The9Billion: Sustainability, Clean Technology News and Views
"Here at THE9BILLION you'll find the latest news, information and opinion related to living a happier and more sustainable life, one day at a time. Main categories cover Earth, Technology, Living, Business, Politics, Culture, Entertainment, and the Social aspects of life.
It's estimated that the world's population will reach around 9 billion people by 2050, and then begin to fall. We are currently approaching 7 billion. Many of us living today will still be around in 2050. The question is: given our many social and environmental issues, how are 9 billion people going to learn to live sustainably by 2050?"
(John Johnston)
Fig.1 "Greenaid Seedbomb Vending Machine", SpontaneousInterventions [http://www.spontaneousinterventions.org/project/greenaid-seedbomb-vending-machine].
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
Zootool: a social bookmarking tool
"Zootool is about collecting, organizing and sharing your favorite images, videos, documents and links from all over the internet.
We are a small, bootstrapped startup, located in Mannheim, Germany. Driven by a passion for design, web, code and all kind of nerdery, we are working hard to built the most awesome bookmark tool for geeks like us and people who love the web."
(Bastian Allgeier, Hartmut Wöhlbier and Nicolas Cormier)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Pinterest: a virtual pinboard
"Pinterest is a virtual pinboard. Pinterest allows you to organize and share all the beautiful things you find on the web. You can browse pinboards created by other people to discover new things and get inspiration from people who share your interests.
People use pinboards to plan their weddings, decorate their homes, and share their favorite recipes."
(Ben Silbermann)
Fig.1 A How-To Video from Braid Creative.
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Pearltrees: a place to store and collect you stuff
"Pearltrees lets you keep at hand the web pages you like, discover some new ones in your areas of interest and share them easily with your friends."
(Pearltrees)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Folksonomies: improving tagging technique
"Here are some of the techniques used by professionals:
Universe - knowing the complete vocabulary, so you know what categories are available
Synonyms - that one of the meanins of ultrasound is the same as sonography.
Hierarchy - a Volvo is a kind of car, is a kind of transportation device.
So here are some ideas for how we could improve folksonomy software to make us better at this, without involving any editors.
Suggest tags for me. A Google Suggest-style interface will help familiarize people with the universe of existing tags, so you can use an existing tag rather than invent your own, when the existing tag applies equally well. It would also reduce typos and inconsistencies, like 'blog' vs. 'blogs', and it might serve as inspiration to get past the obvious tags. The pool of tags suggested from could be a weighted list of my own tags, my friends' tags, all tags, and tags other people have already used for this link.
Find synonyms automatically. In the browsing interface, Flickr is pretty good about showing related tags. Why not show these related tags when I am tagging a photo, thus making it easy for me to just add the ones that apply. They could even do a quick lookup on WordNet for more synonyms. Since the related tags in the browsing interface feeds off of tags used on the same images on the input side, this would also help make strong links stronger.
Help me know what tags other people use. When doing both the Google Suggest and the synonyms above, show the most used tags in a larger size than less used tags. There is value in people using the same tag for the same thing, and we want to encourage that, without in any way preventing people from choosing different tag if they want to.
Infer hiearchy from the tags. I have a habit of using multiword tags, so instead of saying 'socialsoftware' like you're supposed to on delicious, I say 'social software', which really makes it two separate tags. That's not necessarily a bad thing, though. If this habit is generally applied, we could look at home many links that are tagged with 'social' are also tagged 'software', and maybe infer that 'social' is frequently used in conjunction with 'software', and thus might imply a special kind of software (or the other way around, that software is a special kind of social), thus offering the combined tag 'social software' to contain links that are tagged with both. A different example would be items tagged 'volvo car'. If most of the time something is tagged 'volvo', it is also tagged 'car', we might infer that volvo is a kind of car.
Make it easy to adjust tags on old content. If the above and other ideas work, people's tagging skills should improve over time. So why not augment the browsing interface so that it's very easy for me to add or remove tags from my iamges or links right there, e.g. from a list of suggested tags on the page, and I'm sure that sometimes, someone would use it. Another incentive to retag my content is if I'm searching for a link on Buenos Aires, but the link wasn't tagged with 'buenosaires', so I find it under 'argentina', say, it should be very easy to add the 'buenosaires' tag to that item."
(Lars Pind, 23 January 2005)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
