Thu 08 Nov 2007
Great quote from Dave Winer on
Why Google launched OpenSocial
Advertising is on its way to being obsolete. Facebook is just another
step along the path. Advertising will get more and more targeted until
it disappears, because perfectly targeted advertising is just
information.
I don't see Facebook seriously threatening Google, as Dave does, but that
quote is a classic, and long-term (surely!) spot on the money.
I'm much more in agreement with Tim O'Reilly's
critique of OpenSocial.
Somehow OpenSocial seems all backwards from the company whose maps openness
help make mashups a whole new class of application.
It smells a lot like OpenSocial was hastily conceived just to get
something out the door in advance of the Facebook announcements today,
by Googlers who don't quite grok the power of the open juice.
Thu 08 Nov 2007
I've been using tags here right from the beginning, because they
provide a much more powerful and flexible way of categorising
content than do simpler more static categories. This seems to be
pretty much the consensus in the blogosphere now.
I started off using xtaran's
tagging plugin. The one thing I
didn't like about tagging was that it has a fairly brute-force
approach to doing tag filtering - it basically just iterates over the
set of candidate files and opens up and checks them all, every time.
So I started messing around with adding some kind of tag cache to
tagging, so that the set of tags on a post could be captured
when a post was created or updated, and thereafter tag filtering
could be done by just referencing the tag cache. That means that
if you've got 100 posts, your tag query only needs to read one file -
the tag cache - instead of all 100 posts.
En route I realised I really wanted a more modular approach to
tagging than the tagging plugin uses as well. For instance, I'm
experimenting with various kinds of
data blogging, like using dedicated
special-purpose blogs for recording bookmarks or books or photos.
And for some of these blogs I wanted to be able to do basic tagging
and querying, but didn't need fancier interface stuff like
tagclouds.
So I've ended up creating a small set of blosxom plugins that
provide most of the functionality of tagging using a tag cache.
The plugins are:
tags - provides base tag functionality, including checking
for new and updated stories, maintaining the tag cache, and
providing tag-based filtering. Requires my metamail plugin.
storytags - provides a story level $storytags::taglist
variable containing a formatted list of tags, suitable for
inclusion in a story template. Requires tags.
tagcloud - provides a $tagcloud::cloud variable containing
a formatted tagcloud of tags and counts, suitable
for inclusion in a template somewhere. Requires a hashref of
tags and counts, which tags provides, but should be able to
work with other plugins.
Note that these plugins are typically less featureful than the
tagging plugin, and that tagging includes functionality
(related tag functionality, in particular) not provided by any
of these plugins. So tagging is still probably a good choice
for many people. Nice to have choice, though, ain't it?
All plugins are available in
blosxom sourceforge CVS
repository.
