Pluggd to make podcasts chunkier, searchable [Techcrunch] 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. TechCrunch first profiled Pluggd when they launched in June. 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. They reckon that a ‘trail’ is a topic and Trailfire does not support tagging - whereas social bookmarking sites are used to categorize web pages with tags, but do not support trails/topic mapping. A 60-year old concept "...Thus he goes, building a trail of many items. P.S.: 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.
The guy on the radio joked that we should all stay calm if a bearded fellow shows up leading animals two by two onto an oversized boat. But not ten minutes later, as I passed Berkeley, the rain relented. I have no doubt it will be back, but on that fine morning, the sun took a walk around the Bay area hills, peeking between retreating thunderheads and lending an air of Spring to the drive. So I was in just about the right mood to accept the rather surreal juxtaposition of Almaden with its surroundings. The gate opens and you drive a quarter mile to a four-story slate-gray building, which looks rather like a Nakamichi preamp, only with windows (and landscaping).
(more from link below) First, a bit of history. Or…could it? Ontology is Overrated -- Categories, Links, and Tags. 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. In particular, I want to convince you that many of the ways we're attempting to apply categorization to the electronic world are actually a bad fit, because we've adopted habits of mind that are left over from earlier strategies. I also want to convince you that what we're seeing when we see the Web is actually a radical break with previous categorization strategies, rather than an extension of them. PART I: Classification and Its Discontents # Q: What is Ontology? And yet. Domain. Get Involved with Search on TAP. Piggy Bank. Piggy Bank Contributing Piggy Bank is an open source software and built around the spirit of open participation and collaboration.
There are several ways you can help: Blog about Piggy Bank Subscribe to our mailing lists to show your interest and give us feedback Report problems and ask for new features through our issue tracking system (but take a look at our todo list first) Send us patches or fixes to the code Publish Semantic Web data on your web site (how-to) for Piggy Bank’s consumption Write and submit new screen scrapers for others to use Research Publications on Piggy Bank: David Huynh, Stefano Mazzocchi, and David Karger. Related research: History Licensing & Legal Issues Piggy Bank is open source software and is licensed under the BSD license. 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. Disclaimer Credits.
Haystack. mSpace: exploring the New Web.