SAPessi

I’ve finally found the time to give some thought to the auto-tagging fanciful notion.

I posted about this a few weeks ago because I really hoped somebody knew of an application of this kind that I could use with Flickr. My plea was followed by total silence. So here’s my idea for it.

It could use some sort of bookmarklet. The bookmarklet would call a server page with the referrer url or ideally directly with the content of the page. Here there’s a fork in the path: Referrer url means that the server page/app will have to read the content of the page (again) and somehow parse it to extract meaningful information to search for the tags. On the other hand the content in a JS variable would leave all the processing work up to the JavaScript on the client machine.

The downside of the former is that it’d probably use allot of your valuable server bandwidth whereas the latter would practically leave your server unoccupied but would require an awful lot of JavaScript code, which is a royal pain in the backside.

Once you’ve got the content you’re interested in out of the referring webpage Yahoo’s term extraction APIs could turn out to be a useful thing. With Yahoo’s APIs you can get all the terms in your referring webpage ordered by importance (according to Yahoo).

What you have to do now is a search, maybe an I’m-feeling-lucky search on Google for “wikipedia <relevant terms>”. If you’ve found a document on Wikipedia, or the site of your choice, you can go back and leverage Yahoo APIs to get the meaningful terms of that document.

Few questions still remain, how do you do that with images which don’t have a title or description yet (Flickr)? How do you extract the REALLY significant terms from a huge result?

On the technical side it’d be fantastic to be able to leave most of the processing to the client through JavaScript to save server time and bandwidth.

Any thoughts or suggestion?

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I was just about to write something about Google’s acquisition of DoubleClick when I realized that Fred Wilson not only totally beat me at it but also said everything I wanted to say.

Fred wrote a very interesting post which I think is definitely worth reading.

I do not, however agree with him on the fact that Google as a big company is losing the potential to innovate. Google did so and set up a “business-model”/office environment in which it is possible to do so.

I think Google will keep innovating as long as it stays true to its ideal of being a PhD company and allowing its employees to take the time and the funds to come up with brilliant ideas and develop them.

BTW I think Google’s move in acquiring DoubleClick was brilliant, it perfectly complements the business it has been setting up in the last few years. Yes, considerably more expensive than it would have been to develop something in-house, but this way no competitor can get its hands on a ready-made solution.

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… There’s no such thing! If at all possible there’s too much. We’re completely engulfed by information, of every kind, wherever we want whenever we want.

The problem now is finding what you need. As you know I’ve been playing with Flickr lately and published some of my photos, which I think are not too bad, however, there was a persistent 0 comments underneath each photo reminding me that people weren’t watching them, or at least were not interested.

The same thing was/is happening in this blog, constant 0 comments. I started thinking about a “lecture” I saw by Fred Wilson who, rightly, claimed that nowadays it’s not about information, it’s all about information about information. (sorry about that)

Tags, social bookmarking/networking, hopefully people will click on the link and reach your page. Seems that everything comes down to Googlejuice (Jeff Jarvis‘ definition). I was, in fact, really impressed by what a simple “Dig” of the Joost invitation article did, 8 comments, not many but unprecedented for this blog.

Same thing happened on Flickr, I just started submitting my photos to public groups and adding new contacts. Comments/views started arriving. I wonder if there’s something we can do to make the process easier. Tags are genius but I really can’t be bothered to write 50 tags for each article of photo I publish, I want tags to be automatically generated from the content of my article or from… predominant colors… or something… in my pictures. Do you know if there’s already something like that out there?

Oh, and as I promised I rounded up a jury and selected the best comment to the Joost invitation post! And the winner is… Delfin (who’ll get the invitation momentarily). We felt that both Daniel and Delfin actually put some effort in the short pitch. We picked Delfin because he showed definitely more enthusiasm.

Will post something here if I get any other invitation.

Take it easy,

Stefano

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Good news everyone! I’ve been given some invitations to Joost Beta and I thought I’d give one away here.

Since there’s so many people out there who want an invite I’ll try to make it interesting. Have you got an elevator pitch about yourself ready. Leave it here as a comment and by next Monday I’ll send the invitation out to the best one. Obviously leave your email as well otherwise no invitation!

Don’t worry I won’t be the only judge, I’ll make sure to put together a jury of the top people… I’ll find in a pub.

Stefano

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