Introducing Flickr Search Tagging!
It’s a little utility that enables a couple of things:
- Let’s you to propose tags for images that don’t belong to you on Flickr. Contributing tags if you want to help describe the image is often not possible, unless: you’re the owner, you’re a contact of the owner, or the person has allowed very permissive tagging rights.
- Keeps your search queries around the tagging area. Queries are valuable, because you as a user took the time to contribute that text at some point. Now you can leverage that same text when you want to tag an image.
- Tag your images with the proposed tags, or delete the proposed tags.
If this sounds novel and useful, it is :) Or at least, that’s what I’m trying to prove in my thesis.
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Sometime around when I was 14 years old the World Wide Web showed up. and it seems that I have been developing with it ever since. So never, ever did I expect to be as lost on the Internet as I currently am: it feels like the one domain where I should be competent. With the help of an anonymous invite donor, I signed up for grono.net, a Polish social networking site akin to Facebook or MySpace. I thought the transition would be simple enough, and within an hour or so my profile would be set up and I’d be arguing about the merits of European hip-hop in no time. Boy, was I wrong.
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The gentleman in this video, Dr. David Weinberger, thinks it’s a pretty terrible idea to try to categorise ideas in the same way we categorise physical things in the physical world.
Many people who deal with information on a regular basis tend to think that since you can only stack a chair in a single location, the virtual representation of that chair should be categorised in one place as well. It’s hard to explain why that’s a silly idea (and why it’s done often), but he does a very good job of doing just that.
He draws from a really neat reference: The Library of Babel by Jorge Luis Borges, and compares Wikipedia to Borges’ theoretical, infinite library (that, naturally, drives its librarian mad). That bit is in the Q&A period at the very end.
Thanks to Gil P. for this one.
video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2159021324062223592
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This is information about design patterns that can be used in the design of user interfaces. The patterns I’m particularly concerned with deal with the look, feel, and behaviour of modern interface elements, such as those found in browsing “the Web.”
Patterns are often employed in object oriented software development and engineering, much more so than user interface design. I believe that by applying patterns at the user interface layout and design level, employing a “top-down” approach, we can avoid some situations where deep-system code decisions impede usability of the resulting user interface.
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Note: This presentation and bibliography was delivered as part of a graduate course in Object Oriented Design (Fall 2006) to Dr. Bill Gardner, at the University of Guelph. Ajax was pretty cutting edge in 2006. :)
AJAX is a new term, but it referes to a collection of technologies that have been complete since around 2004. It’s use has been popularized through the groundbreaking work of Microsoft, Google, and smaller firms such as AdaptivePath, who coined the term. AJAX adds the capability of getting new data from a server once a web page has been generated, in hopes of reducing screen refresh, lowering bandwidth utilization; additionally, developers hope to increase user interactivity of web based applications to the level of a regular desktop application. All of this has come at a cost though, including increased complexity, reduced accessibility, and new security threats.
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| Tuesday, May 20th, 2008