Ed Bilodeau

This weblog had moved: http://www.coolweblog.com/bilodeau/

# Notice (Oct 19/05): So ends my stay here on Blogger. This morning Google implemented an anti-spam 'feature' that forces me to answer a challenge phrase when I want to post to my own blog. No notice of the change, nothing. Worse is that it doesn't even work! I type the phrase, submit, "An error occured", post deleted. Damn you, Google. Chances are I will revive my blog somewhere else, sometime soon. I'll post the new coordinates here as soon as they become available. (BTW, I'm unable to post anything to my RSS stream, so I'd appreciate it if readers could spread the word and ask people to take a look at this notice)

Update (Oct 19/05, ~noon): After a frustrating few hours (and not just trying out alternatives to Blogger), I've decided that this is a good time to take a break from all this. A day? A week? Who knows. But I need to step away from it before I pass a heavy magnet over the whole mess.

Update 2: According to this post, the reason I'm seeing the CAPTCHA (challenge phrase) is that Blogger has classified my blog as spam. Thanks. User for five years and now I'm spam. I searched the Blogger site, but there is no mention of how to get the spam flag turned off. There is also no way of contacting anyone at Blogger. Wow. Spam they say I am, so spam I must be. Maybe it is time to take a break.

Tuesday, January 18, 2005

# KM tags in delicious : In his post on KM online discussions, Denham Grey notes the following:

Another emergent way to stay in contact with the KM 'community' is to follow the KM related tags in del.icio.us.

He links to the following tag:

http://del.icio.us/tag/knowledge_management

which is fine, expect, because of the typing overhead, I use the abbreviated version for my own KM entries:

http://del.icio.us/tag/km

At first glance, this might seem to be a problem, since users are using two different tags to categorize the same thing. However, if you click on either of the links above, over on the right-hand side of the page you'll see a list of 'related tags'. These are generated by delicious automatically, I'm assuming based on the multiple tags people use to categorize items. So for 'km', I can see that 'knowledge_management' also used to tag these kinds of terms.

At this point, I might want to change my tags to adopt ones that are more commonly used (feature request: make it easier to visualize this in delicious). In this case, I won't, because typing 'knowledge_management' is too inefficient. In any case, at least delicious lets me know these other tags exist. Very cool.

While delicious does allow you to AND tags using +, there is no way to OR tags (i.e. list all items tagged with either 'km' or 'knowledge_management'. I would guess that you would probably want to be able to use something like RDF to specify the relationship between tags in use, and then be able to use these RDF files to specify which tags to display. You could have auto-generated RDF (emergent relationships) as well has human-created RDF (explicitly created by users based on their understanding of relationships).

You could obviously spend a lot more time on this. What is cool is that the tools like delicious and flickr are created large databases of tagged items. These will serve as useful testbeds for developers to build the tools that will make these ad-hoc tagging technologies truly useful.

Ed Bilodeau

Tuesday, January 18, 2005

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