in Ann Arbor, MI 48103
{ Monthly archives }
As a followup to the card catalog graffiti post, I noticed tonight that District Library patrons can now choose to assemble and share their own personal card catalogs — take a look at mine.
If you click through the thumbnail-sized cards, you can see the full record and any graffiti.
This beats the pants off of making a damn fool Amazon wishlist.
This is an item from the Ann Arbor District Library’s online catalog:
You can look up results in a cool card catalog view, and then add your own witty commentary to the cards. I remember annotating the card catalog in my high school library — War NOR Peace kind of stuff — making this a welcome and non-destructive bit of nostalgia.
(via ultra librarian John Blyberg in superpatronbot. John has written about how he did it.)
Over the weekend, I’ve been working on a jabber instant messaging chat room.
unicorn.collective [at] gmail.com
If you connect to it, you can talk to any other people who’ve connected. But you can also run (Ann Arbor-centric) commands to pull photos from Flickr, links from del.icio.us, events from upcoming.org, your fortune, the weather, etc. The results of these commands are shared with everybody else in the room.
It all started when Ed took confbot.py and added an Ann Arbor District Library catalog lookup by way of duckytool. (Ed has documented this work at Superpatron.)
I don’t care for duckytool, so I re-implemented the AADL search using the universal feed parser, and kept on playing from there.
Ed’s project is to search against a bunch of online library card catalogs around the state.
My project is to retrieve random fun things.
I’ve essentially forked confbot.py; it worked fine, but wasn’t a very clean design. It’s still not great, but is at least easier to extend with new commands and text. The code lives in my workspace in the STLC server and is GPL’d, so help yourself.
The room is running on my iBook, so it’s only going to be online when I am.
The instant messaging conference bot design is interesting. The results presented have to be plain text and concise, but the barriers to entry are pretty low. (For example, for students in a hypothetical department wherein the IT staff don’t know to run a wireless network, resulting in Rendezvous/Bonjour not working, this would be a nice way to talk amongst yourselves.)
Tonight, MovieLens greeted me with:
Welcome to Movielens!
We have added a new feature to MovieLens called tagging.
What is a tag?
A tag is a word or phrase you add to a movie.
Why are tags useful?
- You can apply tags to create customized lists of movies.
- You can search by tags.
- You can use tags to express yourself.
- Tagging is fun!
This excellent introduction is followed by a two-sentence description of the tagging interface. MovieLens loads three movies into the instructions page — two you’ve already rated, and one you haven’t — so you can try out the new interface right next to the instructions. (See a screenshot of this part of the page.)
I was really impressed by how well the tagging feature was introduced. Compare the instructions above with the del.icio.us/help/tags document, or with Flickr’s tag FAQ. Nobody is going to read the stuff from del.icio.us or Flickr: it’s too verbose and abstract, and not situated in a place where people are likely to see and react to it.
Since the general proposition of tagging is still pretty new, it was encouraging to see another service rolling out tags while giving some attention to making it a comfortable fit.
When can I go into the supermarket and buy MacBook Pro with my good looks? Apple after all it is you and I who are perfect not the next world. Your machinery is too much for me.
Small Things Loosely Connected is a group I’m starting at the School of Information for students who are working on the web. There is an organizational meeting for interested students this Wednesday at noon.
