What do you THINK I was doing on 9/11? I was aggregating and updating a resource list just as fast as I could. My stepson lived in New York City at the time and while he was fine we didn’t hear from him until late in the day (the phones were down) so it helped […]
Mastodon Stadium Seats
Yesterday was a very big news day and I was curious to see how well Mastodon would keep me informed about breaking news as Twitter continues to crumble. I was disappointed. I run my own tiny instance populated by only about a dozen active users, so only a trickle of news was getting to my […]
A Bookmarklet for Mastodon
I made a bookmarklet today! Do you know about bookmarklets? They’re like regular browser bookmarks, only souped-up with JavaScript. As you might imagine the addition of JavaScript makes bookmarklets much more powerful than regular bookmarks. The bookmarklet I made was to address a Mastodon annoyance. Because Mastodon is decentralized, following a user on a different […]
What Do Internet Users Know About Social Signals and How Can We Apply that to Mastodon search?
It used to be that if I found some online writing I really liked, I’d look up and follow the author on Twitter. Now I look up the author and follow them on LinkedIn. This opinion piece by Elizabeth Lopatto is first rate. I love it when an entire article resonates from the jump. ‘Get […]
Light Dawns On Marblehead: You Can Use Mastodon’s Verified Identities as Search Filters
I was really pleased with the way my Mastodon tool “Gift Article Gazette” turned out. It made me eager to do more hashtag-based Mastodon search tools, but I was worried about spam. After poking into the Mastodon API, though, I think I’ve found big possibilities. I didn’t realize exactly how much information the Mastodon API delivers. […]
Daydreaming About the Perfect Mastodon Data Broadcast Setup for Emergency Responders
I used to play Rimworld a lot in the evening, but since I started learning JavaScript, it’s much more interesting to make up my own games. Yesterday evening I pretended I had just started a Mastodon instance for a county fire and rescue and I was designing a tool to make their posts as useful […]
Turning A Wikipedia Popularity List Into a News Search
Curly and I have been playing a game called “How much information can you get with no information?” A fun field to play this on is Wikipedia’s top 1000 pages list, which provides a list of Wikipedia’s articles by pageviews on a specific date. The information I’m trying to get from such a list is […]
Reconsidering Web Search With Contextual Boundaries, Authority, Interest, and Overlapping (Part III: Popularity/Interest)
In Part I of this series, I talked about using metadata to define contextual boundaries in Web search. That approach took data germane to the subject (like birth date and location) and used it to define Web spaces for searching. In Part II, I looked at using authoritative structures/references to build Web spaces and do […]
Reconsidering Web Search With Contextual Boundaries, Authority, Interest, and Overlapping (Part II: Authority)
In Part I of this series, I talked about using metadata to define contextual boundaries in Web search. That approach took data germane to the subject (like birth date and location) and used it to define Web spaces for searching. In Part II, I want to look at using authoritative structures/references to build Web spaces […]
Reconsidering Web Search With Contextual Boundaries, Authority, Interest, and Overlapping (Part I: Contextual Boundaries)
(Update: I spoke to the Apra Wisconsin folks at the end of March and had a lovely time.) I have been asked to speak to the folks of Apra Wisconsin at a virtual event sometime in the near future about Web search. I’ll be talking about people search because the audience is prospect researchers, but I […]