mtl3p

It’s kindof a cool idea.

I just heard a presention from Andrew Salway. He’s doing data extraction and is part of a panel on language visualization. They were super smart, but unfortunately many academics don’t bother to follow relevant examples of their work occuring in the real world. So they had barely heard of flickr or folksonomy.

I showed him flickr’s most popular tags and joi’s “term fingerprint” designed by Boris (I think he just coined the phrase 2 minutes ago as well).

Among other things, Andrew has done work which compares given texts to standard word distribution (based on grabbing massive amounts of text to provide a starting point for comparaison). So I can hand him a paper, and he can say how unlikely it is that I used this or that word this amount of times). He immediately thought how it would be great if everyone had the kind of thing that Joi has. Then they could compare their own word distribution to other bloggers.

It doesn’t sound very difficult. Basically just a plugin to wordpress or MT which goes through all of the entries and spits out an xml file of words with their frequencies. Then you could submit your profile to something like technorati and it could match you up with other bloggers.

I would use it.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 19th, 2005 at 4:48 pm and is filed under Blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.