Mashup Guide

I was going to try Google Presentation, the new Powerpoint-like subsystem of Google Docs, until I learned that it doesn't export presentations to Powerpoint or OpenDocument. (See Can I download a presentation to my local computer?.) Now, I might create my PPT or OpenDocument presentation and then upload it to see how good the importing facility is.

There is a new YouTube API based on GData, but there is still upload and write-capabilities: YouTube API Blog: We hear you - we know that upload and other write capabilities are wanted by the community. These features are what we're focusing on next. There is a PHP-based library that lets you do YouTube uploading: PHPTube - YouTube API for Video Upload & Download » nonsmokingarea.com.

One specific questions I have had about tags is how stable is the tagging for a given photo. I think that Cloudalicious - Watching Tag Clouds Over Time does a pretty good job at showing me that there is quick convergence. That's a rough take on what it shows....

For your reading pleasure....

Chapter 3: "Tagging and Folksonomies." (2007-08-08)

Chapter 4: "Feeds, RSS and Atom" (2007-08-08)

Chapter 5: "Remixing Weblogs" (2007-08-08)

I posted today first drafts of 5 more chapters for my book.   Take a look -- I'd love to get some feedback on these drafts.   (Send me email at raymondyee AT mashupguide DOT net.):

Chapter 3: "Tagging and Folksonomies." (2007-05-02 07:58:41)

Chapter 4: "RSS and Atom and syndication; integration with news readers" (2007-04-24 17:52:20)

Chapter 5: "Integration with Weblogs and Wikis" (2007-05-02 08:08:41)

Chapter 8: "Learning AJAX/Javascript widgets and their APIs" (2007-04-06)

Chapter 14: "Social Bookmarking and bibliographic systems" (2007-05-02 08:33:09)

"Machine tags" (see Flickr: Discussing Machine tags in Flickr API) have been introduced into Flickr as generalization of things like geotagging. Machine tags are also known by many as "triple tags". These are tags with a specific syntax aimed primarily for "machine consumption" (that is, by programs) and not directly for display to the typical end-user. You can use machine values to store extra data elements for a given photo. I think that it's fair to say that most important example of such data has so far been the latitude and longitude associated with a photo. So important that Flickr ultimately introduced specialized functionality to handle this data, to take that data out of the realm of having people just shoehorning that info into tags.

I'd really like to know what uptake there has been on machine tags. I was hoping to be able to do searches for namespaces in use -- but as I document below, I don't know how to formulate a query to do so.

Some kinks have been fixed in the Flickr machine tags:

• If you look at http://tinyurl.com/2vyrgv -- you'll see that yws-flickr : Message: bug with searching for machine tags? has been fixed.

Some outstanding issues remain:

• missing negative values and decimals in the machine tag API. See yws-flickr : Message: Re: Machine Tag Bug - missing negative values and decimals?. When I do the a query for my pictures that use the geo: machine tag name space and ask for the machine tags, I get the "-" and "." stripped out. (I confirmed the problem on March 11 but as of April 19, I've no seen any resolution.)
• no response to yws-flickr : Message: Re: Ladies and gentlemen : Machine tags. I'd love to have a whole set of query functionality, including being able to look up all domains in use. I know about "geo" but what others are being used -- and with what frequency? For instance, we can pull up all the geo: machine tags by searching for "geo:" with the API call. See http://tinyurl.com/yt5k2f You will >500,000 photos under that domain. I tried variants on "geo:" to try to pull up all machine tags ("*:", "*", "*:*") but I couldn't find any that would get me all the machine tags....

What are the equivalent of machine tags in other systems? What to look at:

• bobdc.blog: All Your Google Base metadata taxonomy are belong to us and Google Base Help Center - What is an "attribute"? in Google Base.
• I also vaguely remember something about attributes in Amazon S3 that might be related to machine tags. (The connection is probably vague.)

In a sidebar to Chapter 3, I ask the question of whether we will be able to ultimately rely on visual searching instead of tags? I mention that that companies like Riya are hard at work to bring us visual search. What other companies are out there? Trying out Riya has been on my list for a while, especially because it has an API. If you have experience with Riya, especially the API, please contact me. I'd like to see whether I can do a mashup between Flickr and Riya in which I could feed Riya my photos, using the tags I already have in Flickr to train it to recognize faces of friends, and then ask Riya to tag the rest of my photos. I'm sure someone must have tried to do so already. How have they succeeded?

What might a non-word based search look like? Draw something that you want to look for and the search engine will bring up pictures that look like what you drew? Or would you present a photo to the search engine, and it would bring up similar photos? The fact that we still have to type words in to a search engine to search for pictures or video or music, shows how deep end and we are on words for search and for describing nonverbal objects. That's why tags are so central in Flickr, where the dominant form of data is visual.

This week, I'm working a version 1.5 (a cleaned up first draft) of Chapter 3 "Tagging and Folksonomies". The important task for me is to work with I already have in my manuscript. Still I like to step back for a moment and write out what ideally I'd like be able to convey to my readers about tagging and folksonomies and/or functionality that I would like to have in hand for my computer systems.

• I'd like to be to integrate the various implementations of tagging, wherever they are. For example, I use tags in Flickr, del.icio.us, and technorati. They all have somewhat different ways of expressing similar functionality -- but I'd like to use these systems in as seamless way possible.
• I like to apply tags to digital content, whether it is on my desktop computer, on one of the Web 2.0 sites, or it is on custom online collaborative spaces.
• I like to be to apply tags at a very fine grained level. For example, not to a video clip as whole, but to a specific time segment.
• I'd like to have better tools to visualize and query my tags, to have tools that assist me in tagging new materials based on what and how I've already tagged materials. I like to offerred suggested tags based on some mix of what has already been typed in,what my social networks uses, global usage patterns, and other things that I've tag already.
• Tools for name reconciliation and reduction of tags. I might have had inconsistent use of singular and plural tags and want to have tools that will help me clean up those inconsistencies
• Right now I have a mess of tags in delicious. I'd like some tool to help me clean them up. (Does del.icio.us direc.tor fit the bill?)
• I'd like to have better reconciliation between controlled vocabulary systems (e.g., LCSH) and folksonomies.

The observations I've written are abstract. I should think in terms of concrete systems. Systems I tag a lot in:

• Flickr
• delicious
• Amazon.com
• Librarything.com
• I do make categories on my WordPress blogs which seem to turn into technorati tags.

It would be useful to have a big list of systems that support tagging. I believe such a list exists already on the Wikipedia. Probably on the list are a lot of the social book marking sites, photo sharing sites other than Flickr, video sites like YouTube.