LightCone is an interesting little dynamic RSS feed that tells you when light from the moment of your birth hits stars from within our local group. Why is this important?

From the moment of my birth, light (that I could have influenced) has been expanding around the Earth and light (which could influence me, from an increasing distance of origin) reaching it -- this ever-growing sphere of potential causality is my light cone.

On Saturday, my light cone has hit Beta Comae Berenices.

Okay, maybe it isn't important or even useful, but it is interesting.

Del.icio.us is... well... delicious. It is an awesome method to store and organize your bookmarks. Here is one of the many reasons why. I have been marking certain links as "pluckme" for a little while now. What is this "pluckme"? It is just a short-hand way of saying "Download these web-pages into my PDA for further reading". Now, with Sunrise desktop (the software that talks to plucker) , you can view RSS feeds (An RSS fee is a 'stock-ticker' of information, links in this case). The final piece of the puzzle is the Del.icio.us RSS feeds. I am sure you can put it all together.

If I find a link I like, I just tell delish that I want to pluck it by giving it a 'pluckme' tag along with a special sub tag 'pluckme:1deep' or 'pluckme:2deep'. With Sunrise desktop, I subscribe to my pluckme:1deep RSS feed, and set it to download links 1 deep. The Same goes for pluckme:2deep. Bam. Instant plucky goodness. I am going to look into finding a better plucker->RSS app, because sunrise desktop, while good, is going to be turning commercial soon.

Tagging has hit the web. Big time. What is tagging? Besides being l'obsession du jour, it is a method for organizing data. Say you have a collection of pictures (flickr), bookmarks, (del.icio.us), blog entries (Technorati), colours (colr), goals (43 things) or anything really; you can organize them in a hierarchy (These pictures were taken during my dads wedding, so they go in the family/dad/wedding folder), you can organize them by date (My dads wedding was in September sometime, so I know his photos are in a September folder. Now was that 2001?), or just put them in all in one big shoe box/directory.

The problem with the hierarchical method of organization is this: The picture of Me and Harmony at my dads wedding... does it belong in family/dad/wedding? or family/us/jon? family/us/harmony? Do I make a new folder in my hierarchy called family/us/jon+harmony? What happens when I just want a photo of me and harmony. I'd obviously find a bunch in family/us/jon+harmony, but how about the ones at the wedding, unless I move them there, but then, what if I want to view the wedding photos? The problem with the date method is obvious If I can only remember the month of the event, and not the year or date, what hope do I have of finding the right picture inside of an hour, especially if my collection is big (and I am prone to loosing my direction, and browsing my photos for long). The issues with the one big shoe box/directory method are obvious.

So this is where tagging comes into play. Instead of trying to classify the picture of me and harmony at my dads wedding, I would tag it instead with the words "dad wedding jon harmony cute dressedup vancouver". Now, with this system, it is easy to find all pictures related to my dads wedding, by searching on the tags "dad" and "wedding". Not only that, but it is also easy to find all pictures of me all dressed up by searching on "dressedup" and "jon" (though you might get more then you bargained for!). You'll notice a few conventions with tags though:

• Everything is (or should be) in lowercase - This makes it easy to search for something. I don't have to remember if I tagged my photos as "jon" or "Jon"
• There are no spaces—this convention is both a godsend and really annoying. This makes it easy to naturally search for 'tag intersections' more on this later.

Tags more most useful when you focus on more then one tag. For instance, if you look at all entries on my blog that are tagged with 'mine' and 'music' you can see whats happened to my music in the past year. Searches like these are called 'tag intersections' (Unfortunately, I haven't finished the tag intersection code for the S9y tagging module, so you can't actually do that search yet). In my del.icio.us you can do a search for "web" and "app" and see all the funky web applications I have found. You could do "win32" and "app" instead. Or even "pvc" and "app" for any applications of PVC that I have found. ;)

Tags are also good when you stop thinking in terms of simple classification. For instance, I use the 'mine' tag when I am tagging a piece of work that is, well mine. the 'checkitout' tag is one for stuff to look at when I am bored. 'pluckme' is a tag for stuff to download on the palm pilot (the palm web-page reader is called plucker).

Now lets talk about folksonomy. The term folksonomy was (apparently) coined by a Thomas Vander Wal, and is a combination of 'Folk' and 'Taxonomy'. There is a Wikipedia entry all about the term if you are interested. Folksonomies are cool because instead of one person tagging stuff, everyone is tagging stuff, which gives rise to some interesting emergent behaviour. There are different ways to approach a folksonomy. One way is where the content creator tags the stuff for everyone elses searchability and consumption (like my own blog, or Technorati). This method is arguably not a true folksonomy. Another is where the creator and everyone tags the item, like flickr (potentially everyone can tag it, because you can control whether or not everyone can tag your photos). Finally, there is the method where everyone tags everyone elses stuff, a-la del.icio.us.

So a system of classification, a taxonomy if you will, bubbles up from the bottom, as people tag things as they would remember them, and classify them. Instead of some kind of classification coming down from on high, from a bunch of Ivory Tower Intellectuals (says the Scheme Programmer). This alone is interesting, both in the "Hey thats cool" and Chinese-Curse "May you live in interesting times" way. The problems are obvious. Tagspam is coming soon. Can you really trust your other humans to tag things properly? The possibilities of tag pollution boggle the mind!

But thats just it, don't sweat the pollution. With most (good) folksonomies, the tags are personal, not global, so the pollution potential is minimized. If someone pollutes the tagspace, the individual pollution is minimized. The way del.icio.us handles this is probably the best.

I think that the future of tagging is going to be linked up to social networking. Some people just have good tagging habits. They are constantly working on their tag-garden, massaging, pruning, merging, splitting as needed. Also, tribes of people are going to be tagging things with differing levels of skill. A tribe of web designers will tag web-related works with more skill then knitters. So when tagging a web-design tutorial, it would make sense to see how the web designers are tagging it ('css xhtml tutorial web') which tells you more then how the knitter would tag it ('web tutorial'). Conversely, I am going to look at how the knitters tag the pictures of my scarf, or even knitting tutorials.

The last thing I am going to touch on is the openness of webapps that make use of folksonomies. The bare-minimum-standard is to have RSS feeds for everything in yoru folksonomy app. Think of an RSS feed as a news feed, or a stock ticker. But instead of spitting out just the latest things that happen in the world, or the stock price of FOO and BAR, it spits out, well whatever we want. Any time you see an orange 'xml' or 'RSS' button, that means there is an RSS feed for whatever you're looking at. The common thing to do with RSS is get something called an RSS reader, and subscribe to the RSS links. It works a lot like your Email or News reader. So with del.icio.us, you can subscribe to your own, and your friends links, and any time a link is added, you'll know about it. You could also subscribe to the 'knitting' tag or the 'css' tag, and get updated when someone posts a link related to those tags.

But thats not all. Other web apps can use the RSS feeds from ones that are published. Check out the Social Software Tag at Technorati. They subscribe to the "socialsoftware" tag at flickr, so that you can see all pictures. Tag Central is the ultimate culmination of all this.

But it goes even further then this, because RSS is getting deeper and deeper penetration in the tools that we use, the only limit is your imagination. For instance: with Sunrise Desktop, I can download RSS feeds onto my PDA, for later viewing in plucker. I can subscribe to my 'pluckme' tag at delicious, and Sunrise will automagickally download all the items I want. I can add an 'updated' tag, to mark all content that gets updated (like news for instance), and tell Sunrise Desktop to check my feed every day, and update everything that needs updating.

OK, so this is with RSS, the bare minimum of openness that folksonomy apps provide. There is something else called REST. REST is a way to expose the deeper guts of your web-application to everyone, so they can interact with it. You wouldn't necessarily use REST, but programmers can and do. Not just web programmers either. REST allows your desktop applications to interact with a given website, and it allows websites to interact with other websites. Because flickr has a REST api, someone could write an application that lets you explore your photos on flickr, just as you would on your desktop. So instead of clicking on the 'My Pictures' folder, you would click on 'My Flickr Pictures', and ... bam!

As you can see, folksonomies are a wonderfully useful tool, with a lot of power, potential and openness. We will see how all this plays out over the next year, and see if our tagspaces become beautiful gardens, or polluted with errection drugs and 419 scams.

Lots of BHC lately. There was a conversation about the perception of sound. Someone mentioned the Memory of Water, and how that could be related, so I did some googling. I found an article from The New Scientist, and then noticed they have RSS feeds. LOTS of RSS.

And in their RSS, I found this little article about how visual perception is altered by audio input. Very cool stuff.

... volunteers were more likely to perceive the image as moving up when they heard the ascending pitch and vice versa, regardless of its actual direction of movement. And when they were made to listen to white noise while viewing the image, their answers followed no pattern at all ...

Oh, and by the way, Memory of Water? Seems like a justification for homeopatic snake oil to me. Even if water molecules retain a certain structure, I can't see how that structure would affect the human body in any significant way.

I found a better RSS reader for windows... RSS Bandit. Very nice indeed.

Also in the RSS division, is Custom eBay RSS Feeds that will let you run a constant ebay search, using rss of corse. Very nice. I already have 3 feeds set up.

Matt Webb has built a freaking COOL web application. Day By Day Da Vinci. My art teacher Wilf at Alternative High once compared my sketchbook to Da Vinci's. It's not that I am a Da Vinci fanatic.. hell, I had to look up how to spell the guys name. However, I have been carting around a Da Vinci pop up book for the past 20 years, that has survived multiple book-purgings.

Anyway, Day By Day Da Vinci takes the Project Gutenburg text of Da Vinci's notebook, and puts it into a page-a-day RSS feed. In 4 years, I will have read the entirety of Da Vinci's sketchbook. Hella cool.

I've been an intuitive supporter of RSS. That is, when it comes down to the Atom vs. RSS war, I threw my lot in with RSS. So I was happy to learn that Google is mulling RSS support.

So yes, I'll admit that I am biased. The source of my bias is in my aggregator. Here are the reasons I dig RSS over Atom:

• Every time I open an RSS feed, I get plain text. No styles. This makes it supremely easy for me to scan through content, because I don't have to parse the design, I can cut right to the chase.
• Separation. Every single RSS feed has a separation between headline, and content. When I click on the headline that says "This foo is bar!" I get the story about how the foo is bar. I don't get a page full of stories, one of which is probably the story about foo being bar. Not so with any Atom feed.
• Simplicity. RSS is pretty easy to understand, pretty easy to work with, and there are an outstanding number of easy to use tools out there. (This could be equally true of Atom however)

Look, the real damning thing about Atom is the bundling of the presentation with content. I have no illusions about the design of my site, It's okayish but it is nowhere near as good as it could be. However I don't feel the need to force its mediocre design into my feeds. I don't care if you are John Hicks or a 13 year old blogger. Your presentation is not so important that it needs to be stuffed in a news feed. When I want the "full you experience", including all of your designy glory, I will go to your site.

Interestingly enough, as a developer, I would find dealing with RSS rather scary. I mean, there are so many versions, with their own incompatibilities to choose from, it is just bad.

On top of that, browsing the comments on the Slashdot Story on Google and RSS, there appears to be lots of political yuckay with RSS. (In a nutshell, it appears the front man of the RSS standard, Dave Winer, doesn't take criticism well. I don't know if this is a fact, but that seems to be the popular perception.)

So it is by no means perfect.