Month: September 2005

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Links for 2005-09-06

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Design

Type Challenge: Redesign the Superman logo…

I have more folksonomy-related posts coming, I’m afraid, but in the meantime I thought I’d point people in a completely different direction that’s almost nerdier if you can imagine such a thing – towards Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely’s upcoming All-Star Superman comic book series. According to a fascinating interview with Grant the book is an attempt to articulate the classic archetypical concepts of the world’s most famous super-hero in a refreshed modern way. The art fits the concept perfectly – I’m particularly fascinated by this posture-based take on why people don’t recognise Clark as Superman:

All of which leads me to a bit of a challenge. As part of this process they’ve done the unimaginable and taken another pass at the Superman insignia – which has to be one of the most well-known bits of typographic/branding work of the last century. Which made me wonder – how would a professional typographer or logo-designer push the shielded-“S” into the 21st century? Does anyone have any ideas? Anyone interested in pushing a san-serif modernist Superman? Comic-Sans Superman?

I’m not really the obvious candidate to get people thinking around this stuff, though, so I’m going to link to a few classy typography blogs and see if they’re prepared to pck up the torch and introduce the idea to some professionals – so if you’re interested in typography or design, can I recommend fontlover.com, typographica, daidala.com, Speak Up and Coudal Partners. Obviously, if the rest of you have a stab, feel free to link to your posts below, and maybe I’ll more formally link to the neatest ones or something.

For more on the typographic variations of Superman’s ‘S’ symbol: A dedicated resource.

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Links for 2005-09-03

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Design Navigation Radio & Music Social Software

How to build on bubble-up folksonomies…

[This post takes up some of the themes that Matt Webb, Paul Hammond, Matt Biddulph and I talked about in our paper at ETech 2005 on Reinventing Radio: Enhancing One-to-Many with Many-to-Many. A podcast of that talk is available.]

A few days ago I wrote about Phonetags, an experimental internal service that we’ve been running inside the BBC which allows you to bookmark, tag and rate songs you’ve heard on the radio with your mobile phone. Now I want to talk briefly a bit about one interesting way of using folksonomic tags that we developed conceptually while building the system.

The concept is really simple – there are concepts in the world that can be loosely described as being made up of aggregations of other smaller component concepts. In such systems, if you encourage the tagging of the smallest component parts, then you can aggregate those tags up through the whole system. You get – essentially – free metadata on a whole range of other concepts. Let me give you an example.

In Phonetags, we allow users to bookmark, rate and tag songs. They do so for a combination of personal gain and to add their voice to the collective. But music radio shows can be loosely understood as a collection of songs, and music radio networks can be equally understood as a collection of shows. So if ten songs that are well-rated and tagged with ‘alternative’ and ‘pop’ are played on one specific radio show, it’s quite plausible to argue that the show itself could be automatically understood as being tagged with ‘alternative’, ‘pop’ and that it should be considered well-rated. Similarly if all the shows are equally tagged with ‘alternative’, then it’s likely that you could describe the network that broadcasts them as an ‘alternative’ station.

How you handle the aggregation up the chain is an interesting question. My first instinct is that you would aggregate all the tags for a song, slice off the top ten or twenty and then throw away the rest and all the quantitative information. Then you do the same for all the other songs played in a show, and then reaggregate to see which tags have been played over the most songs. The alternative would be to simply add together all the tags that people sent in during that timeslot, but I think that would skew things towards the popular songs that people tagged a lot and wouldn’t necessarily reflect the character of the show itself. But that’s up for debate.

Another, and perhaps more intriguing, way of aggregating tags up through a conceptual chain would be to view albums as collections of songs and artists as a collection of albums/songs. This would mean that from the simple act of encouraging people to tag individual songs you were getting useful descriptive metadata on radio shows, radio networks, artists and albums:

The upshot of all of this is that you start getting a way of navigating between a whole range of different concepts based on these combinations of tags and ratings. The tags give you subject related metadata, the ratings give you qualitative metadata and from this you can start finding new ways to say, “If you liked this song, you may also like this album, network, album or artist“. You can start to generate journeys that move you from network to that networks most popular songs, through to the best albums on related themes (or which conjure similar moods or associations even if they’re by radically different artists) and so on.

And because you have a semantic understanding of the relationship between concepts like a ‘song’, an ‘album’ and an ‘artist’ you can allow people to drill-down or move up through various hierarchies of data and track the changes in an artist’s style over time. For me, this is a pretty compelling argument that understanding semantic relationships between concepts makes folksonomic tagging even more exciting, rather than less so, and may indicate a changing role for librarians towards owning formal conceptual relationships rather than descriptive, evocative metadata. But that’s a post for another time.

Are there other places where this kind of thing could be applied? Well, off the top of my head I can’t think of anything useful you could do with photographs, but I think folder structures on web-sites could prove an interesting challenge. I’d be fascinated to see if it would be possible to find well-structured websites with usefully nested folders and to aggregate tags from the individual pages up to section homepages and eventually to the site homepage. A little over a year ago I wrote about URL structure we developed for broadcast radio sites at the BBC built on the Programme Information Pages platform which you can see in action on the Radio 3 site. The URL structure mirrored a formal heirarchy much like the song / album / artist one – except for episode / programme brand and network. I’d be fascinated to know whether you could get a useful understanding of what Performance on 3 was about by aggregating all the tags from each of the episodes contained within its folder, and whether aggregating still further up to the frontpage of Radio 3 would give you a good description of the network’s philosophy and approach. One for Josh at del.icio.us, perhaps?

Now it’s over to you guys – can you think of any other heirarchies or places where we could encourage the tagging of the smallest practical component part and then derive value from aggregating up the semantic chain? Could the same thing work for non-heirarchic relationships? Anyone?

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Links for 2005-09-02

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Religion Science

Science (and evolution) is not a matter of faith…

You know what the real problem is with Intelligent Design? You know why it seems impossible to make it clear to people why it is such total bunk? It’s because the battle was conceded years ago in a parallel argument. Here’s my understanding of the philosophy of science – someone proposes a hypothesis, people test it. If the hypothesis is disproven it is thrown aside. Science is a process of throwing away hypotheses that do not work. It evolves and changes. It is as simple a process as working out that spilling hot things on yourself is something you don’t want to do twice, because the hypothesis, “it is nice to spill hot things on yourself” can be swiftly and easily determined to be untrue. Scientific rationality never claims things to be true beyond all doubt, unless they can be proven in self-contained conceptual systems like maths. In science, any theory is there to be disproven. People make careers out of challenging the work of their predecessors. Science is a process of self-critique.

But it’s not just about having hypotheses and testing them. Scientific rationality is also about understanding the nature of hypotheses themselves. Firstly, there may be an infinite number of hypotheses to test – even if they are only subtly different from one another. As such, with the sheer variety of options, it’s probable you will never achieve an answer that you can say is true beyond all doubt. But you can get pretty close. One step is to undergo testing of reasonable hypotheses. But the other is to pass over the infinite number of untestable hypotheses that also exist. These can be passed over because there is no logical basis for giving any one of those theories any credence over any other. Untestable concepts, untestable hypotheses must be treated with enormous scepticism in any rational attempt to understand the world.

Now we get to religion. I am an atheist of long-standing. Other people believe in a god of some kind. I think they’re wrong but it’s their right to make that error. What is interesting is when people try to move the terms of the debate to deny the existence of atheism itself. The argument bascially goes like this – given that you cannot prove that god doesn’t exist, then atheism is as much a matter of faith as religion. In fact, they argue, atheism is not even really a sustainable position – you can only really be agnostic.

This argument is founded on the assumption that one particular untestable hypothesis – no matter how fantastic – is different from all the others, and that we must give it more credence than equally provable ones about space aliens, pastafarian gods and the like. But it is the responsibility of the person promulgating a hypothesis to demonstrate that it is testable and that the results can be repeated. By allowing ourselves to lower that expectation, and to allow people to conflate a process of testing with a process of justifying, we’ve made it possible for people to argue that not believing any random theory that someone conjectures on the spot is a matter of faith – as good or as bad as any other theory.

We’re reaping Intelligent Design because we allowed the sowing of a view of ‘science’ and ‘religion’ as parallel activities. They are not parallel activities. They are precisely different activities. They are not two approaches on the same quest for truth, they are two different processes with two different ends. They may be compatible views for people prepared to accept faith as the answer to areas where hypotheses cannot be tested, but that compatibility is predicated on the two world views operating on different levels, in different territories. Intelligent Design and Evolution are not equivalents. They too operate on different levels, in different territories. We cannot be asked to believe Intelligent Design on the basis that it’s as good a theory as any other that hypotheses magic to fill gaps in logic. Nor should we accept the characterisation of the scientific approach as one based on faith. We have to fix that earlier mistake on first principles if we expect to move forward.

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Call for Participation: ETech 2006…

Ladies and Gentlemen, the Call for Participation for the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference 2006 has been posted, and I recommend you all go and read it, come up with good ideas and then submit them. I’ve been to the last three years of the conference, and presented at ETech 2003 and (twice) at ETech2005 and I can say without reservation that it’s a fascinating and inspiring conference, well worth attending, and even better to present at. If you have insight to share about future technologies or if you have projects that you’ve built that you think might be part of a foundation for the world to come, then you should be trying to talk at ETech. It’s by far the best way to expose yourselve to a community of creative peers and business people, to find new people to collaborate with and maybe even find some money or backing for your enterprise. It’s also bloody good fun.

This year, I’m delighted to report that I’m on the progamme committee for the event as well as attending. This means that I have a new responsibility and desire – to try and uncover new people and new work going on in the world and to try and persuade them to submit a proposal. So even if you’re not yourself thinking about submitting something, if you know someone who you think would be particularly good – either a famous technologist or a sole researcher working in their backroom on a fascinating problem, then point them in the direction of the Call for Participation and/or send me as much information as you can about them – including any URLs you think might be relevant or interesting. My e-mail address remains tom {at} the name of this website – or post your thoughts below in the comments.

You only have around three weeks to get your submissions in – the final date is September 19, 2005 – so get thinking. This year’s call is full of interesting starting places to do with handling and navigating vast amounts of information and media, exploiting or dealing with the unexpected affordances of new technologies, drawing data and systems together across the internet to generate a service-to-service network effect and the increasing ubiquity of what was previously hardcore and specialist technology. There’s an enormous amount to think about and react to in the Call for Participation alone, but feel free to go beyond it and find the stuff that we’re missing.

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Links for 2005-09-01