Wikia search and Wordle

They say (whoever they are) you should stick to a single topic per post, but I don’t always follow the rules. Sometimes things relate enough in my mind that I make a post into a related links post, other times it just occurs to me that a couple of things I’ve run across recently I should make a note of, but I can’t see a really good reason for two notes when one will suffice. This post is an example of the latter case. First up, Wikia search:

Somebody landed on my blog using Wikia search, which I’d never seen before. So, curious, I paid it a visit.

Here’s a quote from their about page…

Our Principles
Wikia Search has four organizational principles: Transparency, Community, Privacy, and Quality

which they go on to describe in detail. Here’s a quote from their Crawl the Web page

Wikia Search uses a distributed web service called “Grub” to crawl the web. Grub was started back in 2000 with the mission of using a team of volunteers from around the world to crawl every website, every day, in order to build the most up-to-date search results possible. To further this goal and the goals of the Search Wikia project, Wikia acquired Grub from LookSmart in July of 2007. Like all other code used on Wikia Search, Grub is available under the BSD License.

Users are developing a “whitelist“, described as follows:

This is a list of sites that the community considers to be prime “must have” sites for the first crawl of the web. We are aiming for around 35 million URLs in the first index, which is of course very small (more to come soon of course!). This is a list of URLs (and notes about each of them) that should evolve to be a generally accepted consensus of a good starting point of sites that should be deep crawled and included.

So, basically it looks like it is a search engine which falls somewhere between stumbleupon, digg and wikipedia… an interesting idea, if nothing else. Perhaps a valuable new search engine at some stage…

Wordle- Beautiful Word Clouds
I ran across this colorful tag cloud forming site through (wouldn’t you know it) tag surfing on wordpress. Pretty cool results, I think.

Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.

I just started a stone soup group

Today, I started a new project. I gathered together a handful of nice looking polished stones and went and visited a few friends and neighbors to tell them about my new group which I was contemplating- a stone soup group. If you aren’t familiar with the Grimm’s fairy tale about Stone Soup, wikipedia has an entry about it which will give you a sense of it. My idea- still in its formative stages- is to build community networks using the idea of stone soup as an icebreaker to get people talking about cooperation, sharing and tips to help out in times when resources seem more scarce. I shared a few stories of things which I knew about some of my ancestors doing, talked about a neighborhood bulletin board for trading skills, goods or posting needs and offerings. Craigslist also came up during conversation, since they have both barter and free sections. So far, we don’t have any concrete plans for a potluck or gathering here yet, but simply by beginning the discussion I now have 5 new donated stones to add to the pot, several stories given and recieved an more of a sense of connection with some neighbors. Also, some ideas for possible future ways to expand on the concept, such as a wikipedia type project for such tips and stories. Everyone I’ve talked to about it so far thought it was a good idea, too. How about you?

 

Possibly related posts (automatically generated)- do I like this new feature?

WordPress has recently added in a feature which adds automatically generated links at the end of posts which as they say are “possibly related”. Is this good, bad or neutral, from my point of view?

First off, it seems that perhaps only posts of a certain length may recieve this treatment (or perhaps only posts which are keyword rich enough, who knows?). Secondly, they don’t appear on the main blog, but only under individual entries. Thirdly, if I really dislike them, I can apparently disable them (though I haven’t tried to yet). They are getting a fair bit of discussion in wordpress forum threads such as these:
http://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic.php?id=27419&replies=15
http://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic.php?id=27282&replies=15
http://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic.php?id=27356&replies=22

So, how do I personally feel about them? Ambivalent at the moment, but generally positively enough not to disable them (for now anyway).

On the down side- spam/porn blog linking potential (or just blog posts that I would never personally link to) and links to unreciprocating MSM sites.

On the upside- referrals from other blogs to my posts and potentially interesting further reading for both myself and my blog’s readers. These are really sort of like auto generated Google ads without the downside of having ads. OTOH, they don’t necessarily have the potential upside of ads either (income- which I’m not interested in selling out my blog for) except perhaps for potentially bringing in new readers.

Here are some reasons why I think they’re worth keeping:

Firstly, I usually try to make my headlines descriptive enough so that people interested in what I’m writing about will get a pretty good idea of what they’ll encounter if they stop by, which is one of the recommendations which “uber blogger” Cory Doctorow gives for making a blog more sucessful, which you can see in this video. I think this gives me an advantage over bloggers who don’t.

Secondly, I don’t have a problem with sending my blog traffic elsewhere for further reading. This blog has never been designed in order to keep readers “only here”. Not that I think it would be sucessful if I did try to design it in that way.

Thirdly, I think it offers the potential for like minded bloggers to find each other and start conversations, exchange links and build community.

Fourthly (and this point is still ambivalent) I think wordpress will continue to improve the feature enough to make the upsides mentioned above outweigh downsides such as links going to sites which I don’t want to send traffic to. I think that wordpress can do that by

1. offering bloggers more options and control- such as allowing them to exclude MSM links if they choose and to go with wordpress only links

2. making the feature an entirely reciprocal one- if I get an auto generated link to a blog post, that blog post should have one to my post.

3. making it very clear that this is a wordpress feature, and that the blogger (currently) has no say in what links appear through this feature, so caveat emptor (or clicker).

4. improving the AI’s reading of relevant posts so that the quality improves

5. continuing efforts to identify and purge spam and identify adult content

 

Anyway, though I’m not completely sold on the feature in its current form I figure it doesn’t cost me much to leave it turned on. But, readers should be aware that they visit such links on their own recognisance or some such. In other words, along with the good you may also see the bad and the ugly if you use the feature yourself or click on the autosuggested links.

 

 

Seasteading- homesteading on the high seas

H/T to The Wild Ox Moan for bringing seasteading to my attention. It’s definitely a good time to start thinking outside the box. Their wiki and forum may have some interesting content before long, though right now it looks as though the web version of the project is still in its early stages.

buying locally

cwongyap writes about a couple of local internet initiatives to support people’s efforts to buy from local businesses- one in Olympia, Washington and another in Oakland, California. Long, long ago I had a post about a couple of things like that, I seem to recall. Maybe I can dig that up from the blog archives here.

Supporting local businesses makes good sense, in terms of economic, ecological and overall health of the community and people who live there. We need a lot more efforts of this kind.