hackdiary

Stemming tags, and one website to the tune of another

del.icio.us is still giving me food for thought. Here are two toys I've made recently: a tag stemming tool that helps you tidy up your tagging using the Porter algorithm, and a (Flash) screen-recorded demo of del.icio.us seamlessly embedded in the BBC Radio 3 website.

(Maximize your browser window! Apologies for the slow playback speed of the movie; although you're welcome to browse the javascript, it's something of a pain to get it running on your own browser. I'm looking at how I can turn it into a reusable and configurable Firefox extension, but for now it's just a demo built with Greasemonkey.)

UPDATE: I had to demo this to a mixed audience at the BBC this afternoon, so I put together some quick slides to help me explain the step-by-step process that goes on behind the scenes. Perhaps someone else will find them useful too.

So, what are you seeing in this movie? It's nothing more than a bit of DHTML trickery that imports a subset of del.icio.us functionality into an existing website. I chose BBC Radio 3 because it has a wealth of content with plenty of potential for horizontal navigation, and because it has a clearly-defined canonical URL per programme and thereby gains the maximum benefit from being tagged. By creating a symbiotic relationship between the two sites in your browser, you gain an overlaid cross-site navigation that doesn't exist in the site as it currently stands, and del.icio.us users see your tagging of Radio 3 pages in the wider context.

There are several things that I enjoy in this demo. In no particular order:

• I like the immediate feedback that you can get from adding a tag to a programme. Decide that 'cello' is relevant, and within seconds you see a bunch of other cello programmes. It's common for content management systems to demand 'metadata' or 'keywords' of you when you file content, but rare that there's an easy way to get a feel for what value you've added by doing so.
• This was my first real attempt to wrangle the XMLHTTPRequest system, and it was a satisfying one. I did learn one or two things, including some problems with asynchronous and synchronous modes of operation.
• Looking beyond the specific application (tagging) used here, notice the two-way benefit that came from the mashup of one site's service with another's content. I like the idea that domain-specific use on Radio 3 leads to general usefulness on del.icio.us.

There are many more possibilities to explore. The demo uses a single user on del.icio.us for all tagging. Imagine instead being able to select between different tag sets to overlay - one to guide newcomers to classical music, another designed for experts and old hands, a third to explore the history of a particular instrument or musical movement.

Conferences, conferences

Two conferences are looming large on my radar this week. I'm speaking at Emerging Technology, which happens in San Diego in March, and I'm on the Program Committee for XTech 2005 in Amsterdam in May. Early registration is still open for both conferences (although the O'Reilly one closes very soon).

The ETech talks are called BBC Programme Information Pages: An Architecture for an On-Demand World and
Reinventing Radio: Enriching Broadcast with Social Software. It's notable that this is the first time that I'm talking on BBC topics at a major conference, despite having been employed by the corporation for nearly four years. This is in no small part due to my move to the Radio and Music division, where many clues are to be found. My co-conspirators on these papers are names to be reckoned with.

I've submitted a proposal for XTech: "The Application Of Weblike Design To Data" - Designing Data For Reuse. We're reviewing papers at the moment, and the quality is high. Looks like it'll be a superb conference, and I'm particularly excited about the new 'Browser Technology' and 'Open Data' tracks.

Radio 1 takeover reprise

Bank Holiday Monday comes around again in a few hours time, and I'm off to BBC Radio 1 to help out on another Ten Hour Takeover show.

UPDATE: related random links and pictures.

There's plenty of fun python code running behind the scenes (and some perl and java too), which you can read about in a previous entry on this site. If you look closely, you can even see me in the studio in the backstage photo gallery.