Blog of Leonid Mamchenkov

It looks like humans aren’t all that useless when it comes to technology.  There are still a few areas that we do better than machines.  Image recognition is one of them.  TechCrunch runs the story about one company that seems to be using humans in image recognition process.  Comments to that story also mention Google doing the same.

To me it feels like a problem with timing.  There is a need to tag and search a whole lot of images.  But there is no good automated solution available.  So we are falling back on humans.  It’s easy to come up with a few other areas, in which there is a need today for solutions which won’t even be here tomorrow.  Technology needs help, I guess.

I have decided to use Flickr for yet another purpose of mine - mobloging photography. Basically, I have configured my Flickr account to work with email. From now, whenever I don’t have my camera with me, I’ll use my phone to make a picture and will immediately send it to Flickr. It will automatically tag all such pictures with ‘cameraphone’ (also ‘mobile’, ‘moblog’, and ‘p800′ but that can change).

If you have the mobile phone with camera and email, you can do the same. Login to Flickr and configure upload by email. And than you can tag you pictures with ‘cameraphone’ too. Automatically. And than we can all be a part of one huge international group that tags their pictures with ‘cameraphone’.

That’s fun. Here are my pictures so far (I’ve uploaded some old ones that were in the phone) :

http://flickr.com/photos/mamchenkov/tags/cameraphone/

And here are the global pictures of all Flickr users that used ‘cameraphone’ as a tag :

http://flickr.com/photos/tags/cameraphone/

If you thought that I’m done with changes, think again. There is plenty going on behind the scenes. In fact, so much is changing that I better write about it before I forget.

For starters, I messing around with the theme. I didn’t manage to make it look exactly like I want yet, but I succeded in braking browser compatibility. It only looks nice in the Firefox now. Konqueror is the second runner up. It looks almost as good, but with few pixels moved left and right here and there. MSIE on the other hand is totally screwed. The funny thing is that the both HTML and CSS validate against w3c.org just fine.

Than there are categories and tags. With excuses to McDonald’s advertising campaign - I’m loving it! I am talking about the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin. I like it so much that I have removed all the categories today, except for the default one which just has to be there. Yes, you’ve heard me right. There are no categories for posts at all now. Tags only.

What’s so good about it you might ask. Well, plenty. Firstly, it imported all categories as tags. Than it imported all my Technorati tags too. Than it gave me an nice administration interface to manage tags. And than it has these totally cool concept of tag synonyms. I’ve been thinking about this for a year or so now and I was stunned to find it in this plugin. Basically, I can assign synonyms to tags and thus decrease the number of tags used on the site without losing any functionality. For example, I configured “Cyprus” to have synonyms “Nicosia”, “Lefcosia”, “Lefkosia”, “Paphos”, “Pafos”, “Limassol”, “Limassos”, “Larnaca”, and “Larnaka”. Now you can use any one of this sysnonyms or tag itself to get the same results. Consider for the moment the same synonym defined for two different tags!

With all these huge changes I of course have a lot of stuff to take care of. My usage of tags was very chaotic before. I didn’t have any naming scheme what-so-ever. My categories were marked badly in some cases. Dumping this all into tags scope didn’t make it all much nicer. I am fixing it all over the place and you might see gradual improvements. But even if you don’t,

stay with me. It’ll me over before you know.

As you can see (unless, of course, you’re an RSS reader) I am working on a new theme for the site. The new theme is wider and utilizes screen space better. It also looks better and more consistent across different browsers.

But the new look is not the only thing that I am working on. There are some navigation changes and design simplifications (hopefuly). Long lists of categories and monthly archives are gone from the sidebar of the front page. They’ve been moved to the dedicated Archives page (more on it in a second), which is linked to from the top of all pages.

The top of the page also includes the link to the photo albums marked as Gallery. Many people were requesting this and I don’t know why I didn’t do it earlier.

I have also installed and configured Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin which allows to integrate tagging deep into the site. The integration process hasn’t finished yet, so I’ll have to update you on the functionality later on.

One bit that I will notice now though is the tag cloud that is available in the Archives page. The tag cloud represents most used tags and allows quick navigation to posts marked with those tags. The bigger the tag name more often it was used.

Anyway, as you can understand, the site undergoes some changes now and might not be very stable. If you encounter an empty page, broken link or an ugly message with debug dump, please don’t shoot me just yet. Everything will be back to normal very soon. Also note that none of the old functionality should be lost. If I forgot to enable something that you used before and thus can’t anymor, please drop me a line.

While playing around with del.icio.us I thought about how useful it would be to have a calendar which could operate with tags. This way, a jazz festival in Cyprus that is going to happen in Cyprus during 16-18 of September this year, for example, could have been tagged as “jazz”, “festivals”, “events”, “music”, “cyprus” as well as “16sep2005″, “17sep2005″, “18sep2005″. And maybe even as “year2005″ and “september”.

It is easy to find some format to express dates and times - there is no question about that. After that is done, the set of events can be represented in a variety of forms. The usual calendar table could be filled using the date format. The list of events for a certain month or year could be combined. Or it could even be categorised based on tags.

It would be possible to make queries like “Show me the list of music events that are planned for September 2005 in Cyprus” or “Show me the list of Cyprus festivals”. These could be easily used together with the usual calendaring stuff like “What is planned for September?”.

If there was some calendaring application that could work with del.icio.us it would awesome! Just think of the possibilities! A combined calendar of events with geographic locations and links to website for more information maintained by a bunch of interested people. And since del.icio.us provides RSS feeds for everything, it would be really easy to update and monitor such a calendar. That would be partially competing with the service provided by Airset. Purhaps there are even some commercial applications that could be based on this service.

Now all we need is for someone to create it…