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Seattle based podcast discovery and management service Pluggd is unveiling a major new feature at DEMO this weekend that combines speech recognition and semantic analysis to let users search for and skip to parts of an audio file that are related to topics of interest to them. It’s more than just speech recognition. This is one of the most compelling examples I’ve seen lately of a growing trend: making multimedia content more granular and letting users take even greater control over the media we consume. We don’t just want to consume what we wish, we want to consume it in the way we wish. Called “Hear Here”, the new feature is only available for use with a single test file this weekend, but CEO Alex Castro told me that with his team’s background in scaling large distributed computing at places like Amazon and Microsoft, they decided to take on the hardest part first – the relevance determination.
Pluggd to make podcasts chunkier, searchable [Techcrunch]
Social Networks and the Semantic Web
FOAFnet lead by Mark Canter is an industrial consortium of social networking services. They are adapting FOAF to be used as an interchange format between social networking sites (i.e. you can import your user profile from one system to another with the click of a button). SXIP Networks (pronounce: skip) start-up by Dick Hardt involved in the Digital Identity Management/Single-sign-on business, possibly adapting FOAF. Home Research Personal Links
Trailfire: Building Vannevar's Memex
There are a plethora of bookmarking sites out there and only a few of them have become very successful - del.icio.us and Stumbleupon are two that spring to mind. Trailfire is a bit different from your average bookmarking site, because they don't just allow you to share bookmarks - they make it easy for you to share 'trails', which are "annotated navigation paths". Trailfire is a free service and is described as a way to let bloggers place multimedia rich comments on any Web page and automatically link related Web pages to form a trail, or navigation path. The product is a download plugin for Internet Explorer and Firefox. Interestingly, they claim it is "more complementary than competitive" with social bookmarking sites.Taxi in portugal are generally very cheap. This is why people, in particular tourists that come from richer countries, tend to take them a lot. But in Lisbon they are often not that honest. It is very common to take a taxi in Lisbon and end up paying much more than what you were supposed to. And what you are supposed to pay is what it is written on the taximeter (plus sometimes an extra of 1.60 euro if you have luggage), with the taxi having done the shortest or fatest route between the two points. It is not unfortunately uncommon to end up paying twice of three times what should be the real price by law.
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WebFountain, the Long Version
(nb: long post, subject to revision…) To quote Dylan, it’s been buckets of rain for the past few months around here. On my way down to IBM’s Almaden research campus a week ago this past Friday, I crossed the San Rafael bridge and tacked South into yet another storm.
Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags This piece is based on two talks I gave in the spring of 2005 -- one at the O'Reilly ETech conference in March, entitled "Ontology Is Overrated", and one at the IMCExpo in April entitled "Folksonomies & Tags: The rise of user-developed classification." The written version is a heavily edited concatenation of those two talks. Today I want to talk about categorization, and I want to convince you that a lot of what we think we know about categorization is wrong.
Ontology is Overrated -- Categories, Links, and Tags
SIMILE | Piggy Bank
Piggy Bank is an open source software and built around the spirit of open participation and collaboration. There are several ways you can help: Note, however, that this software ships with libraries that are not released under the same license; that we interpret their licensing terms to be compatible with ours and that we are redistributing them unmodified. For more information on the licensing terms of the libraries Piggy Bank depends on, please refer to the source code. Piggy Bank makes use of Google Maps and Google’s geo-coordinate look-up service but no Google’s copyrighted information is distributed along or contained within Piggy Bank.