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.

Sunday, March 27, 2005

# del.icio.us tag stemmer : A great utility for filtering your personal delicious tagspace to find similar tags. For example, 'weblogs' and 'weblog'.

I spent a few minutes cleaning things up (a bit slow, given that delicious is currently in crash mode) and could see how useful this tag stemmer is. For example, I noticed that the biggest problem is using singular and plural version of the same word. I've decided to standardize on the plural version, since the tag points to a collection of items (i.e. weblogs).

While this will help my personal tagspace, it doesn't help across the larger shared tagspaces. Building the stemmer into the retrieval interface would go a long way to helping.

I'm sure that as the tools mature, we'll see who layer of tag mapping and combining functionality added. It will be interesting to see if the tools do this in a way that supports the emergent nature of tag meanings, or if it will be a case of imposing formalized mappings onto a chaotic tagspace.

Ed Bilodeau

Sunday, March 27, 2005

Comments: