Saturday, May 17, 2003

K-collector and Me...and Google? You see, the k-collector allows people to place their posts in common categories. One can them look up all posts concerning a common category (topic). In my examples of yesterday, I could set up a topic for an art piece, others could do posts on it and flag them with that topic, and we could all see the various changes when looking at the collective posts on that topic. At first blush this looks like a just great way to have people comment on the same thing(s). However, in my prior examples people would actually be changing the meaning of an art piece. What's more, is that one can select multiple topics. So for one post, I can select the topics "John Norris", "Semantic Web", and "New School Tools". Now this looks like a great way to allow one's comment to appear in multiple areas (and it is.) However, you are really appending common, meta-information about your post. This would allow for all kinds of interesting things: For example, I want all the posts by John Norris that deal with the Semantic Web but not New School Tools. I could use boolean search with the topics to get to those posts. Or maybe I do some data mining and find that John Norris always posts to New School Tools, but rarely to Semantic Web...perhaps identifying him as an expert in a particular area, or someone who needs to do some further study. I could also use it to append a topic which a web services application could act on...like emailing that particular post to a group. Once my feed gets up on the k-collector area (I'm running the beta version now) we'll see what we can do! 11:30:09 PM