Heard??? You know I'm all about the latest in the wireless world. So imagine my shock when I heard someone's cell phone barking like a dog. I am totally not making this up. It's the newest thing. Musical rings are so yesterday. Well, I made a B-line to the cell phone store and guess what? My new cell meows! Fab or what?
She is also, apparently, a camgirl.
Wired News carries a recent article that says:
How's this for a stocking stuffer? A portable DVD player that projects the movie right before your eyes through a device embedded in your glasses.
Mark Pilgrim has a new Recommended Reading page.
Enter any weblog URL and you'll get a list of other sites that you might be interested in, based on the links on the weblog you entered.