2010-05-08
A First Look At Annotations
A couple of hours after I gave my talk about Flickr machine tags and their possible lessons for Twitter’s new annotations, Raffi Krikorian gave a talk at Warblecamp on that very subject. He’s now posted slides of the talk, which are well worth a look.
In them, he expands on the format for annotations (they consist of types, attributes and values; types can be repeated, but attributes can’t), and mentions an annotations “explorer”, which will contain both “statistics of most used, adopted and trending attributions” and a “wiki page so developers can document their attributes”.
This dual approach pretty much fixes the main points I was worried about, combining a “pave the cowpath” method (looking at actual usage data) with a more editorial take on the wiki.
Anyway, the talk touched on even more (including the beta rollout plan, which will be based on OAuth-enabled apps, rather than feature flags or user lists), and mentioned release dates (which are reassuringly close). All in all, it’s pretty exciting, and I’m looking forward to seeing how they get used in the wild.
Edit: there’s now a video of the talk, thanks to Farhan Rehman.
Annotations and Machines Tags
I’m at Warblecamp (unsurprisingly, they also have a Twitter account), where I gave a short talk about Flickr’s machine tags and possible lessons for Twitter’s upcoming annotations feature. You can download the slides (6MB PDF), but they’re very much from the “big word / big picture” school, so feel free not to bother.
The idea was to breeze through Flickr’s implementation of tags, machine tags, machine tag extras, and exploring hierarchies via both URLs and the API, and point out the features I liked and how, perhaps, Twitter might learn from them.
The discussion afterwards was interesting. One point, which was well worth making, was that Twitter’s stream of text is very different from Flickr’s archive of photographs. (One more difference is that tags (and machine tags) are editable later; annotations are set in stone at post create time.) Aral Balkan suggested a registry of Twitter annotation namespaces, along the lines of his Twitter Formats proposal. Personally, I prefer the “pave the cowpaths” approach of discovering what’s actually in use in the wild (and is also why I built the machine tag browser). I didn’t mention this at the time, but there was an attempt at a Flickr machine tags wiki, which failed, perhaps colouring my view.
There was also a question about size limits for annotations (turns out it’s 512 bytes) and a discussion on the more RDF-ish aspects of triple tags (and how you say what a thing is, which also touched on establishing concordances). Generally I don’t get hung up on the semantics of machine tags, but I’m sure there are people who do, and they might be reassured by the points (mentioned in the Twitter preview post) about the use of schemas:
People could add some agreed upon “meta-annotation” that points to something which *describes* the annotation or annotations that person is using. Think something sort of like XML DTD, though not necessarily machine readable.
For a few slides knocked up the evening before, I’m vaguely happy with both the talk but very happy with the response and the way it’s made me think more about the idea.
2010-04-25
post/547939097
John Naughton: Old media, new media and the UK election. The whole piece is worth a read (as, I suspect, is the Peter Preston article he quoted from, which I haven’t read in full).
It’s certainly an interesting counterpoint to the Economist’s piece, quoted here, which claims that the old media are dominant. Perhaps the problem is the millions of overlapping friends networks of discussion aren’t visible, but they surely take what used to be water-cooler discussions between five colleagues in an office and broaden them to a hundred, or even thousand, people - and more immediately, too.
Anyway, I’m sure there’ll still be argument about old vs new well after the result’s in.
2010-04-24
post/545614083
Media and politics: The shock of the old in The Economist. The entire article is worth a read: it points out the ways the mass media still reach far more people, particularly older ones, who also vote more.
There were two other articles in the Britain section this week that caught my eye. One is on university students in Chester and elsewhere, and the other looks at how people’s opinions change when the costs of policies are stated. Both are worth a read, but the latter is perhaps the most universally relevant (and will be long after this election has come and gone).
Twitter Style and Privacy
@madmw asks in a comment on Daniel Jalkut’s sensible (if verging on obvious) guide to Twitter style:
What about people protecting their tweets? Protect from who? Don’t they use twitter search?
My Twitter account is private, and so are those of many people I follow, so I thought I’d make some suggestions as to why I’m private, and answer the other two questions.
When I set up my account in November 2006, it was far from clear how Twitter was going to be used, but I thought of it more as IM than blogging. For the first year and a half of using the service, that privacy gave me the freedom to do some of the things Jalkut rightly suggests public users don’t do: make posts that were filled with swears, heated, political, or otherwise offensive. It also allowed me to vent about work. (Past tense there: I moved to a job where I had less need to, and also where pretty much every co-worker and I were mutual followers. That’s probably going to be the case for any job I actually want from now onwards, too.)
So, who am I protecting myself from? My future professional self, really. Early in the current UK election campaign, a candidate with some rather ill-judged postings was removed by his party. I don’t think I’ve said anything quite as stupid as that, but I quite like having more freedom to do so than those whose timelines are public, and I really don’t want to have to go back and purge the “old me”.
Does privacy carry a downside? Of course. As you note, searches don’t find private posts, so even if I wanted to contribute to a conference’s notes via a hashtag, I can’t. (The bonus side of this is I hate the aesthetics of hashtags, so it’s not a great loss.) Many third-party tools, even now OAuth is deployed, don’t work on private accounts. For me, the most noticeable problem is that the methods described for making sure people know you’re talking about them - acknowledgements, mentions and replies - don’t work if the person they’re directed at isn’t following you. Still, I’d use the first two anyway - people who follow me deserve to know where thing come from.
(Are there any etiquette recommendations for interacting with private users? The main one is to be mindful when quoting them. Twitter doesn’t allow private posts to be retweeted, although of course you can do so organically (to use Jalkut’s term); think about whether, if you’d written the post, you’d want it public, and if not, ask permission first. Otherwise, there’s nothing really I can think of.)
I doubt there’s much in the last year or so I’d be ashamed to have made public. Nonetheless, if only for that first, grumpy, year of posts, I keep my timeline private, and I’m glad I have the option, even if a vanishingly tiny percentage of users share my opinion.
2010-04-09
post/508957268
kelly oxford on rumours that a new biopic about the Nirvana frontman would star the actor most noted for his role as a sparkly vampire.
2010-03-31
post/486385204
Wired Reread: We need highscreen, not widescreen
My uncle worked for Portrait; he had one of these monitors too. Being a CRT, it was a bit unwieldy, but worked rather well.
Portrait are still a going concern, as a software business.
twitter.com/@mattb:
trying my external monitor in vertical portrait orientation for a bit, inspired by recent info-panel blog posts and perhaps ipads. •
it seems that vertical monitors have a posse. •
2010-03-30
Why I Don’t Use Packrati.us
(If you don’t know what I’m talking about, it’s a tool for automatically posting links on Twitter to delicious.)
- It links your feeds
- It uses via: to indicate service posting when I use it to attribute
- Twitter is private, delicious is broadcast
- Twitter is for nonsense, delicious is serious
- I could get around those if it posted private then let me share; it doesn’t
- I can’t quote meaningfully in only 120 characters
- It posts the short link text in the description, which is redundant and ugly
- For posts from favourites, there’s even more ugly description text
Still, I suppose if it works for you, knock yourself out.
