emergent metadata

the idea in the general: is to continuously grow metadata from the use of the data - keeping a history of use, learning patterns, links, and contexts from that history. eventually establishing a strong semantic layer over the data.

in the specific: a plugin for my personal wiki of choice, WikidPad. The plugin, lets call it WikidPadMonitor for now, when in 'learning mode' should collect information about the wikipages you open, the wikilinks you follow, and the patterns of wiki and tag usage - and use this to grow useable metadata.

Eventually, this emergent metadata could be used to establish a new measure of the strength of the links between wikipages, make predictions about the page being looked for, and discover context..

well, thats the idea, anyhow: growing metadata in the wikigarden.

the tag in negative

Just had an idea for del.icio.us. Well actually, for tagging in general, and in particular, for additions to a set of tagging plugins for wikidpad that i'm working on.

You know how you can ask delicious to give you bookmarks with an intersection of tags by using tag1+tag2+tag3 in the url. As with:
http://del.icio.us/jaysen/dev+audio ..which will show all bookmarks with both the tags, 'dev' and 'audio'.
Well, wouldn't the following form be useful:
http://del.icio.us/jaysen/dev+audio-radio - to give us all those tagged with 'dev' and 'audio', but not with those also tagged with 'radio'

It would mean that we'd have to say goodbye to hyphenated tags, but still, i think the added functionality would be worth it.. and i never liked hyphenated tags anyway.

to be continued..

ShowMeDo - demonstrative video

good resource -basically, people sharing what they know via screencasts- nice for slower, lazier learning.
its also pretty easy to submit screencasts, so if you've got some knowledge (that others could use ;-) -share!

checkout http://showmedo.com/videos/python and http://showmedo.com/videos/screencasting

python diaries

michael palin's diaries - this weeks bbc4 book of the week. features extracts from michael palin's diaries of 'the python years', read by palin himself - definately worth listening to, enjoyable, but probably online for the next week only.. so thats about until the 20th of october. Until then, the links are:
part1; part2; part3; part4; part5;

bbc radio online needs realplayer -which can be downloaded here. just remember to turn Off realplayers irritating messagecenter [Tools->Preferences->Automatic Services->configure message center -> uncheck 'Check for new messages' and 'Show Message Center icon in system tray'] . thats after cancelling the irritating registration process.

a different sort of python diary entry is the release of python 2.5. highlights include the new 'with' operator, some changes to the Generator mechanism and some speedups.

tagged code snippets

Code Snippets : a code snippet repository, with del.icio.us type tagging. The service is still growing, and it still needs multi-tag searching capability, but i think its a winning combination.

oh yeah, they might also be suffering a bit from slashdot induced server strain.

Python Sidebar

something useful for FireFox users/Python hackers:
Edgewall Software: Python Sidebar

wikidpad goes opensource

WikidPad has been opensource for a few months now. the group has settled on using Trac/Subversion along with two google groups (dev and user).