Category Archives: annoyances

Triple tags on Twitter

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Triple tags (known as Machine Tags on Flickr) are a way of tagging web content with tags having three parts: a namespace, a predicate and a value. This means that we can differentiate between content about a (tagged taxonomy:vernacular=beagle) and (tagged maritime:vessel=beagle). Of course, that relies on everyone using the same tagging schema (my two examples could also be tagged with, say, pet:dog=beagle and history:ship=beagle). Fortunately, communities of web authors are agreeing on such schema.

One schema that is widely used is for geo- (or location-) tagging, where posts such as my picture of a Kingfisher on Flickr are tagged with (in that case):

  • geo:lat=-1.56403
  • geo:lon=53.60913

In other words, the coordinates of the place where I took the picture (pages using that schema are also often tagged with ““).

Kingfisher at Bretton Lakes, South Yorkshire

It is then possible for Flickr to display that picture overlaid on a map of the location.

The Flickr page is also tagged:

taxonomy:binomial=Alcedo_atthis
taxonomy:genus=Alcedo

which gives the scientific name (binomial or binominal) of the Common Kingfisher, Alcedo atthis, including the Genus, Alcedo.

Another form of tagging, using hash tags, is used by the social media text-messaging service Twitter. Tags in twitter are prefixed with a hash symbol (#), hence the name. A “hash-tagged” message might look like:

I live in #England

Hash tags are parsed by three sites that I know of (there may be others — if so, please let me know): Hashtags (e.g. ), Summize (Summize for “#blog”) and Twemes ().

All well and good.

It occurred to me recently that it should be possible to use Triple tags in Twitter messages, so I posted these “tweets” as they’re called (I find that rather, er, twee):

#tagged post about #Kingfisher #taxonomy
( #taxonomy:genus=Alcedo,
#taxonomy:binomial=Alcedo_atthis )

(See
http://twitter.com/pigsonthewing/statuses/849630924)

and:

Is anyone is parsing #geotagged posts like this: #geo:lat=52.478342 #geo:lon=-1.895389 ( #birminghamuk #rotunda #geo #geotag #tripletag)

(See
http://twitter.com/pigsonthewing/statuses/853592240)

(line breaks have been inserted to improve readability)

Disappointingly, none of the three hash tag parsers above managed to understand these. They all see “#geo:lat=52.478342” as just “#geo” and “#taxonomy:binomial=Alcedo_atthis” as just “#taxonomy”.

Worse still, Hashtags wrongly displays my two posts without the second two-thirds of the tag content, as:

#tagged post about #Kingfisher #taxonomy ( #taxonomy #taxonomy )

(see http://hashtags.org/tag/taxonomy/)

and:

Also wonder if anyone is parsing #geotagged posts like this: #geo #geo ( #birminghamuk #rotunda #geo #geotag)

(see http://hashtags.org/tag/taxonomy/).


See also:

Wouldn’t it be great if services which parse hash tags in Twitter messages also recognised “hash-triple-tags”?

[Update: Summize was bought by Twitter and is now absorbed by them as Twitter’s own search.]

[Update: Hashtags.org now parses the triple tags as, for example, just “#taxonomy”]

[Update: David Carrington of Dabr tells me that some of these triple tags are too long for Twitter’s search API. I’ll try to find out what the limit is, and raise the matter with Twitter’s support people]

[Update: There is now a tool to automatically generate tags for Flickr images of living things; iNaturalist tagger.]

Bunkum & Quislings

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According to a press release from B&Q, the DIY store:

… has teamed up with British designer Wayne Hemingway and HemingwayDesign to help raise awareness of the impact we are having on our planet. […] B&Q is launching ‘Body Warming Not Global Warming’. As 2008 is set to be colder than recent years, people will be leaving their heating on longer this Spring, which is why B&Q is asking everyone to save energy by turning down their heating by 1°C, and keep warm by pulling on a jumper instead.

Which is really good and community spirited of them, and only a hardened cynic would suggest that it’s “greenwashing“.

So how come they’re still selling patio heaters?

Hypocrites.

Come friendly bombs and fall on Birmingham Central Library

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OK, Hands up everyone who thinks Birmingham Central Library is of sufficient architectural merit to warrant occupying its prominent position in the centre of Birmingham? OK, now put your hands down again if you’ve never worked in there (as an employee, I mean: not just doing your homework for a few hours).

Well, you might not have done, but I have, and it was awful. Bad acoustics, stale air, inflexible, unwelcoming — and impossible to drill into to attach a coat hook, much less a bookshelf.

Goodbye and good riddance to the monstrosity.

hAccessibility: BBC drop hCalendar microformat

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Almost two years after I first raised the issue (to a reaction from the cabal that runs the microformats “community” which began with denial and moved to hostility) the BBC have stopped using the hCalendar microformat due to accessibility concerns.

Maybe now something can be done to incorporate one of the several, more accessible proposed work-arounds, into the relevant standards?

Thanks to Bruce Lawson and Patrick Lauke for breaking the news.

Update: Patrick now has a post on the subject, at webstandards.org

Stupid, Stupid BBC!

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One of my favourite indulgences is to watch a whole TV series, on DVD, seeing each episode in quick succession. I saw most of The West Wing that way, for instance. It means that I don’t have the week-long wait after a cliff-hanger ending, and there’s no danger of missing a broadcast episode, and ruining (at least, as it would have done before the advent of BitTorrent!) the whole run.

Late last year, I treated myself by spending some cash I’d received for Christmas on two double-DVD sets, of the BBC adaptations of John Le Carré‘s cold-war spy thrillers, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and its sequel Smiley’s People (in print, these were separated by a third volume in the trilogy, The Honourable Schoolboy, but this was not adapted by the BBC).

Two damaged copies of the former arrived, one after the other, needing to be returned, as the discs were loose inside the packaging. Then, Amazon were out of stock for some time. After a very frustrating wait, a further replacement copy finally arrived only a week or so ago.

I took advantage of the bank holiday weekend to set aside a couple of afternoons and three evenings to watch the whole lot. I thoroughly enjoyed the seven episodes of Tinker, Tailor…, starring Alec Guinness and with marvellous supporting performances by, among others, Bernard Hepton, Beryl Reid, Ian Richardson and a very young-looking Hywel Bennett. I then decided to watch the accompanying DVD “extra”, a documentary about the making of the series, before moving on to Smiley’s People.

In their wisdom, the BBC had included, with no prior warning, a scene which gave away the plot-twist-ending of Smiley’s People, and even showed the final scene! Though I still enjoyed the second series, it was nowhere near as engaging as it should have been had I been properly kept in suspense.

Whoever allowed such thoughtless idiocy should be sent to a gulag.

Surface Unsigned: to be avoided

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Like many others (see below) I’m seriously unimpressed that Surface Unsigned have tried to stifle reasonable criticism made on Created in Birmingham, by threatening legal action on what appear to be spurious grounds, in order to force the removal of this extract of their contract with performers:

As you must bring with you at least 25 people to your event you must sell at least 25 tickets for each round you play. If you do not sell 25 tickets you will still be allowed to play however you will NOT progress to the next round no matter how many Surface Ratings you receive.

I hope others will support Created in Birmingham by linking to the following blog posts, and adding them to social bookmarking sites like Ma.gnolia, Digg and Delicious.

Update: Curiously Jay Mitchell, the person behind Surface Unsigned, is involved in another event which openly advertises similar conditions.

Update: Dead link removed, 30 July 2010

Daughters of Albion review

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Here’s my review of the Daughters of Albion at Birmingham Town Hall.

You can see more of my reviews, on the same site, ‘Birmingham Alive!’.

Update: Link expired; sorry. Here’s the original text:

Town Hall
27/04/08
folk

I was really looking forward to this concert — and I was really disappointed by it.

It seemed shambolic and amateurish and the over-long changes between each song meant that it lost what little atmosphere it had had.

June Tabor, a singer for whom adequate superlatives simply do not exist, was sorely under-used — but not as much so as Martin Carthy, who spent most of the evening as the best-seated spectator in the venue. Presumably, he was only there because his wife Norma Waterson was in the line-up. Apart from the opening number, Tabor took part in none of the evening’s collaborations. Indeed, though she appeared on stage for the encore, she bizarrely refused to sing, standing mute and looking lost; something her fellow performers seemed to find amusing, unlike your reviewer, who frankly thought it insulting to the audience. Even so, her performances, with Huw Warren‘s piano accompaniment, were among the evening’s few highlights.

Also worthy of mention was the understated accompaniment from musical director Kate St John (late of the Dream Academy), especially her oboe playing, and her small band of backing musicians. For the most part, the contributions from Lou Rhodes and Lisa Knapp were insubstantial, lacklustre or — performing a much-anticipated cover of Kate Bush‘s This Woman’s Work — unbearably shrill. Kathryn Williams‘s rambling and apologetic introductions were, frankly, embarrassing. Bishi, a replacement for Sheila Chandra‘s role in the 2006 concerts under the same banner, was a poor substitute.

The impression given was that the whole under-rehearsed event was being treated as a bit of fun for the performers. Nothing wrong with that in itself, but surely not at the expense of the enjoyment of the audience.

ch-ch-changes

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Here’s a screen-shot of a search of the e-mail archives on my PC at work: never let it be said that I or my colleagues are change-averse!

4,509 documents in view 'all docuemnts' matched a search for 'changes'

hAccessibility – Unhappy First Birthday

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It’s one year today since Bruce Lawson and James Craig published “hAccessibility“, about the misuse of the ‘abbr’ element in microformats (an issue I first raised on 20 September 2006 in Accessify Forums).

As recent events show, the microformats cabal still has its collective head up its own^W^W^W in the sand.

Despite suggestions for a workaround, a solution seems no nearer, thanks to their apparent indifference. Shame on them.

Google Reader's great, but it could be even better

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Here’s another screenshot (linked to a larger version; thank you Flickr).

[link to large image of Google Reader screen-shot]

This one shows some of the RSS feeds I follow, in Google Reader. I only started using that service recently, and I’m finding very compelling (and time consuming!) both on my desktop PC, as shown here, and on my mobile device, using the stripped down and rather splendid mobile interface. However, I think the desktop interface — if I can call it that — could be improved and made more usable.

Firstly, I’d like a “mark as read” (or “ignore”, with the same effect) button, so that I can skip over posts which look uninteresting, without having to open and then close them to do so. It could go to the right of the “star” icon (highlighted yellow — and what’s that for? I can find no explanation, other than references to apparent side-effects of using it, in the help pages).

Also, if I select the title of a feed , such as “BBC News | News front” (a truncation of …News Front Page”; marked in orange), surely I can reasonably expect the view of that feed to open, instead of the specific post? That would be the same action as when I select the feed’s title in the left-hand column. The post’s title, to the right of the feed title, is a large-enough target to work in its own right.

Lastly, there are two “refresh” buttons (each highlighted in red). These, stupidly, have different functions. The one in the left-hand column refreshes all the feeds, while the one at the top refreshes the feed I’m viewing. If I use the latter, it clears read items from the current feed view, but annoyingly that doesn’t happen if I use the former — what’s that about? Either the two buttons should have the same effect, or they should be labelled differently.

I’d like to let Google know what I think, but — in typical Google fashion — they don’t seem to provide a mechanism for me to do so.

Postscript: The URL provided by Google for my “publicly shared items” in Google Reader, which anyone can visit, is the mind-bogglingly unmemorable, untypeable and generally unfriendly http://www.google.com/reader/shared/03499548569546420688. Why can’t I have http://www.google.com/reader/shared/pigsonthewing ?