Group items tagged

A list of Beehive features, from a Beehive introduction session yesterday (presented by VP and Chief Architect, Oracle Collaborative Technologies, Terry Olkin): * Contacts * Messages (email) * Wiki * Tasks * Conferencing * IM (transcripts) * Calendar * Documents * Discussions

I'm fascinated with the way that a bunch of old ideas floating around from the dot com era are back, and now succeeding. Many of these apps are explicitly social, and are benefitting from the larger user population and increased comfort - it took quite a while for Match.com to catch on, and sixdegrees had much of the Friendster model down by 1996 and flamed out anyway. One really interesting category of these v 2.0 apps is shared bookmarking, a la the service Backflip from Back in the Day. So, with a minimum of editorializing, here is a list of places doing some form of shared link management, which are providing some of Tom Coates' "user-friendly throw-aroundable clumps of groupness."

The Historical Event Markup and Linking project provides a means of coordinating and navigating disparate historical materials on the internet. It includes 1. an XML schema for historical events which describes the events' participants, dates, location and keywords; the schema associates these with source materials in print or on the web. 2. XSLT stylesheets that combine conforming documents and generate lists, maps and graphical timelines out of them. Heml integrates these resources using the Cocoon2 web publishing engine.

A tag cloud is a list of words in different sizes and colors, with or without a sense of depth (3D), meant to represent the statistical importance of keywords mentioned in a particular document base (a blog, a website, twitter,…). It serves as an indicator of the relative importance of the use of certain ideas in the document base at hand. It is a bottom-up, very fuzzy method for the synthesis of knowledge from an arbitrarily big aggregate of (text) data. Because it rests entirely on statistics, very often there is absolutely no relationships between the keywords of a tag cloud. Worse even, if they existed (by pure chance), there is absolutely no way of finding out about the meaning of those relationships.

CrunchBase is the free database of technology companies, people, and investors that anyone can edit.

Our "pattern language" is a holistic collection of "patterns" that can be used together to address an information or communication problem. Each "pattern" in this pattern language, when complete, will represent an important insight that will help contribute to a communication revolution.

RDFa ("Resource Description Framework in attributes") is having its five minutes of fame: Google is beginning to process RDFa and Microformats as it indexes websites, using the parsed data to enhance the display of search results with "rich snippets." Yahoo!, meanwhile, has been processing RDFa for about a year. With these two giants of search on the same trajectory, a new kind of web is closer than ever before.