content management systems etc.

For the last week I have been evaluating bids for a content management systems that will be deployed across campus. The plan is for the central IT shop to act as a content management ASP (similar to atomz).

My first impression is that most of these systems are designed for deployment to a single location. Or possibly that is just the most common deployment scenario.

Gosh that was really boring… in other news… I twisted my ankle this weekend at Summer Soaker 3. It was my first ultimate frisbee tournament in about two years and I played well and had fun. Because of the sprain I have been mooching rides off of everyone since I can’t ride my bike. Oooohhh and guess what else… last night I played in the sandbox with my son. I buried his toes in slightly wet sand and then he made them peek out. We also made smoothies (yum) and ate popcorn.

I am also reading Human Behavior and the Principle of Least Effort (the origin of zipf’s law) by G. Zipf. I have seen it cited in many places and figured it was time to read this classic. I really love when the fields of sociology, economics, biology and computer science come together (sorry requires IE). If you want to read it for yourself I suggest your local library because $250 is the best price I found on the web.

reversible is dead

I thought I would revisit “a recent meme”:http://www.khakipants.org/archives/2003/02/reversible_will_collapse.html to see how my predictions have panned out. In this case it looks like I was “on”:http://reversible.org/sex “the”:http://reversible.org/xxx “money”:http://reversible.org/porn. I am interested to see how the folks at reversible will deal with this situation.

But at least the porn site operators are doing a nice job of categorizing their sites… truly the spirit of the web!

google + blogger = blogs.google.com

In case you haven’t heard yet “google has”:http://weblog.siliconvalley.com/column/dangillmor/archives/000802.shtml#000802 “purchased blogger”:http://boingboing.net/2003_02_01_archive.html#90330803. From this “purchase”:http://www.dashes.com/anil/index.php?archives/005129.php “google”:http://www.google.com will gain two things:

* the ability to treat a blog as an interrupt driven data source (i.e. they won’t have to request RSS files every hour) and
* simplification of the data cleaning process (i.e. they won’t have to try to remove page templates and blog rolls).

The most obvious use for this is as an addition to “google news”:http://news.google.com (for breaking news and critical commentary). However, the data mining opportunities are phenomenal. This is infact the exact thing that I have been looking into and learning about over the last several months (especially entry-wise categorization).

The central question is “What unique services will this bring?”

You need to think about this question from several perspectives:

* blogger users : PageRank favor (doubtful)?
* users of other blogging tools
* searchers : This is where the big payoff will likely be… google will likely just play it safe for a while and provide a “google news-esqe”:http://news.google.com interface to blogger data. The difference between blogs.google.com and google news will be that the categorization of content will need to be more dynamic. Think of tracking topics like “blogdex”:http://blogdex.media.mit.edu/ but with an “interface like this”:http://news.google.com/ and a more blog appropriate classification scheme.

The real benefit coming for the average searcher will be the entry-wise categorization (most existing tools only categorize blogs not blog entries), topic threading (this must currently be done explicitly via TrackBacks or referrer tracking) and seamless integration into the google search interface.

reversible should canonicalize URLs

“reversible.org”:http://reversible.org/suggestionbox/ should purge duplicate referrers. You can see that “my previous post”:http://www.khakipants.org/archives/2003/02/reversible_will_collapse.html left “two different referrers”:http://reversible.org/sucks.

Some simple ideas:

* for a given domain name and category only show the referer with the longest URL or the most recent URL.
* automatically combine www.khakipants.org and khakipants.org

faceted browsing

Does any weblogging software exist that supports faceted browsing ala “facetmap”:http://facetmap.com and “flamenco”:http://bailando.sims.berkeley.edu/flamenco.html?

A few related links:

* “faceted searching”:http://radio.weblogs.com/0107808/2002/10/26.html#a510
* “exploring content filters”:http://www.boxesandarrows.com/archives/exploring_content_filters.php
* “search tools”:http://www.searchtools.com/info/faceted-metadata.html

reversible will collapse

As it currently works “reversible.org”:http://reversible.org will fail. It will “collapse”:http://reversible.org/sucks. It will be filled with “worthless spam”:http://reversible.org/spam and posts by people desperate for hits (like myself). Without a mechanism to determine the quality of a referrer this problem will continue. It depends too much on the individual (the content producing individual) to determine the quality of the content. It does not allow for intelligent refactoring that a Wiki would allow.

more on wmdi

After a closer look I think the weblog metadata initiative might be defunct. The last post to the forum was on Tue Dec 03, 2002 at 11:50 am.

I am not sure whether I should say:

• I told you so or
• bummer or
• hmmm… I guess I will just have to wait until they are less busy and return to wmdi or
• doh… I should read more carefully before I post.

weblog metadata initiative

The weblog metadata initiative is a attempt to convince publishers of content (bloggers) to markup their pages for the purposes of improving the ease of finding information and generating fun statistics.

Standards efforts like this (that force additional effort on the part of the publisher) have caused anger and unrest lately…

All the same I am interested in this effort because they want to gather entry level meta-data (something I have been contemplating for the last couple of days).

topicexchange

The Internet Topic Exchange is an intesting effort aimed at allowing bloggers easily post to specific categories… hmmm. What is the point? What is the motivation?

You can read about some of the idealogical underpinnings or the supposed source of the idea. Some of you may disagree but I believe that this strongly relates to my desire for improved classification tools.

Basically what they are talking about is a something akin to google news with a more granular classification structure and little editorial control. It will be interesting to see how this scales. Especially considering slackers like me can post junk like this.

Because of the MovableType default of generating RSS 1.0 with dublin core markup, I am currently in the process of analyzing the topic/category labels gleaned from 471 blogs to see if anything smart can be done to create a topicexchange without the TrackBack requirement.

Ideally some of these suggested category labels could see more standard use.

a couple more automatic blog tools

• blogdex
• memeufacture