Earth: Mostly Harmless

MemoryMiner - the ultimate photo organiser?

This week saw GroupSmarts release an interesting update to their MemoryMiner social photo organiser application. MemoryMiner is a social photo organiser for Mac OS X, allowing users to tag imported photos by who appears in them (the ability to draw a marquee around a subject in a photo is somewhat similar to Facebook’s photo tagging service). Memory Miner also incorporates time-based selection, tagging and geotagging.

If you’d like to see a visual demo, check out MacBreak’s video interview with GroupSmarts [QuickTime movie, 93.6MB]. Warning: Merlin Mann present. I don’t mind him but I know that many do…

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del.icio.us will eat itself

I’ve been doing a bit of work using del.icio.us as a data provider so this post by Jason Kottke made me chuckle.

Besides, recursion is just cool.

del.icio.us will eat itself:

del.icio.us.

People who have bookmarked del.icio.us on del.icio.us.

People who have bookmarked the people who have bookmarked del.icio.us on del.icio.us.

People who have bookmarked the people who have bookmarked the people who have bookmarked del.icio.us on del.icio.us.

People who have bookmarked the people who have bookmarked the people who have bookmarked the people who have bookmarked del.icio.us on del.icio.us.

People who have bookmarked the people who have bookmarked the people who have bookmarked the people who have bookmarked the people who have bookmarked del.icio.us on del.icio.us.

People who have bookmarked the people who have bookmarked the people who have bookmarked the people who have bookmarked the people who have bookmarked the people who have bookmarked del.icio.us on del.icio.us.

People who have bookmarked the people who have bookmarked the people who have bookmarked the people who have bookmarked the people who have bookmarked the people who have bookmarked the people who have bookmarked del.icio.us on del.icio.us.

Ed. note: At this point, the del.icio.us web server started singing “Daisy, Daisy” and soon after, Skynet achieved consciousness.

(Via kottke.org).

Rammstein and the Chipmunks

Breaking news: animated chipmunks join German industrial rock band!

Exhibit A.

If you listen to Last.fm radio on a Mac with its audio output sample rate set to 96Khz, you will too find that the godforsaken hellish sound of The Chipmunks has infiltrated your machine.

Social networking

I’ve been thinking quite a bit about how to provide some sort of social network service for students and alumni at universities in Scotland. The thing is, the social side of things at Scottish universities is pretty good - but it does pretty much consist only of bars and nights out, and it’s difficult to meet many people from outside your own faculty other than through this sort of thing. What I’d like to see more of are kind of ‘half-way’ activities like informal societies and shared interest groups, to try to extend the links between disparate groups at the universities, and increase the general sense of ‘community’.

First of all, my journey started at the Facebook, an impressive social network for students and alumni, which having expanded out of its US homeland is available in about 20 HE institutions in the UK. Andrew Gruen introduced me to this, and while it’s impressive, it’s really only the beginning of what might be possible using social networks.

Last week in a History tutorial I discovered a whole range of interesting, and obscure, links between people attending. Several groups knew one or two other people there, but gradually it emerged that a lot more linked the attendees than was obvious at first. The tutor also mentioned that he had been keeping up with what a few ex-classmates were up to using Friends Reunited. While the intentions of FR may be admirable, it has two limitations for me: firstly, the only real semantic information is based on names, classes and schools; and the second is that it’s a horribly commercial endeavour. I think anything of this nature should essentially be student-led.

What struck me was that all of the extraneous information which people might want to submit could be presented in a semantic form, à la Facebook, but that on the scale of an individual institution, much deeper and more interesting links might be formed than what’s possible there.

The most obvious difference is that people will often know each other better - but on an institutional scale, it might also be possible to leverage clubs, societies and unions into providing semantics (or even allowing users to create metadata on their membership of such things that would emerge into a structure of sorts). Furthermore, the social network itself might be a highly suitable place for clubs and societies to base themselves and recruit new members. After all, if you can see others who are also interested in 2nd century Greek pottery, you might find (obscure societies permitting) that there’s a group set up for just your sort, or choose to set one up of your own.

Enter Ning. A development platform and API for social network apps. I’m going to give this a go, and possibly steal huge swathes of code (possibly). I don’t think it’d be very suitable for actual deployment but it might be useful as a playground to see what’s possible, and how it might work. Also, I’ve been tentatively looking into joining the Geek Society at UoS, so I’ll see if any of them are interested in looking into it. Spoken Word (where I work) might also be interested - hopefully in hosting, but it might also be relevant to the Shibboleth project we’re bidding for.

Unfortunately, as you can see, Strathclyde doesn’t exactly have a thriving societies scene, so I think a Glasgow-wide deployment might be appropriate. It also makes sense given the large numbers of intra-institution social links between students at the University of Glasgow, GCU, the University of Paisley and so on. Who knows, I might even get the unions on board.

Mining the Hive Mind, Wikipedia-style

Clever stuff.

Mining the Hive Mind, Wikipedia-style: “One of many Wikipedia-based applications, Omnipelagos mines the hive mind to map the connections between two things.”

(Via MetaFilter.)