Ged Carroll

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  • Folksonomy


    I wouldn’t have thought about tagging for community sense using the idea of the folksonomy if it wasn’t for my friend Uri. Uri introduced me to the ‘For Immediate Release‘ blog. The blog and podcasts focus on both PR and new communications technologies like podcasting and blogging. One thing of interest that came up was the concept of folksonomy, particularly with regards to web content. Folksonomy as a word is derived from taxonomy – where an item is strictly categorised into one area, think of a real book library where books are sorted by subject area and then sub-categories.

    Intranet designers are keen to sort items into clearly defined areas and this is often forced on e-tailers who purchase an off-the-peg online shop – I remember hearing stories of a famous UK online retailer where customers could not find how to buy their mobile phones online, the reason being is that the company had set up its online venture in a rush not to lose ground to the pure play dot.coms and went with an off-the-shelf US e-tail solution that categorised the product only as wireless phones.

    Folksonomy is about community-based classification, relying on the similar kind of goodwill that has made Wikipedia such a force.

    A key example that Hobson & Holtz discussed in their For Immediate Release podcast and blog on March 17, was photo repository Flickr and community bookmark site De.licio.us, both of which use their communities to classify content. This cluster of classifications resembles the lexemes that linguists talk about that associate words with meanings. This attachment of meaning from a user point of view could be the key to true contextual searching.

    At the end of the day Google is more like a savant, trying to use blind mathematics and processing power to compensate for its inability to establish meaning.

    Imagine going to the supermarket and asking the assistant for an item, they run down the corridor and run back with their arms full of different stuff. They empty the stuff into your trolley and say to you ‘Your item is in there’. If you are lucky, the item is at the top of the pile, it you aren’t you may sort through it all and find you don’t have it anyway. You complain to the manager and he dismisses you with ‘Its your own fault, you asked in the wrong way’. The analogy is actually what web search engines are like today, Google is just a fool shop assistant that can hold a lot more stuff.

    Yahoo! had previously tried to provide that context through a directory approach. This organised websites along a taxonomy approach. Categories had other categories nested in them, for example

    Arts >Literature­ >World Literature­ >British >Renaissanc­e >Drama

    This approach would be very familiar to librarians who would be used to every book having a categorisation. But sites can fit into multiple classifications and the average consumer has to know exactly the right classification.

    Efforts to make a ‘semantic web’ seem to have have gone nowhere. Hence efforts put behind the idea of a folksonomy. More related content here.

  • Renaissance

    Platform Art and Renaissance

    At Gloucester Road there is a series of self portraits by a photographer who has desguised himself in each picture. It is part of London Underground’s Platform Art series.

    I boought the tenth anniversary reissue of the original Renaissance mix album by Sasha and John Digweed. Renaissance is hailed by many clubbers as being revolutionary. I thought I would comment on some of the innovations:

    – Renaissance was the birth of progressive house: no it wasn’t you can hear a natural progression between early Renaissance and Sasha’s sets before the club was formed. Renaissance was built on the back of the reputation that Sasha had earned at Shelly’s in Hanley, Stoke-on-Trent. Progressive house had been put out for a fair while by artists, most notably the Italian acts Sueno Latino and Last Rhythm. Fabi Paras had championed the sound in London.

    – Renaissance changed the visual language of clubbing: kind of. Renaissance got its name from borrowing fromrenaissance paintings, which were deconstructed and repurposed, however from the early days of house, many club flyers and imagery was borrowed from the cheesier ‘catholic’ religious art.

    – Renaissance was a life changing experience: It depends where your head was at. Renaissance was a good club, they managed to get all the ingredients right: the security, the staff, the clubbers, the venue, the ambience, the music and the DJs. People had a great time, but then in club culture during the early 1990s there was a lot of great times to be had every weekend all over the country.

    – Renaissance revived clubbing: Don’t believe the hype. Renaissance caught the top of the clubbing wave. It was one of a number of clubs that issued in a glitzy waye: straight lads wearning Versace shirts and leather trousers. Another trend to benefit was the mixed gay straight clubs like Vague in Leeds. The reasons why this came about was as much to do with getting a licence as baggy clothes for dancing meant wholesale drug use and possible dealer rumbles. Mincing around the club in clothes you would be afraid to sweat in was supposed to prevent it, it didn’t it just heralded the arrival of wholesale cocaine use. It replaced the egalitarian nature of house and rave with snobbishness.

    My recollections of Renaissance

    It was towards the end of 1992, a friend of mine had got a gig on a Friday night at the Venue 44 in Mansfield playing what would now be termed drum and bass. I knew him as we used to play house sets together. He had met a couple in some ski resort where he had gone to play for a couple of months. The couple were involved in putting club flyers in shops and bars throughout the Midlands and the North of England. When he came back, he got in touch with the couple and they got him the gig.

    I turned up to a half empty night decked out in decorations. After I made some enquiries, I got into Renaissance for free a few weeks later. I remember having a nightmare parking the Austin Metro I had at the time and stiff legs from the two-hour drive that did not welcome the stairs I had to climb to the front door. The building looked anonymous and whitewashed on the outside.

    The main dance floor had the DJ booth well above it and there was a chill out area between the front door and the barn like dance floor with bench seating and some sort of trellices. Most of the lads going there looked like rugby league players and the girls like night wear models. The club had a buzz, but it was not the raw electric feel of Shellys, The Hacienda or the Quadrant Park. More related content here.

  • China Inc. – The 800-pound dragon in the room

    The New York Times has a great review of China Inc. by Ted C. Fishman which highlights the growing economic might of China. Some interesting facts and figures featured in the review of the book include:

    • From 1982 through 2002, the United States economy grew at an annual rate of 3.3 percent. China’s economy grew at an annual rate of 9.5 percent,
    • In 2003 China bought 7 percent of the world’s oil, a quarter of its aluminum and steel, almost a third of its iron ore and coal, and 40 percent of its cement.
    • China makes 40 percent of all furniture sold in the United States
    • China has 3,000 Christmas-decoration factories which exported more than $900 million tree trimmings and plastic Santas in the first 10 months of 2003.
    • China still only makes one-twentieth of everything produced in the world
    • China can rely on a vast low-wage army, working for an average of 40 cents an hour, that can turn out consumer goods of every description
    • American and Japanese companies spend $1 billion to $2 billion to develop a new car
    • New super-cities like Shenzhen, a fishing town of 70,000 20 years ago that now has 7 million people, making it larger than Los Angeles or Paris, swelled by migrants from the countryside looking for a better life in the city
    • Up to 300 million Chinese have migrated from the country to the city over the past 20 years
    • The Asian Brown Cloud, a wind-borne industrial smog that originates on China’s east coast, can be seen in California as it rides the jet stream
    • China has seven of the world’s ten most polluted cities


    The book also provides some insights into the differences between the rise of China and Japan. Unlike Japan, China Inc. is driven by local enterprises rather than the central analysis and planning carried out by Japanese Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) [now known as the Ministry of Economy Trade and Industry] to find key markets to conquer. There is a certain irony in the socialist state using the brutal darwinism of the marketplace in a way that Adam Smith would have appreciated.

    Current reading at chez Renaissance Chambara:

     

  • The Layer Cake by JJ Connolly

    The Layer Cake is a hard bitten crime novel of 90’s underworld London that the movie was based on. However the book is worth reading because the plot is similar but different to the film.

    I won’t go into too much depth because that would spoil it for you, but suffice to say its a great read. The book doesn’t have the slick quality of the film, primarily because it has more depth.

    From the thought that has gone into it, one may wonder as to how J.J. Connolly got his knowledge. Having worked and lived in clubland during the late 1980s and early 1990s the type of characters Connolly describes brought me right back to my early and mid twenties.

    The Layer Cake mixing the world of private military contractors and criminal endeavour reminded me of a former boss who had an address book. The address book was alleged to be full of ‘good lads’ who could solve problems ‘at home or abroad’. He was anything but the action man himself, being obsessed with his Hugo Boss suits at the time. He’d apparently been employed because of his work for a major name in the road construction industry, before I’d worked for him.

    Great fiction like other forms of art has an intrinsic truth hidden inside that otherwise wouldn’t be able to be told.

    Get out and buy the book; watching the film before the book doesn’t affect your enjoyment of it. More book reviews here.

    The Layer Cake

  • Audrey 3Com net appliance

    Bob Cringely wrote an interesting article about the need for internet appliances such as 3Com’s Audrey to provide internet access for the slow adopters and laggards. internet appliance were orginally muted as an idea by Larry Ellison of Oracle as part of his network computing vision. They failed because of the topsy turvy economics that have driven PC growth, though one could argue that the iMac incorporate the spirit if not the technical specification of an internet appliance. Bob’s discussion reminded me of the small time I worked on 3Com.

    I got put on the Palm pan European PR account when the company had been spun out from 3Com and Audrey was on the horizon, my predecessor worked on Palm as part of the 3Com portfolio. Part of the reasons discussed internally for this was that Audrey had the potential to eat Palm’s lunch. Audrey was based on a more modern operating system. Even by 2000, Palm realised that its current operating system was in need of a replacement.

    Unlike Audrey, It couldn’t multitask and involved kludged layers of abstraction to work. When it worked it was brilliant. But it wasn’t ready for a connected online future and the greater demands that we will put on mobile computing devices. The upper layers of the operating system providing the user experience and handwriting were the real genius in the PalmOS.

    The lower levels were off the peg software from the mid-1990s. Back then we didn’t even have multi-tasking in Macs and most installed versions of Windows. Indeed Palm went on to buy Be Systems, who provided the software and expertise behind Sony’s eVilla internet appliance.

    Now PalmOne has different things to worry about, like how to stop Microsoft’s kamikaze antics in the handheld and mobile space. It is interesting that PalmSource has had to go and purchase a mobile Linux company due to client demand. More content similar to Audrey here.

    Revisiting this post in 2022 on the Audrey 3Com net appliances reminded of how Robert X Cringely in his book Accidental Empires talked about innovation in terms of surfing waves. Picking a wave too early would mean that you wouldn’t get much of a ride, picking it too late would leave you wiped out. Audrey was a ‘too early wave’. A stable multi-tasking operating system with easy single purpose apps is the basic technical specification for the iPad that my parents use to keep in touch wit me and the the world online. Superficially Audrey resembled the appliance like computing experience of the early iMac where everything you needed was in the box, but the iPad was its true successor as a communal communications and content consumption device. If that doesn’t sound like Larry Ellison’s net computing device and the Audrey I don’t know what does.