For people who have installed Ubiquity from Mozilla Labs, here’s a user script that enables you to quickly search for words in Wordnik:

makeSearchCommand({
  name: "Wordnik",
  url: "http://wordnik.com/{QUERY}",
  icon: "http://wordnik.com/media/img/wordnik.ico",
  description: "Searches Wordnik for your words.",
  preview: function(pblock, directObject) {
    var searchTerm = directObject.text;
    var pTemplate = "Searches Wordnik for <b>${query}</b>";
    var pData = {query: searchTerm};
    pblock.innerHTML = CmdUtils.renderTemplate(pTemplate, pData);
  }
});

I’ve added Ubiquity meta information to this page so that you should see a Firefox bar across the top of the page asking you whether or not to install/subscribe to this script.

makeSearchCommand({
  name: "jaikungfu",
  url: "http://jaiku.lemonad.org/search?q={QUERY}",
  icon: "http://jaiku.lemonad.org/favicon.ico",
  description: "Jaikungfu search Jaiku.",
  preview: function(pBlock, directObj) {
    if (directObj.text)
      pBlock.innerHtml = "Searches " +
      "<a href=\"http://jaiku.com/\">Jaiku</a> for " +
      directObj.text +
      " (<a href=\"http://jaiku.lemonad.org/\">jaikungfu</a>)";
    else
      pBlock.innerHTML = "Searches " +
      "<a href=\"http://jaiku.com/\">Jaiku</a> "+
      "for the given words " +
      "(<a href=\"http://jaiku.lemonad.org/\">jaikungfu</a>)";
  }
});

Thanks to Håkan Kjellerstrand for teaching me the basics!

Update 2008-08-31: I’ve added Ubiquity meta information to this page so that you should see a Firefox bar across the top of the page asking you whether or not to install/subscribe to this script.

Karin and I are going backpacking in the north of Sweden. The tentative itinerary is to meet Jonathan and Jessie in Kiruna on the 23rd. They’ll arrive at the airport coming from the US via Stockholm. On the morning of the 24th we’ll start hiking from Abisko and follow Kungsleden for a couple of days.

When we reach Sälkasstugorna we’ll head off on the “unmarked” trails up towards Nallostugan. Then follow the “unmarked” trails down to Vistasstugan and up again over the pass at Mårmastugan and back up towards Abisko. We’ll see how it goes ;)

Now, we’ve spent tons of nights in tents while biking but we’re relatively unexperienced hikers so the last couple of weeks we’ve been planning and purchasing stuff to bring. We thought we had most of it but, alas, the checkbook says no, you really didn’t.

Here’s what it boiled down to:

Backpack fodder

Wearing:

Carrying:

Karin’s packlist

Good for one week of backpacking? Missing: Clothes for wearing, towel, peanut butter, soft bread, money and possibly a book.

Click the above to see the Flickr notes on what Karin is bringing.

Say hello if you meet us! Feel free to help us carry our too heavy backpacks ;)

Greasemonkey scripts are great. However, for users and developers alike, they do pose one problem; that of managing updates and bug fixes. There’s no automatic infrastructure set up for it and users might not notice that there are newer versions out—especially if they’re happy with the functionality of the current version. Developers can’t notify these users either since they don’t know who they are.

So to get around that limitation, over the last week or so, I’ve slowly (and painstakingly) made my own Firefox extension combining the two Jaiku Greasemonkey scripts I had previously made (AutoLink and More Context for Comments) with some additional features.

without Jaikungfu

with Jaikungfu

with Jaikungfu (blue marks extended icon set, version 0.1.3)

Integrated search form in sidebar (version 0.1.5)

Integrated channel search form in Jaiku channel and explore sidebar (version 0.1.6)

Inline reading of comments. Click the read inline link and and comments for the presence update are downloaded via ajax and displayed underneath (version 0.1.7)

List of commenters displayed underneath comment edit box. Click to insert @usernames (version 0.1.9)

In order to be able to submit it for Mozilla approval, I need people to beta test it first so I would really appreciate if you would register and download Jaikungfu from my sandbox at addons.mozilla.org. The sandbox is an area for advanced users to test add-ons before they are reviewed for general use. In order to access the sandbox, after registering, you must enable it in your account settings: click the link in the upper right corner that says My Account and check the box that says Show sandbox?. Then click save.. If you’d like, you can read more about it here.

Good news, the extension is out of the mozilla extension sandbox and can now be downloaded without registering—thanks everyone! :)
Kung-Pow! Download Jaikungfu 0.1.5 from addons.mozilla.org (or if you prefer the absolute latest version, development build 0.2 is available directly from my site. Download and open with FireFox/Flock).
Oh, and please remember to remove my previous Greasemonkey scripts before installing Jaikungfu as they probably don’t play well together :)

If you find a bug or have suggestions, don’t hesitate to email me!

• 0.1.3 extends the icon set shown on the Jaiku site.
• 0.1.4 removed some files that was no longer needed.
• 0.1.5 is the latest public version (approved on August 2) and adds a search form to most pages (the search functionality can be accessed without jaikungfu at jaiku.lemonad.org/search/).
• 0.1.6 is the latest beta-version and adds channel search through Rick Measham’s JaikuFans channel search.
• 0.1.7 adds inline reading of comments.
• 0.1.8 adds a list of commenters under the comment box for quick insertion of @username’s.
• 0.1.9 improves upon the list of commenters under the comment box by adding user images. It also fixes a rear display formatting problem with inline comments.
• 0.1.10 just includes some small tweaks to the above functionality.
• 0.1.11 adds a “top” link below comments to quickly return to the top (per request on Jaiku).
• 0.1.12 integrates search and channel search into one form with two submit buttons.
• 0.1.13 includes a number of changes and additions with the main ones being that it now works in Firefox 3, clickable inline comment avatars, and links for increasing size of profile avatars.
• 0.1.14 primarily fixes a very annoying problem for users not using adblock (Thanks again Rick Measham for all the help with finding and solving this! :).
• 0.2 is the latest alpha-version and fixes a minor problem for users not using adblock. I really hope this will become the public version so I rev’ed it to 0.2 :)

This script will create links out of @username and #channel. Before:

with script

After:

without script

To enable this functionality, you will first have to install Greasemonkey. After that, you are ready to install the Jaiku AutoLink script. Please email me or contact me through jaiku if you have suggestions or encounter any problems. Thanks!

Again, Rick Measham’s excellent site JaikuFans has a write-up.

tags: jaiku, greasemonkey, scripts

A while ago I posted a suggestion to the Jaiku #jaiku channel on showing more of the presence titles when listing comments in order to provide more context. Currently, comments are displayed like this:

without script

The thing is that the listing actually has more context information embedded in it but you would have to hover over the link to show it as a tooltip. With my Greasemonkey script installed, this text is pulled out and shown directly on the screen:

with script

To enable this functionality, you will first have to install Greasemonkey. After that, you are ready to install the Jaiku More Context for Comments script. Please email me or contact me through jaiku if you have suggestions or encounter any problems. Thanks!

There’s actually a much better write-up of this on Rick Measham’s awesome site JaikuFans :)

tags: jaiku, greasemonkey, scripts

Forthcoming?

No doubt, a river otter would be the perfect animal for the cover of a book on twitter in the O’Reilly series. Just look at that little hand, perfect for texting.

Karin on Canopy Trail in Santos, FL

Karin riding a skinny on the red trail around the Vortex freeride area in Santos, FL

Karin at the Vortex freeride area in Santos, FL

The camping at Santos in Florida was right by trail which is a luxury we’re definitely not used to. We could ride our bikes to the tent and eat lunch and then go back to the trail for another ride in the afternoon. Awesome - and we had great weather too. Only thing was that we were meeting Jonathan in Brevard, NC so we had to go north at the same time as the a cold front moved in. We went from 85 degrees in Florida to snow and below 32 in North Carolina! We stocked up with an extra blanket at K-mart and actually never got cold during the nights even though we had temperatures around 20 degrees. Perhaps due to ending each day with microbrewed beer and hot dogs around the warm and cozy campfire.

Lots more photos on flickr.

What you might be more surprised to hear though is that Florida seem to have some amazing mountain biking trails too. We haven’t been biking there yet so I’m very enthusiastic about going there if we have the time. The terrain is generally pretty flat which has led to trails being more freeride oriented. I guess it’s also a matter of parks there being confined to smaller areas.

Santos Trail, Florida (via toddsherman).

Anyhow, we’ll be back in about ten days! Ten days of biking and camping so wifi will be limited to sneaking access outside of motels :)

perhaps other peploids also write about mountain biking, pisgah, santos?

In some cases, like in gmail (labels) and in google reader (folders), users will probably use the tags like folders, because that’s how most of us are used to dealing with email and feeds. My guess is that most people will probably stick with this and many of them might even consider the possibility of assigning more than one folder/label to be more of a bug than a feature. In the case of gmail you’re not imposing your scheme on anyone but yourself but on the other hand, you’re not exposed to other people’s tagging either so you’re not conforming. Thus, the term folksonomy is not really applicable here. It’s first when you start sharing your tags that they become interesting.

So take Flickr, which employs what is called narrow folksonomy, where each item has only one set of tags associated with it, whoever adds a tag to an item, adds it for everyone else as well. Here I think is where we’re currently seeing folksonomy at its finest, where it actually works… To a certain degree. Because, when you want to search, do you really choose to do that by tags alone? Or when flickr only had search by tags, did you actually find everything that you wanted that way? Or when you want to find anything from your archives, is the tag cloud your first association?

There’s also broad folksonomy tagging, as employed by del.icio.us amongst others. Here each item is described by each user individually. Depending on if you look at it from an individual user’s point of view or from the items’, you get two different but overlapping tag sets. One is a union of all users’ descriptions of that item and the other is a subset of the former. The interesting part is that with del.icio.us, it actively tells you how to conform in terms of tagging folksonomy. That is, based on how other people have tagged the item you’re adding, del.icio.us is giving you suggestions on how to tag your item.

Great! So now you have all your items properly tagged, conforming with how other people has chosen to tag the same items. Only thing is, they’re all tagged with web2.0 and social! Not very surprising since those were the most popular choices and they were displayed with the biggest font. They were also the most general of the choices and thus wholly seemed to describe the items. Only not precisely so.

I think one problem is that we’re not all biologists. Nor economists, nor linguists. A folksonomy, if employed by a larger population, will conform towards the generic, not the specific. To a flower, if you will, and not a rose. In the fields where there’s already an established taxonomy, folksonomy will water it out. In the fields where a clear taxonomy not yet exists, such as in web applications, folksonomy through tags as they are employed today will not create one. After all, most people aren’t really setting out to be taxonomists, they just want to add an item to del.icio.us and be done with it. If someone says it’s web2.0, who am I to argue—who even cares?

However, tags came out of the need for something that was a bit more free than categories and folders, yet still more strict and powerful than plain text. In actuality, tags also came out of the real-world problem that freetext search in big and constantly updated databases was not feasible. Powerful as tags were meant to be for both the generic and specific, they were the most powerful when it came to drawing the broad strokes: to show trends and what is currently popular. Pair a very general tag with a current event or product release and suddenly it becomes crystal clear what it means.

In a sense, applications that use tags based on their popularity are doing their users a disservice. Because it really only aids them when they are adding an item, not when they’re later trying to find it. And if they’re not storing things in order to find them later in the first place, there’s no basis for folksonomy and shared tags could be skipped altogether.

What can be done though? In theory, perhaps the following:

Separate the broad from the specific.

Aim for the benefit of the long tail. If you can’t get them to work for that, your shared tags are probably not working at all.

Separate search from tags. They should not just be a subset of search.

Exclude popular tags and those shared by many users.

Keep filtering until your tag cloud is both intriguing and surprising.

In practice, it’s not going to be that simple. However, that’s where the creative people in your staff come in, go put them to good use, give us tags 2007!

20070319: What about a bell type curve?