Better English, better blog posts

Frederick Giasson

You will probably notice that the English of my blog post will upgrade considerably in my next posts. This is not magic, and no I didn’t implement an English language micro-chip in my brain. Everything is the grammar correction work of Jon Husband, a good friend of mine. He told me: “Fred, if you want that I continue to read your blog, I will have to correct your posts, otherwise I stop, I can’t continue anymore!”

Okay, it is not exactly what he said, but I would have understood! Nah, Jon kindly told me that he would be willing to correct my blog posts before I publish them, so I would be able to know the English errors I make habitually, and thus begin to accelerate the improvement of my English skills. Naturally, I said yes to his proposition!

That said, it’s a win-win game: I will continue to upgrade my English skills (and there is a lot of room for that) and you will begin to read better-written English blog posts.

Thanks Jon.

Is there place for a Meta-Memetracker and what would be its utility?

Frederick Giasson

I came across a seed idea spread on the FeedBlog, wrote Kevin Burton, yesterday (using Talk Digger of course, you see the link to it in the blog post? It is the reason why linking is so important ). He pointed out an idea that Dave Winer gave for free 3 days ago on his blog.

The idea?

“Implement a search engine that accumulates all the stories pointed to by the top meme-engines over time. That way if I think of something I saw on Tailrank or Memeorandum a year ago, I just go to the universal meme search engine, type in the phrase, and get back the hits.”

Kevin was thinking about something a little bit different: a meta-memetracker that would look like Talk Digger.

I think that there is a place (at least emerging) for such a service considering the growing number of memetracker out there (TailRank, Memeorandum, Findatory, Megite, and probably others that I do not know of (I found yesterday a sort of memetracker on Rojo’s main page that is really cool)).

What would be the added value to users? The first thing is that you would have only one place to visit to get the top stories (obvious behavior for a meta-memetracker, no?).

However, I think that a more interesting phenomenon would happen too. The thing is that none of these memetrackers use the same methods/algorithms to find out what is a good story. Some seems to works with links and predefined list of good information sources selected by humans, other probably user some sort of advanced natural language processing algorithms, other a mix of these two methods and other probably use methods that I can’t think of.

All the memetrackers have one thing in common: they aggregate stories they think that are good (are they performing users profiling? It could be one next step to increase the effectiveness of these services Dave).

This said, some stories appear on all memetracker and other only on one of them. So, if one algorithm doesn’t score well for a specific story, it is not really a problem because the strength of the meta-memetracker is that it would prioritize the set of results composed by the intersections of the sets of results returned by each memetracker. That said, the meta-memetracker would return the bests of the bests stories because the error rate would be blended by the intersection of results’ sets.

It was my two pennies

(if you would like to read more about the socio-philosophical background of popularity, read that blog post wrote by Joshua Porter a couple of days ago)

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Talk Digger supports Feedster again!

Frederick Giasson

I am pleased to announce that Talk Digger support Feedster again. The Feedster development team closed their back-link service a couple of months ago. It seems that they implemented it in a new way (looks like Technocrati’s way) during my departure. So I just finished supporting it again.

I am happy because it was a good real time indexed blog search engine, despite the troubles they had a couple of months ago. However their new architecture seems to be much better (the GUI and under the hood). I hope you will find their results useful!

I also fixed a glitch found by Mr. Ataka with the RSS module of Talk Digger and another one that I found while fixing the previous one. So if you had some strange behaviors, it could be fixed; if you always have some, then contact me as soon as possible so I will be able to fix it.

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The Web as a Publishing Platform: How could we optimize the process?

Frederick Giasson

I was putting back my head back in my books and documents, rereading things and trying figuring out what will come next after 5 weeks off.

Then I re-read the transcript of a talk give by Tim Berners-Lee at a W3C meeting in London the 3 December 1997. He was talking about the evolution of the Web, started to talk about the concept of the Semantic Web and what it could brings to the Web.

Then I read:

“[…] One crazy aspect of the current Web use setup is that the user who wishes to publish something has to decide whether to use mailing lists, newsgroups, or the Web. The best choice in a particular case depends on the anticipated demand and likely readership pattern. A mistake can be costly. It is not always easy for a person to anticipate the demand for a particular Web page. […]”

It was 9 years ago, and is always up to date.

The idea Tim had in mind was probably to use semantic web technologies to publish texts: that way any software (agents) could use that published content the way they like.

The good news is that it is what is happening with the emergence of the Web Feeds like technologies. It is a good experience but there are much more to do. What would be great is to extent that Blogging (publishing) / Aggregating (reading) trend to everything else: news, shopping catalogs, anything else that is publishable and useful to somebody.

That way, anybody would be able to use one easy-to-use tool, to publish anything, to anyone (or any web service) over the Web without caring about anything else than the content he is publishing.

Utopia? I do not think so. A lot of work for sure but not utopia.

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Back from the Himalaya

Frederick Giasson

As you probably know, I was on a trip in India for the next months. However, as expected, nothing gone as expected: thanks God!

There is only one word to describe my trip: Adventure.

It was awesome.

Everything started in India. I have been there for 3 weeks: 3 weeks of pure adventure. It was awesome and really an experience to live for an occidental. Nothing is familiar and everything can happen in India. My motto was: expect the unexpected.

I will not write everything here (I wrote about 40 or 50 pages in French just in emails, to my friends and family, to describe what happened, and not really expected, during the last 5 weeks). However I can say that it was awesome and I would do the same trip anytime.

As I said, I was supposed to be away for 2 or 3 months, and I came back after 5 weeks, so what happened?

Everything ended with my last adventure in the Himalaya. There is the short story:

I flew from Kathmandu to Lukla (the last airstrip before the Everest) and was suppose to go to Gokyo, then getting the Chu La Pass (if the weather conditions were good) then heading to the Everest base camp. (Have in mind that I have been alone all the trip long, meeting a incredible number of people from all around the world).

Click here for a map of the region

So I headed to Gokyo without any Acute Mountain Sickness problems: I was at 4700m of altitude. Everything was going as expected and without any problem except for a could that started 2 days ago, so I woke up the morning after my first night at Gokyo, started to climb the Gokyo Peak (5400m), expecting to go to the Chu La Pass later in the day.

Then the unexpected happened.

I get a HAPE (High Altitude Pulmonary Edema): water in lungs. I had only one thing to do from that point: climbing down of 1000m of altitude in the next hours or I could get permanent injuries to the lungs or worse death if I keep myself at that altitude for too long. The problem is that I had to climb down to Phortse to climb down of 900m and it is a 12km or 15km of walk in the mountains, with 25kilos of stock, 50% to 60% of the sea level oxygen, malfunctioning lungs and I was alone, unable to find a porter or even a tourist to help me to carry by pack-sac.

To make a short story, I got to Phortse after around 11 hours of walk: I never been that exhausted. Then the next day I got to the doctor in Kunde ( if the day before I was exhausted, now I was dead after the walk from Phortse to Kunde). Then I found that everything was okay vis-a-vis my lungs, but I got an alimentation intoxication.

It was the worse… I haven’t been able to eat during my last 3 days in the Himalaya because of this intoxication, and I was spending around 5000 calories to get me out of there. So I was not able to go back at the Everest base camp because I wasn’t able to eat, so getting back my energy. My antibiotics were not effective and I wasn’t able to restart to eat after a couple of days so I decided to get out of there in case that it wasn’t a bacteria that I had in my belly. So I found a cargo Helicopter that was flying near from where I was (Namche Bazard) to Jiri (a beautiful old 1960 helicopter drove by by Colonel I. Tchekov).

So I got back to Kathmandu 4 days after my ascension of Gokyo peak, my belly started to get back on track after 10 days, and I am now in Quebec.

My trip was awesome; I lived many many fabulous things during these 5 weeks.

Now I am back, full of energy and ready for the next steps.

Right now I am digging in 5 weeks of web feed aggregation, trying to check what happened in the Blogsphere during the last 5 weeks. So my next posts will probably be in relation with the interesting writings I found.

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