Geekblok

BOK surprised me with an invitation email about a website I never noticed. The small mail suggested that I should check it out and maybe write a little about it here, due to absence of BOK this weekend.

So I did check it out and had no clue what to expect. The sign up was easy enough and after a few seconds, I was looking at my online “notebook” hosted by Evernote.

I’ve seen such dump sites before and they never really seemed to interest me for more than a minute. I know Joffie has his own wiki at home for dumping notes, and I have CVS and SVN software installed on my home machine(s) so I don’t really need this either. But then I found out it also offers text recognition within images. Now that’s something my `grep` can’t do, so this might be nice! Time to explore the service after all.

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I’ve ranted about OpenID before and in my predictions for 2008, I even wrote that OpenID will get supported more and more.

Today, Yahoo! announced that their OpenID implementation (as a provider) has opened up as a public beta. This means that you can use your Flickr photo URL (or custom me.yahoo.com URL) to log in to a lot of places. This will most likely boost the OpenID implementations (for now you can offer your service to (theoretically) all the Yahoo!/Flickr users).

Let’s see if my OpenID prediction becomes reality. As for the measurement, I’ll use The OpenID Directory. Currently, they have listed 471 websites.

Will Google and Microsoft follow soon with OpenID?

In December, you’ll get bombarded by people looking back on the year. The best website of the year, the top 10 best songs etc. etc. In January, these people suddenly look forward and make predictions of what will happen in the new year.

Let’s look forward! (So that in December we can look back and see where I was right…)

Some predictions for 2008:

• privacy issues will become a monthly event
• everything (mail, websites …) will get a “social” aspect
• some big company burns it’s hands in China
• swal.org will finally release something “cool”
• openid will get accepted in more places
• google will keep gmail in beta

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You may have heard about OpenID before, or maybe seen the little icon popup at some sites already. Fact is that OpenID is slowly but steadily gaining popularity. And in my humble opinion, that’s a Good Thing™.

Let’s first look at what OpenID really is. It’s a system that allows you to authenticate yourself. Instead of your email address (which is commonly used), OpenID uses an URI as point of view.

How many accounts do you have online? 5? 10? 25? 100? 250? more? A lot of people (including me) don’t even know the amount of accounts anymore. It looks like every other website requires you to login and after a while you just loose track of all accounts, passwords and email addresses used. OpenID is very useful for this! It allows you to have one login, one password and all you need to remember is your own website’s address.

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Tagging is a method that can be found on many websites and even software. Wikipedia defines tags as:

A tag is a (relevant) keyword or term associated with or assigned to a piece of information (e.g. a picture, a geographic map, a blog entry, or video clip), thus describing the item and enabling keyword-based classification and search of information.

With tagging, you’re attaching labels to a certain property, for example a bookmark, email or photo. The reason for this is to make it easier to find them back. To tag effectively, there are a few things to take into consideration.

Plural versus singular

If you have a picture that shows your new Playstation 3, you could take it “console”, but what if you also have a Nintendo Wii, and Xbox 360? And what if you also have photos with all of them right next to your television? Either you should always use “console”, or “consoles”. It doesn’t really matter what form you use, as long as you are consistant.

Don’t state the obvious

Flickr is a great place to host your photos. It also allows you to add tags to your photos. Imagine you have a picture taken on your vacation in Rome on March 2007. The date of the picture is already recorded in your EXIF data so you don’t have to tag the photo “march” and/or “2007″. The advanced search is already allowing you to query based on date.

Another example of mis-tagging would be the use of the tag “me” (one of the most popular tags on Flickr, in fact). The tag only refers to you and has no meaning for anyone else. My me is not the same as your me.

Get everything covered

“A picture is worth a thousand words”. That doesn’t mean you need a thousand tags! You have to make sure to tell everything about the picture to find it later in time, no more and certainly no less. Common tag categories that could be helping you are:

1. people
2. places
3. events

For photos, this will cover the main tags. If you have a photo of the drunk uncle Josh at Christmas eve at your aunt Mary’s house in Vienna, your tags could be: “josh vienna christmas drunk”.

Now three years later, you’re at your aunt’s house again and talk with uncle Josh about that one time he got drunk. You remember it was uncle Josh, and it was at Christmas eve, and at your aunt’s house in Vienna, but not last year and also not longer than 5 years ago. Boom, within seconds you’ve found the right image.