Jon Udell: jabberconf blaggplug

Jon's Radio : Jon Udell's Radio Blog

Updated: 8/6/2002; 12:30:45 AM.

Note: Jon's Radio has moved to InfoWorld

Thursday, May 09, 2002

jabberconf blaggplug

A little Q and A from DJ Adams:

Q: What do you get when you cross really simple aggregation with 'messaging to spaces' and ideas of "poor man's" pubsub?
A: The 'jabberconf' Blaggplug - a plugin for Blagg that pushes RSS item info to a Jabber conference room (akin to an IRC channel) as they're pulled in the aggregation process. [DJ's Weblog]

When I find a phrase like 'jabberconf blaggplug' rolling trippingly off my tongue, I'm inclined to wonder what the hell is going on. But I've got to agree with what DJ wrote to me in email: simplicity is the reason that jigsaw pieces from so many different places seem to fit together these days.

6:28:17 PM

Radio's RSS writer is now user-extensible

The RSS writer in Radio is now officially user-extensible. "Before generating the RSS, we check user.radio.callbacks.writeRssFile," Dave writes today. Excellent. This will open the floodgates for all sorts of useful metadata experimentation. We'll see Radio UserLand sites emitting RSS 1.0, and others extending RSS .9x. It's not the format that matters to me, it's the experimentation.

In that vein, I've heard from a few folks who are working the other side of the street, looking for ways to enhance the aggregators that read RSS channels. I think this is fertile ground for innovation. Personal aggregators are still quite new, and we have a lot to learn about how we want to use them.
12:06:33 PM

Topic-sensitive PageRank

Thanks to Rahul Dave for a pointer to Taher H. Haveliwala's WWW2002 paper on topic-sensitive page ranking. It takes a while to download all the PNGs that display the equations. But the key points of this mathematically-dense paper are easy to grasp:

- It's computationally feasible today to precompute sets of topically-biased PageRank vectors. In simple terms this means you could differentiate between blues in an Arts sense (the musical genre) and blues in a Health sense (depression), using the Open Directory as a source of classification data.

- A fruitful area for future work is the incorporation of context into queries. For example: "A search for ``basketball'' followed up with a search for ``Jordan'' presents an opportunity for disambiguating the latter."

An architecture of community-based page collections would, in principle, supply a lot of context that could be used to disambiguate queries. Hopefully RCS and systems like it will move us in that direction.
9:40:07 AM