Tags!

 Tag your posts with whatever you want

Plus, for those who have their blogs supplied by RSS feed, your tags will be displayed on WineCHATr too. 

After that, Tag Clouds! See at a glance what any blogger on WC is most interested in writing about. Or find bloggers that share your interests by following popular tags on our global Tag Cloud.

SIDE NOTE  /  TECHNICAL DIFFICULTIES

I created this in TagCrowd; my blog layout does not offer the desired tag cloud widget suggested in this weeks assignment. I did create and place the tag cloud that was available on the sidebar, however I find it quite boring as it is all one weight and color. I do like the hyperlinks. This tag cloud is a screen shot, that shows an enlarged image when clicked on, but does not link to posts (obviously). I did place this image in the sidebar as well, but it is very small and difficult to read; hence the reason I’m also including it in a post. (Of course, you can click on the sidebar image, as well, for an enlarged view.)

Dear EDUvis users,

We at Spurr Wireless Solutions are thankful for the response in such a short time with the registrations.

We do realize that there are a few discomforts you are facing with the session time out and elaborate login procedure.

We are revamping our website in the next one month’s time and including the following features for your benefit and ease of use

- Brand new, youthful and catchy design
- Intuitive, single click through login
- Select themes and upload your college logo on your college page
- Share apart from video, audio, images, pdfs, presentation slides etc.
- Password protect a specific video and make it available to only a select few
- Site blog to keep you updated on the past and future of EDUvis
- Add friends to your profile
- Most active user of the week
- Most viewed user of the week
- Most rated user of the week
- Special offers from top brands just for EDUvis users

We request you to test the portal to its hilt and help us better it. Anything you feel necessary and is missing will be granted.

Your feedback is very important. Do send us your feedback, whether good, bad or ugly and we will look into it at support@spurr.in

Looking forward to serving you better.
Team Spurr

Nettes Spielzeug:

You may have noticed that in the right column of the blog is a area known as a “tag cloud.” The tags are keywords that represent the content of each post. The reason that the fonts are different sizes is that the tags with the most articles associated with them are represented in larger font than those with fewer associated pieces. So, you can visually scan the Tag Cloud and see what this Blog (or any Blog) is talking about.

@====={{\\\Breon Guarino\\\\\\

That’s right, you heard me. I’m a TABLETOP GAMER. You might ask what that entails; you might be utterly confused by the miniatures and dice scattered amongst the half-consumed soda cans and dog-eared manuals. I would answer you, but I am elsewhere.

Where I am, I am the tactical commander of a Blood Angels battle-group. I am watching the auspex readings of a dozen squads of elite Space Marines. I am sending troops loyal to the God-Emperor of Mankind to their deaths in battle; I send them to glory. I speak three words, and thirty jump-packs spin up their turbines, thirty power-armored knights fall from the sky into the main gun-line of the menacing xenos. The foul Eldar have made their last incursion on the surface of this planet, and it will be by my hand and my faith in the God-Emperor that they are driven back. The air is thick with ionized air from the pitifully deficient las-weapons carried by the doomed Planetary Defense Force that held the surface long enough for me and my battle-brothers to arrive by drop pod assault.  We were fired from orbit to bypass the danger of anti-aircraft fire; the blessed sons of the Emperor have arrived to purge the xeno filth from a loyal planet of the Imperium. I hear the bark of my brethren firing .75 caliber shells from their holy bolters, and within short moments I hear the secondary explosions as the bolts penetrate and explode a few inches past the first layer of armor, terrain, or flesh that they encounter. I hear cries of “For the Emperor!” and “Death before dishonor!” I see my brother Chaplains reciting the Litanies of Hate among their squads, fearless in their sable armor, masters of the trade of bringing death and destruction. Streams of plasma and melta-weapons bring down the agile but poorly-armored vehicles of the Eldar, and my Assault Marines have torn through the enemy gun-line in a spray of tainted blood and torn flesh.

Shortly thereafter, my turn has ended, and I pass the dice off to my esteemed opponent with a few comments about the wonderful painting work on his miniatures. I am only human, and I watch my opponent’s vehicles prove their offensive worth against two of my support squads. My opponent doesn’t fully grasp that I’ve allowed myself to be flanked for a reason, though, because I still have some  reserves left, and he’ll be singing a different tune once I melta-bomb his sorry little grav-tanks with my fresh Assault Marines on the next turn.

Sure, I’ll grant that I’m sitting at a table covered in painted plastic terrain pieces. I’ll allow the assumption that all I’m doing is playing a luck-based version of chess. A person who sees only these things does not see the story I am creating with every die roll and with the help of my opponent. My miniatures were painted not too long ago, but the Blood Angels are a venerated Chapter that has been in existence since the 31st millennium. I wage war not upon tabletops with good friends but on distant scattered hell-worlds against horrors that would break the minds of less well-versed humans. The Great Age of Humanity has come and gone three times before the battle on my dining-room table, and I fight in the name of the mighty God-Emperor that only just succeeded in uniting humanity once more before his betrayal by his favorite son among the Primarchs, the Warmaster Horus. I insert myself and allow myself to fall into the grand universe of Warhammer 40,000 like a quarter into a gumball machine. Through my battles and campaigns, I forge new legends and lore against the backdrop provided the backdrop of a cold and uncaring universe in which the only hope for humanity is to abandon the compassion and mercy that makes it humane.

Am I playing 40K (as it is often affectionately known by the fan base) for the tactical struggle? Oh, most certainly. It is engaging to work within the rules that are constructed. At the end of the day, it is an honor to test myself and my good fortune against that of a worthy opponent. I love the feel of a good roll in combat, knowing that my squads’ bolter fire has struck true. I love the suspense of an assault phase during my turn and the triumph of pinning down an enemy squad with well-directed sniper fire. There is a thrill to the process, almost as though my war-spirit was being tested in the same fiery baptism that my miniature battle-brothers go through.

However…I could just be playing chess, or the Star Wars miniature battle game.

I play 40K because the story really hits me. The grim darkness of the 41st millennium is a setting in which humans cannot afford to give or take any respite. Travel through the Warp from planet to planet runs the risk of being devoured in transit by otherworldly daemons too powerful for the human mind to comprehend. It is a unique tactical experience, but it is a purely unique experience in storytelling. It is a meeting and melding of LotR, Star Wars, and the compiled world of Lovecraft, with the finest aspects of each. Each victory comes through a moral fog, because the morality isn’t white/black, gray/black, or even simply gray. Each race is unabashedly disturbing in some aspects, from the dogmatic zealotry of the Space Marines and Ordos Hereticus to the frenzied debauchery of the Dark Eldar and Chaos to the planet-rapes of the Tyranid hive-mind. The depth there to be probed is staggering, and one can only truly appreciate the game through the story. This is why I play 40K instead of chess, when given a choice.

Why do I play 40K instead of the Star Wars miniature tabletop battle game?

I play 40K because a .75-caliber explosive shell punching into your chest and detonating within you will clear up that nasty little case of Midi-Chlorians in a hurry. The Force is a sign of the Taint of Chaos, after all.

On Monday night we updated Encore to 3.3. This solved a mystery issue we experienced on Monday with the library names being in code. We also have new features which one is currently turned on. After a search if you scroll to the bottom of the results page you will notice the Tag Cloud of Related Searches appears at the bottom as well as at the top of the page.

As we decide on which to new features to turn on I will update up on them.

Having fun with Wordle.

A year ago I wrote a blog post comparing Twhirl to TweetDeck. So far, it was a very successful blog post with lots of visits and direct traffic from search engines. It could be due to the timing, or maybe comparison posts are very search engine friendly, or that it was just useful, helping people to decide which twitter desktop client works for them.

Since a year is a long time on the web I decide to revisit my findings and to check what has changed during this period. Based on this Mashable blog post from early February 2009 TweetDeck is by all mean the winner. A similar post from Techcrunch supports these findings too. The most recent TwitStat report from October 5th, 2009, shows TweetDeck with 12.82% of users and twhirl with 0.07% of the users. The next serious contender (and one of the selected top 5 based on a recent survey done by lifehacker) from Seesmic (twhirl was bought by seesmic in April 2008) is the new Seesmic client with 3.8% market share.

Up until recently I was one of the 0.07% that were still using Twhirl. I do also use TweetDeck. I used Twhirl at work because of its tiny condensed screen. Twhirl was really good at utilizing window real-estate and it allowed me to use twitter more discreetly in the office. TweetDeck on the other hand let you see more of twitter and other life stream social networks in a single glance when it is maximized. I used it more in the evenings, at home.

I recently replaced twhirl with the new Seesmic client. So now it is time to compare TweetDeck vs. Seesmic Desktop. In this post I will mainly describe the differences, feature-wise, between the TweetDeck and Seesmic applications. I will also cover what has changed since my last examination. You can assume the rest to be the same.

Features that are in TweetDeck and not in Seesmic:

• Trending topics and Tag Cloud – via TwitScoop, TweetDeck shows what is going on right now on the web. This is a killer feature and having this view locally on the desktop ensure that you won’t miss a beat.  This feature was already there when I first reviewed TweetDeck, yet it is still a big differentiator.
• 
• Integration with 12 seconds – not new and not a deal breaker for me
• Unique timelines views – there are many twitter time-line types  views like: all friend (home), Mentions(@replies), Direct messages (Private), Favorites, Facebook, and Search results. Both applications shows all these view types. TweetDeck offers few more unique time-line views:
  • * StockTwits view for people sharing trading information. It is not a bad idea to add more niche community timeline views. Hint: look at the #litchat hashtag.
  • * TweetDeck recommend which is a group of people on twitter that TweetDeck thinks highly of. This could be a useful service for people who just joined twitter and can learn what to do and what not on twitter.
  • * Groups – in this great feature TweetDeck provides a very efficient way to construct new timelines following groups of people. I have my “experts” groups for all sort of subjects. Metaphorically, a group provides you with a new lens looking into the twitter update stream. A group is a filter. Harnessing good group members ensure great stream of information. It is a great way to avoid spam.
  • *MySpace – I don’t have MySpace account but I guess that this is very helpful to have just single desktop client that could brings friends feeds from any desired social network. I noticed that I do more with Facebook just because I have it locally via my twitter desktop client.
• Mark all as Seen, Clear seen tweets and Show what is popular in this column – all great and useful features that are helping to manage the time-line. I don’t understand yet why it is not available on the TweetDeck recommend column ??.
• TweetDeck multiple accounts. This, for me, was the most significant reason for sticking with twhirl. Now, actually, I think that TweetDeck is doing better job handling multiple accounts than Seesmic. Switching from account to account in the Compose Update frame takes only one click or two. In Seesmic it requires opening a dropdown and then another click or two.To be fair, it was easier to find how to add new accounts on Seesmic than on TweetDeck. But once an additional account was added in TweetDeck it is easier to know what are you doing for which account. For every new time-line added you’ll see an option to select the associated account. I liked that.
• Window management:TweetDeck minimize more horizontally – I think that it is more important than vertically.
• Translate – From an initial examination it looks like it really works and I could understand some of the tweets that I see in foreign language (Hebrew was on reverse – is this my computer?). I did not test it enough though.
• Text Shrinking – Both serviced offer this option. This feature takes a tweet and replace some of the words with abbreviated version or numbers. I tested only couple of tweets comparing the two and I found the results to be very similar.
• Reply to all – this is a cool feature that can save you some time communicating with your clique. In a single click TweetDeck copies all the referenced twitter user names from the selected tweet to the message edit box. Seesmic has this feature too. I mentioned it here because it was added to both since my previous review.
• Configuration:
  • • Show preview information for short urls. This is useful in a couple of ways. It is nice to see where a link is taking us before actually going there. It is also a good way to validate that the link that I just posted is actually working.
    • Show # of followers in tweets – if you care about size!

Features that are in Seesmic and not in TweetDeck

• Navigation – here I think that Seesmic did a great innovative job. The left page serves as a hypertext-ed index, linking to each one of the columns. Since there could be so many columns added, each for any time-line, it is great having the left pane for easy and quick navigation to the desired column. It is easier/quicker to click than to scroll to the right place. On the other hand Seesmic did not make it intuitive to find the General configuration page – it requires clicking the plus sign next to the Accounts label. Some of these setting are not Account specific (at least not at the time I was writing this blog post).
• 
• Multiple accounts – I miss the single window per account. It is not always clear for which account the main five timelines will be added when I clicked on them (Home, Replies, Private, Sent, Favorites).
• FriendFeed client – gone, I don’t miss this one
• Services – Seesmic supports a list of services yet beside bit.ly I don’t use any of the other so I can’t tell much about this feature. It was easier to set the bit.ly account on TweetDeck, they did a good work pointing me to where my bit.ly API key was.
• Spellchecker (English only) – as you can learn from reading this blog post, I was not born in an English speaking language country, so for me this is a life saver.
• Friends/followers view – I need this view back! I used it to learn about my new followers. It use to be available in twhirl. Dear Seesmic, what happen to this view? In this view I could see the list of all my friends and followers, together with their profile details.
• Color coded notifications – gone, I missed those too.
• Window management– Seesmic allow multiple window mode: single column mode (good when you work from the office), One fix view and many detached column, or all column detached. Also Seesmic minimize more vertically. I prefer it to be thinner. I expected that after shrinking the right pane I would be able to minimize it more horizontally but it didn’t. One more thing, could it be possible to add another window mode? How about single window for account:) ? Hint: just launch twhirl.
• Archive button vs. Sent time-line view – I don’t know if there is a difference.  Anyway it is convenient to have this right at the home view.
• Lists – It seems like an incomplete feature. There is no way to add more than one person to the list. Was this the intent? I did like the way it was organize though, as a tree.

Performance – both applications perform well retrieving information and being responsive to user action. TweetDeck crashed once on my laptop.

Each of this application is packed with features and I’m sure that I missed some from this review. I hope that I did cover the notable differentiators.

What’s next?

What else could be added to these desktop clients? They are already more than twitter client. If the objective is to bring the real-time web down to the desktop I can see few additional real-time web services out there.

BackType Alerts – BackType crawl looking for comments on lots of blog posts. It is possible to create an alert searching for a word or phrase in blog comments. This is another listening tool that can lead us to where the action is.

LazyFeed – Real-time stream of new content feed from web-sites, blogs and twitter, filtered by tag (subject). I love this new service and i use it a lot. This is taken from LazyFeed web-site:

Never miss out.
Save all kinds of topics and don’t worry about missing out on anything. The most recently updated topics will rise to the top, keeping you always updated.

Conclusion: both applications are doing great job helping us to constantly be connected and to find out: what is going on now, what’s hot, and what’s next. It is getting harder and harder to find a key differentiating feature that can help us to deice which way to go. It is a matter of preferences and also a matter of what is that you are doing on the web. I personally plan to give Seesmic a chance. I think that the Seesmic team is doing a great job organizing the different  time-lines and hopefully soon I will see back some the features that I liked so much on Twhirl.

What are your thoughts? Do you see a killer feature that can help Seesmic to acquire more market share? Are there any other real-time services that you want to see streamed to your desktop?

Wordle.Net

The Wordle site will generate a word cloud from any text you provide. You can type the text into a dialog box or upload a document. Then Wordle will create a graphical cloud image of your text. Words that are used most often are larger; words used least often are smaller. You can select a color pallett and whether words are random vertically, horizontally or both. You can print the output or capture the screen to create a graphics image of your cloud. (read more…)

What do your reading habits say about what you should be writing? Just for fun, I decided to use the mysterious powers of the internet to find out.

I used Library Thing to identify some of my more ‘interesting’ reading habits and Wordle to make a word cloud out of the results:

This mash up gave me an instant overview of my literary preoccupations, no matter how weird and wonderful. It was spookily accurate, and much more honest than if I’d written out a list of things that I considered ‘worthy’ of writing a novel about.

The next time you’re stuck for something to write, your current idea won’t come good, or you’re feeling a little bit too curious about the contents of your own head, this is a great exercise to try. Just remember to spend more time writing your novel than – oh, I don’t know – making tag clouds out of your reading habits and posting them on the internet.

I know you SAY that you want to write a literary masterpiece, replete with deathless prose and universal themes of love and redemption. But, if you’ve got a real penchant for the darkly comic and surreal; and are far more likely to be caught reading trashy thrillers about Japanese hit-men and whimsical fairytales about magickal cats – then perhaps you should reconsider your options?

If you love reading it, you’re much more likely to have fun writing it.

Word Cloud

Grazie a Metilparaben possiamo confrontare la tag cloud del discorso di Obama all’Onu con quella di Berlusconi. Le parole più ricorrenti del presidente americano le vediamo qui sopra, e sono: “nazioni“, “gente“, “mondo“, “pace“, “lavoro“.

Nella nuovola di Berlusconi qui sopra, invece, spicca un’altra parola: “L’Aquila“. Forse il “nostro” presidente è andato a ringraziare la Provincia di Trento davanti alle Nazioni Unite.

My public links in delicious.com have become 6000, today:

• http://delicious.com/omadeon

I’ve been collecting links since the beginning of 2007 and regularly use my account in  delicious.com for bookmarking any web-page, pdf, youtube video, or other URL that I find significant, coming across it, while surfing or searching. My total number of delicious links exceeds 10000, but I usually don’t make a link public unless I read it (or at least read a substantial part of it) to believe that it can be useful to others, too…

The problem is INFORMATION OVERLOAD. It’s perhaps the most important knowledge-management problem of our time: -We can not make sense of so much information, at least at the current… complexity level of our (undoubtedly still very primitive) Homo Sapiens brain!

Our current, extremely primitive level of evolution, viewed in the future, after certain… deliberately engineered human DNA species-enhancements, after only a few decades, may indeed look (to future generations) a bit like… this (looks to us) :

So, perhaps the only other way to understand so much data, is to use better forms of data organisation, based on meta-data (or information about information): This can consist of very simple enhancements like tagging, or more sophisticated ones like full-blown Semantic Web technology. If the latter is used to extract tags, if it succeeds it usually does a lot more: -The ultimate goal is semantic tagging and the automatic creation of Semantic (meta-)Structures of information, associated with any specific (human) text or web-page, anywhere…

Despite Semantic Web technology’s advances (and sites like OpenCalais that provide free API’s for programmers) real practical progress in facilities available for ordinary internet users, as regards automatic text-tagging has been very poor and too slow, perhaps because of the generally poor knowledge of NLP techniques by most programmers. In theory, automatic tagging has progressed a lot, with research links here , but in practice there are many problems, while an increasing number of people ask questions about (how to do)  it, e.g. in this post.

You can now try out two free on-line automatic text-tagging services:

• TagThe.net – Webservice that tags your resources

• TagCrowd – make your own tag cloud from any text

As an example, here are some experimental tags extracted automatically out of my recent blog-post “Intellectual Dishonesty as defensiveness against Cognitive Dissonance (a Research Proposal for Gestalt Psychology)” by

(and  subsequently corrected by hand to remove some invalid entries):

beliefs brain cognitive contradictory defensiveness discomfort dishonesty dissonance form function fundamental gestalt human incomplete inconsistent information inner intellectual intelligent mind pattern pattern-completion people perception phenomenon positive psyche psychology sense swan

The same text tagged automatically by another automatic tagging service,

generated the following tags:

topic

Gestalts    mind    Dissonance    Cognitive    defensiveness    perception    pattern    Gestalt    discomfort    information

language

english

Last, but not least, I should mention the excellent free automatic tagging service offered by Zemanta, as a firefox plugin for bloggers (hat I’ve used already to… generate automatically most tags for THIS post):

• http://www.zemanta.com

Among my programming  interests is to develop automatic text-tagging software in Prolog (with Assembly language for speed). However, other obligations (in a scheduling project) as well as the absence of anyone’s… willingness to finance a project in tagging, not to mention… (admittedly) too much blogging (!)   have delayed this goal, for a long time; even though a lot of work has already been done, e.g. in the creation of merged semantic dictionaries and optimised  parsing.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Access Delicious bookmarks with your BlackBerry (bbgeeks.com)
• Delicious Makes Searching and Sharing Bookmarks Easier [Delicious] (lifehacker.com)
• You: Delicious Joins the Twitter Era (mashable.com)
• Share your Delicious bookmarks to Twitter (technology.johnsamuel.in)
• New and Delicious: Search, Tweet, and Discover the Freshest Bookmarks (ysearchblog.com)
• Create, share, collaborate (slideshare.net)
• Back to School: 10 Must-Have Firefox Extensions for Students (mashable.com)
• Deaugmenting Reality: When Less Is More (socialmediatoday.com)
• What Twitter Needs to do for Personal Knowledge Management (fastforwardblog.com)
• Emerging Semantic Ad Platforms (web2express.org)
• More than just another Google (guardian.co.uk)
• Google and Future of the Semantic Web (mehmetalierturk.com)
• How the Semantic Web Will Redefine Digital Music (gigaom.com)
• What’s wrong with vocabularies on the Semantic Web? (tripletalk.wordpress.com)
• OpenCalais to Add Semantic Metadata to Oracle Databases (readwriteweb.com)
• NLP finding mass audience (web2express.org)
• OpenAmplify Opens Up To The Semantic Web Community (techcrunchit.com)
• Talks at SXSW Interactive 2010 (zemanta.com)

Vi har ibland börjat använda tag clouds eller etikettmoln som ett medel för att redovisa olika typer av fritextsvar i våra projektrapporter. Det ger en direkt och visuell grafisk representation av en mängd svåröverskådlig data som annars skulle behöva presenteras i någon typ av frekvenstabell. Det är både mer tidskrävande för oss och svårare att ta in för mottagaren.

Nu har vi hittat ett nytt verktyg för tag clouds, wordle.net. Det ger mer flexibilitet när det gäller att olika mönster, färger och fonter än andra verktyg och är helt öppet att använda även i kommersiella syften.

Nedan visar vi två exempel, i det här fallet har vi matat in ett urval av våra kunder och gjort två olika representationer. Det är kanske inte så vi ska visa undersökningsdata i framtiden men visst är det snyggt!

Hai! This is just Kathy playing around again!

You can implemenet Tag cloud using asp.net. Tag cloud is something using which user can easily identified the particular word under which the number of items are more.

You can find free source code by visiting following links:

http://www.codeproject.com/KB/custom-controls/cloud.aspx 

http://thetagcloud.codeplex.com/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=17637

http://www.4guysfromrolla.com/articles/102506-1.aspx

Happy Progamming!