Peter over at Ease provides a short overview of what's happening now in faceted classification. Worth looking at if you're interested in metadata and taxonomies. Peter writes:

tool availability is coming, and that's good because that will allow us to experiment and then refine the theory.

This is precisely how I think it should happen. It's a bootstrap process.

[Seb's Open Research]

» The forthcoming 1.0.5 release of liveTopics will have a built in XFML exporter.  However, in a sense, this is nothing more than the simple XTM exporter already present (although somewhat buried).

To see a sample of the XFML from a liveTopics enabled weblog take a look here.  As you will see we have only one XFML facet generic defined to which all of the topics belong.

In considering my own ideas for theme support in liveTopics I think they can be mapped to XFML 'parent topics' and so we won't really be using XFML facets at all.

This then begs the question:  Of what use is XFML faceted classifaction in a weblog?

To anyone working in a software company. My computer is my own. You do not make assumptions as to how I want to use my computer, nor do you make assumptions as to how much I want to use your product, just because I happen to be installing it.

The worse culprits in this kind of thing are probably Real. Real seem to have an entire marketing strategy focused on annoying the fuck out of their users until said users refuse to ever install a Real product again. I know that's the state I'm at, and so are quite a few of my friends. When there's a site that says “requires Real Player”, my reaction is “Oh well, I can't hear that”.

[The Desktop Fishbowl]

» This is such a stupidly annoying practice.  I too gave up on Real long ago, so far it hasn't bothered me too much - their time seems to have come and gone.

To Microsoft, and all the others who mess with my carefully configured settings, I ask the question "Whose bloody computer is it anyway?"   But of course we all know the answer to that one: "Not yours mate!"

Playing With liveTopics - Part II. I still don't know how many episodes this mini series will consist of, but today I'm focusing on the liveTopicsSeeAlso macro, which displays a list of related topics with each post. [read more] [s l a m]

» I'm grateful to Marc for his excellent introduction to the features of liveTopics.   His work has shamed me sufficiently to promise that the next full release will come with a complete macro reference.  I aim to put more emphasis on the new user in future releases as well.

One picture per mile from the Statue of Liberty to the Golden Gate Bridge all strung together in a beautiful interface.  I really loved Matt Frondorf's American Mile Markers.

“I wanted what I did to be seamless and moving like me, east to west. So I mounted the camera upside down, which allowed the contact prints to be oriented in the proper east to west, left to right orientation.” He set the camera with an automatic exposure that would hold the shutter speed (4000th of a second) constant and adjust the aperture as the daylight changed. “Using a little trig,” he figured with the 63 degree field of view afforded by the camera lens, each exposure would produce a frame with a mile-wide view at a point 0.82 of a mile from the road. This gives uniformity to the frames and helps to create the panorama aspect.

When Matt got to San Francisco and shot the Golden Gate Bridge at mile 3,304, he celebrated with a pizza and a beer. It was a Friday, six days after he left New York. He dismounted the camera, drove home, and was back in his office on Monday morning. "