life on the edge of the digital extreme
Whilst being more of a toy than having any tangible application Wordle is a cool way of generating “word clouds”. Words are given more prominance depending on how many times they occur in the source text. I generated the cloud above using tags from my blog - simple but effective.
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While CAPTCHA’s are supposed to keep the evil spammers of the world at bay there is no doubt that they are an annoyance to the end user. Most involve deciphering a string of mangled characters in an image which you must get right before you can complete a transaction of some sort (e.g. for signing up to an email service or posting on a forum).
Theoretically only humans can correctly identify the characters and hence proceed but in recent years many variations have been allegedly defeated by advanced optical character recognition software (check out this Chinese website which tells you how difficult each type is to crack and how much it costs to do so). It seems to have turned into a game of cat an mouse between the hackers and those trying to stop them with ever more elaborate variations. A friend of mine discovered this one today when trying to download something from RapidShare -
What on earth is “only enter symbols attached to a cat” supposed to mean??!! Am I lacking optical cat recognition abilities? For the life of me I can’t see any cats in there (let alone attached ones)! After multiple failed attempts it turned out that the answer to this one was DTEC. It seems we have a problem.
As it turns out, this isn’t the only crazy CAPTCHA out there and whilst captcha is a “good enough” solution in most cases there has to be a better solution to this madness, even if it’s just to improve the usability of the current system. Any takers?
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If you’re a blogger or have any interest in semantic/content management technologies then you may be interested in a couple of new services which have recently launched with the aim of making content creation easier by automatically suggesting contextually relevant images, links, articles and tags which you may like to include.
Tagaroo
Tagaroo is based on an initiative called Calais by Thomson Reuters to “connect the world’s content by providing automated metadata services“. The video below sums the concept up pretty well -
It has an extremely slick and easy to use UI which sits neatly below the post editor on the Wordpress write page, suggesting tags and images as you type.
Underlying the interface the magic is carried out using “natural language processing and machine learning algorithms to extract the people, organizations, companies, geographies and events hidden within it”. To do this it connects to Calais via a free API (registration required). Pictures come from Flickr with a CC license.
My tests have found it pretty reliable and an extremely quick way tag your posts using a standard global taxonomy. At the moment the plugin is only available for Wordpress and Drupal however a number of other tools are currently under development.
Described as “a brilliant product for lazy or otherwise time-focused bloggers“, Zemanta is similar in many respects to Tagaroo, although perhaps a little more mature in its functionality (it’s European after all!). The video below shows how it works -
The tool uses its own database of content (indexed from over 300 “top media sources”) in order to suggest related pictures, links, articles and tags. It has a clean UI which integrates well with whatever backend you use and is offered either as a plugin for all the major platforms; WordPress, Blogger, TypePad and LiveJournal, or as a browser extension for IE or Firefox.
As someone who frequently links to Wikipedia in my posts I’ve found the link suggestion component an especially easy and quick way to insert these references with virtually no effort. Although the interface for picture insertion isn’t quite as nice as Tagaroo, Zemanta is currently my plugin of choice.
Yahoo also have a competing offering although it’s restricted to Yahoo content only so I’ve not taken time to review it.
Implications
Whether you call it Web 3.0, the Semantic Web or the Giant Global Graph I think these sorts of services are an important step towards the automated inference of knowledge from information. When we reach the point where machines can “understand” the content which they are parsing the implications are massive. Aside a whole herd of near-term applications I can also imagine scenarios in the not-so-distant future where every piece of content on the web is automatically linked to everything else which is relevant to it without the need for human interaction - Wikipedia without the editors or boundaries (or inherant bias?).
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What do you notice about the design of these web pages (aside from the fact that they’re not English)?
The top 3 are Korean and the bottom 3 Chinese - all are popular portals. Naver is Korea’s premier search engine (with 77% of the market there) and Cyworld could be compared to Facebook (with over 20 million users).
If your first reaction is that all these sites are very crowded and densely packed with content then you’re not alone. Your second reaction might be to ask why would they design something so cluttered, and from a western perspective lacking in the clarity and simplicity that we’ve come to expect from “good design”. It’s certainly not very “Web 2.0″, as we know it anyway.
It turns out a lot of other people are thinking the same thing. Different theories for why there is this marked difference are abundant, ranging from the influence of Buddhist principles whereby “strong and rich colour, density, and opulent presentation symbolize happiness and wealth”, otherwise termed the ‘aesthetics of abundance’, to different advertising models and the way in which people read/scan different languages. It seems no one has a definitive answer which means there’s definitely room for research here.
What I find fascinating is that two almost entirely different ways of looking a web design have emerged from a common set of technologies used by different cultures. It’s even more applicable when you consider western firms doing business in East Asia where a simple re-branding exercise is clearly going to be insufficient.
Another interesting point in fact is that whereas in the west we are used to accessing and advertising websites by their URL (e.g. www.randomwire.com), in East Asia the search box is king and URL’s are virtually redundant. These so called “navigational searches” may have something to do with the complexities of typing roman characters on input devices especially designed for Japanese/Korean/Chinese but still seems a pretty good idea to me and one which I expect will slowly make its way westwards in time, especially with the rise of the mobile internet where typing is even more cumbersome.
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I thought I’d share this heart-wrenching story I received from a friend in China yesterday relating to the devastating earthquake last week -
This is just one of many such harrowing tales emerging from the disaster which really brings home the reality of the situation.
I sometimes feel that it’s all to easy for us to divorce ourselves from tragedies which happen on the other side of the world. We sit and watch them unfold on the news in near real time with the media doing their bit to dramatise the situation ala 24. However, the suffering is very real and the numbers involved almost unthinkable - whatever we may think about the way the Chinese government sometimes conduct themselves in this instance it’s difficult to find fault.
I find it sad that it often seems to take a national tragedy to unite people but at the same time encouraging that there is still a thread of humanity left in the world. The scenes on the streets in China during the time of national mourning were a particularly moving testament to this. Perhaps if everyone felt this sort of compasion for each other all the time the world we live in would be a much nicer place…
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