Alan’s blog

I just found a wonderful service spell with flickr that makes images like:

It is built from a pool of letters on flickr which have been collected independently (there are also pools for digits and punctuation), a lovely example of Web2.0 in action!

I’ve added it to Snip!t, so now if you snip a single word ’spell with flickr’ gets suggested as an action.

I had thought I had got used to the ineptitude of Microsoft programmers, that nothing would surprise me any more. However, yet again their inventiveness in producing obscure yet damaging effects has once again amazed me.

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I’ve noticed that I reuse very few tags … and thought I was just a poor tag-user. However, I read the other day a reference to a paper at the CSCW confernce last year; it reported that the average number of re-uses of a tag was just 1.31¹ . I thought this meant that most tags are never reused … I am not alone

Having downloaded and read the paper it turns out that this is the average number of users who use a tag – that is most tags are used by only one person, in fact individuals reuse their own tags a lot more … so I am no-good tagger after all

Incidentally, I use ultimate tag warrior plugin for wordpress and it seems OK. Only drawback is that if you want tags displayed with your post, they really get inserted into the post itself. This is not a problem for tags at the end, but would mess up an RSS feed if you like your tags above the post. I guess this is because wordpress does not have a handle for plugins to add things to display loops, so the only way to ensure the tags are displayed are to make them part of the post.

Also Nad sent me a link to a neat tag visualisation by Moritz Stefaner.

1. Sen, S., Lam, S. K., Rashid, A., Cosley, D., Frankowski, D., Osterhouse, J., Harper, F. M., and Riedl, J. 2006. tagging, communities, vocabulary, evolution. In Proceedings of the 2006 20th Anniversary Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work {Banff, Alberta, Canada, November 04 – 08, 2006}. CSCW ‘06. ACM Press, New York, NY, 181-190. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1180875.1180904 [back]

I was at futuresonic last Friday doing a panel keynote at the Social Technologies Summit. I talked about various things connected to imagination: bad ideas, regret modelling and firefly/fairylights technology. On the same panel was a guy from Satchi and Satchi who created television adds for T-mobile and a lady from Goldsmiths who described a project for Intel where they studied a London bus route. The chair Eric introduced the session with a little about blogging and other web-based technologies and in general we were immersed in the ways in which digital culture pervades the day to day world.
In my way home on the train I sat opposite a father and son who were playing hangman. The boy was about 6 or 7 and the father had to help him and sometimes correct him. Every so often I noticed the words they chose, but just before I got off the train there was obviously the father’s hardest challenge yet. I gradually noticed the hightened excitement in the voices … it was a word with ‘X’ and ‘Y’ in it.

As I stood to get up, the boy eventually got the last letters and completed the word …

F O X Y B I N G O . C O M