I've been toying with some concepts about tags, shared tags and the ability to uses tags as an engine for various things...trying to find any sort of emergent behaviour that may mesh well with my various interests. While it's easy through del.icio.us to see the crowd, I'm wondering how I can dig up the wisdom (see also, Clive's Slate article and his recent pong post).


So I tossed together an experiment in processing, using some of the parsing code I had from Shrunq, and a java library called Classifier4J. It grabs each and every URL available from my del.icio.us feed, and parses and classifies each. The result is a 3D representation of my tags, where their Z-location is based upon the "ranking" of the tag -- much like a tag cloud -- with the actual terms used for classification pulsing behind. Once it's loaded you can click to have it grab pages to test, to see how well random webpages match up to the classification that we've created.


I've already written about this, so I'll do an incredibly silly thing, and quote myself:

I've started to amass a bunch of links in my del.icio.us account. It's not just a bunch of random junk, but it's stuff that I made a point of noting that I had to remember -- at least enough to go to del.icio.us to post it. Tag clouds are cool, and it's a nice way to quickly see the tags, and thus, topics that are most interesting to me.

But I wanted to know more about each tag, to know more about what's under each: What makes that topic more important to me than that topic? How are my tags interrelated? Are there things that connect seemingly disperate topics -- such as "buddhism" and "J2ME" and "wifi"? That is, other than me?

There. I make a lousy quote. See the applet in action, read more, or watch the thrilling video. There are certainly some next steps to this -- just not sure exactly what.

If you'd like to check out a cloud brain based on your tags, let me know, I can build it from my laptop. I've thought about building it out so that people can request it online, and my server will automatically queue and create the necessary data files -- but I'll only write that if enough people are interested...

Stumbled on an interesting Slashdot post from Sprint about their developer program. I do believe the author is the guy behind Nextel's program -- hopefully Sprint will be able to adopt the openness of the Nextel position some time soon.

JSR 179 & OEM Location APIs: Location is a tricky one. The APIs themeselves don't require signatures, but getting the SDKs and tools with which to compile apps that use them on CDMA phones require additional approval. Nextel historically opened up the GPS APIs on the phone to anyone, and the only requirement was a phone-triggered privacy consent for location transmission; that's still the practice we're following for all Nextel phones. On CDMA phones, it's different--the location infrastructure that allows the GPS chip on the phone to get a location fix uses the data network more extensively than does the infrastructure on iDEN, and every location fix carries an actual monetary cost to Sprint. Our position determining equipment (PDE) servers on CDMA are sized based on certain usage assumptions, and a sudden spike in the frequency of location fixes that could result if that SDK were freely downloadable. We're working on changing all of that so that it's no longer a problem to distribute the SDKs, but it'll take some time.

...

I know that these things don't necessarily say what many would like to hear -- that it's all free, that all you have to do is get a cell phone and go for it, and that there's nothing standing between you and mobile glory. But there are options:

Try it on an iDEN phone....

Try it on a non-phone...

Drop us a line....

Link.

Well, at least the deal is in place, and the cap has risen to $102M for this season with two days left for everyone to digest the deal and sign any of their own players to new deals before free agency. There will be some interesting manuevers, surely, and the Patriots have some deals to make of their own.

Interestingly, the Pats released #55, Willie McGinest right after the new CBA was signed. Why then? Of course, both sides knew that this next year of his contract was inflated at $7M and that a re-do would be in order. But with the cap suddenly higher with the new deal, there was no imminent pressure to release Willie -- is there another deal on the table that needs the space? Deals that wouldn't have been done without the new CBA?

McGinest is the rebirth of this franchise. You can draw lots of lines to various sources to the Patriot's success. The Krafts, of course. Belichick and Brady. But from the depths of the league in the early 90's, with Parcells, Bledsoe and #55, the Patriots began their upward ascent. Battling back from numerous injuries -- playing through 'em all, and now in the latter part of career playing smarter and stronger than anyone would have guessed. And, we're told, a total leader in the locker room.

Watching the footage of the Super Bowl parade in Boston, where on the podium #55's giant arms draped around Belichick like giant bear restraining it's child (then later goading the coach to dance). McGinest is as much a factor in the rebirth of the Patriots as the rest of 'em. And Ernie Adams -- maybe he's really the wizard behind the curtain. I hope McGinest returns for another tour of duty -- although I wonder if taking a 2 or 3 year deal from Cleveland might be too much to pass up.

Save the swap for Corey Dillon a few years ago, the Pats haven't done much in free agency, so I don't expect much again this season.

You know, I wish I could claim to be all worked up about the Dubai deal, or something that's at least more worthwhile than a game of chicken by multi-millionaires (see the quote in the Curran article in the Projo). Or maybe it's a face-off between the millionaires and the billionaires. At any rate the NFL Collective Bargaining Agreement standoff, with Free Agency set to start at midnight tonight has got me all worried. At one level it's simply a concern for what happens to the veterans this season, it's a thought about rank-and-file revolt from the player's association, with all the actual drawbacks of an upcapped year. Decertification would be a mess. But even short of that, just having this year's free agency period screwed up at stuck at a smaller cap will make this total chaos.

I think the Boston Herald (Online) has subliminaly sent a message, and one that many football fans echo:

Settle it now, for the difference in money now is not worth the costs to the game, even this season, by messing with what works....or at the very least, the system we've all gotten used to.

And before all those folks at the Globe get smug about typos on the Herald website -- at least they didn't print that error out along with your credit card info and distribute it, actually, more like abandon it, at locations all around town.