ia play

myExperiment reminded me of Connotea, as an example of the way the scientific community adopts Web 2.0 ideas with enthusiasm but makes use of the greater structure in the scientific information space.

Connotea is essentially Delicious for scientists. The main functional difference is that when you bookmark a page from a number of sites (Nature, PubMed, Amazon) Connotea will automatically fetch additional bibliographic information. But really difference is the skew of the communities interests.

At an IASummit a few years back, one of the panels opened with the thought “would you still use Delicious if your gran did”, presumably trying to tap into the fear that your gran might start polluting the links for ‘apple’ with pie and strudel recipes.

Football fans, classic historians and internet geeks might irritate each other with their ‘ajax’ links. In fact, classic historians would probably get on everyone’s nerves.

Connetea’s top tags include biotech, gm crops, evolution and insect resistence.

And ‘celebrity’. Perhaps the world of scientists is not so different after all?

Daniel Gilbert’s homepage is the fabulously named hedonic psychology laboratory within which there is a page called ‘playing’. The page has the tag line ‘frivolous linkageZ’ (he’s got a thing about Z).

Slightly outside most people’s expectations for the page is the section called deathZ -which includes the links to Find a Grave and Dying Words .

Control a Man in a Chicken Suit, Kwazy Rabbit and Walls with Things Written On Them are probably closer to mainstream definitions of playful.

Only an IA would have a favourite Wikipedia category. Mine is currently Fictional computers, as stumbled across when constructing a clumsy Skynet-related metaphor.

(From here I found out about Heinlein’s Mycroft Holmes computer which would have shared a namesake with my husband if my father-in-law had got his own way.)

This category particularly appealed to me as the person responsible many years back for the rather ludicrous plant CV at the BBC. I repeatedly had to explain that it wasn’t a list of plant species but, well, plant personalities such as Major Oak, General Sherman tree, Pando and Methuselah. Famous plants… I don’t know what I was thinking (although I am relieved to see Wikipedia has a page for each of the above).

I’ve also always had a soft spot for the Dictionary of Imaginary Places. Fictional locations also caused a more potentially controversial dilemma for the CV management team. Should heaven be a ‘location’ or a ‘fictional place’?

Of course, the sensible decision is the coward’s classification of ‘religious concepts’.

The rather grandly titled Mining the Collective Intelligence of NYTimes.com users announces the rather more simply titled feature of their search engine ‘Also Try’.

Also try “recommends relevant suggestions of related searches, based on a fairly simple formula. The basic principal [sic] is to cluster together all the search queries submitted to nytimes.com in the past week.”

A search for ‘caucus’ certainly brought up a set of related queries:

what is a caucus, caucus results, caucus process, new hampshire caucus, edwards caucus speech

Unfortunately the relevance of the query can’t guarantee the relevance of the results and clicking ‘what is a caucus’ seems to provide less helpful results than the original query. Can we have a Times Topic please?

Similarly a search for ‘weather’ offers ‘today’s weather’ as an alternative but that doesn’t get you any closer to a weather forecast. At least you have the comfort of knowing that you want the same thing as lots of other readers.

We’ve been trying to come up with a new org structure for our website and every plan we’ve come up with so far has included categories that on closer reflection turn out to just be miscellaneous categories re-branded.

Alongside the meaningful stuff like ‘programmes’ and ‘news’ we’ve got ‘about’ which is just a bucket for corporate information and other pages we have to have on the site but the audience isn’t necessarily looking for. At the moment we’ve also got ‘innovation’ which is a bucket of new stuff that doesn’t fit in the current org structure. And then there is ‘products’ which wouldn’t necessarily be a miscellaneous category for another organisation but for us it means things we make that aren’t TV or Radio programmes.

Might need to have a re-think.