Tag: khoj

Speech recognition -> Podcasts -> Podzinger

Post author By Gautham Pai
Post date December 1, 2005

Podzinger is just what I was looking for! Podzinger uses speech recognition technologies to actually try and figure out the words in a podcast and then helps us to search within podcasts! Although not quite 100% accurate, it is quite impressive.

This can actually be used in a number of ways:

* Just search for keywords the way you do a normal search and get the podcasts of your choice. Podzinger actually provides RSS alerts for these keywords and so you get podcasts on the fly delivered to your favorite reader.

* I had recently written about the Problems with podcasts, where I had mentioned:

…there is an inherent problem with podcasts. They are not searchable. A typical podcast, for example, Slashdot Review contains many different news items. In this example, Slashdot review contains all the important stories published in Slashdot in that day.

In RSS, suppose I am not interested in reading a particular news item, I can just skip and read the next one.

Podzinger helps us with this.

Usually podcast publishers provide you with a description, which tells you what the podcast contains. Just use this to search in Podzinger and you can magically be transferred to the exact location where that particular item starts.

One problem however: Podzinger works only with IE 5.0+ with RealPlayer. (However for the sake of using this utility you can definitely go back and use that browser. 🙂 )

If you care about podcasts, you definitely should give it a try!

Tags khoj, podcast, search

World Wide Web

Tag evolution

Post author By Gautham Pai
Post date November 11, 2005

Tagging has been one of my recent interest fields. The concept of attaching words with objects exposes a lot of possibilities, although it is quite simple and straightforward.

While there are people who say that tagging is not useful/time consuming [1] [2], I feel this is just the beginning in information/knowledge management. I feel there should be one solution that fits all. If you don't like tagging don't tag. If you want tagging use it. And if you want more than that, have more (this is yet to come, but there are people working on this).

There are many other tools/technologies being developed in the semantic world that help this cause, but their 'complexity' has resulted in lesser adoption. So the golden rule seems like 'If it is for the web, KISS'.

Tagging in its present form has a lot of cons and so it is evolving naturally. Here is my first snapshot of the latest developments in this field.

Tag clouds
– http://del.icio.us/tag/
– http://cloudalicio.us/tagcloud.php?url=http://www.livejournal.com/
I-Tags
– http://www.dvguru.com/2005/10/29/itags-a-new-idea-in-tagging-media/
Tag clusters
– Explanation of flickr clusters [1] [2]
– http://flickr.com/photos/tags/chip/clusters/
– http://flickr.com/photos/tags/lion/clusters/
Tag tagging
– http://atomiq.org/archives/2005/10/tagging_tags_to_make_synonyms.html
– http://tagtagger.com/
Tagwebs
– http://www.blumpy.org/tagwebs/
Tagcamp
– http://tagcamp.org/
About the concept of tagging
– http://blog.simpy.com/blojsom/blog/2005/08/11/Categories_vs_Keywords_vs_Labels_vs_Tags.html
– http://wiki.osafoundation.org/bin/view/Journal/HierarchyVersusFacetsVersusTags
– http://www.rashmisinha.com/archives/05_09/tagging-cognitive.html
– http://www.boxesandarrows.com/archives/beyond_cardsorting_freelisting_methods_to_explore_user_categorizations.php
Tools built using tags
– http://tagcentral.net/

Tags khoj, tagging

World Wide Web

A general update of many things

Post author By Gautham Pai
Post date November 10, 2005

This blog entry has no specific title. I wish to talk about a lot of things here:

First and foremost, I have updated my website – ? / // / // `/ ? / /-/. It now reflects a lot of things and is dynamically updated based on RSS feeds. Thanks to RSS-to-Javascript for a cool utility.

From now on, all the items that I search (which I used to normally include in Khoj) will be reflected in my homepage.

All my comments that I make in a hazaar other web-sites will also be dynamically updated in my web-page. (Thanks to this blog entry for the cool hack.)

Let me tell you what this hack is all about:
You might be commenting in a number of other websites and you might wonder how I can club all these together and bring them in one place. This hack helps you do this.

This hack reminds me of the UNIX tooling concept, where you are given small tools and it is up to your creativity to join them together and do wonderful things. Semantic web and Web 2.0 revolution has just started and this is just a taste of it! You will see more of service-combinations in the near future.

Tags ananyeah, comments, khoj, semantic-web, webpage

World Wide Web

Khoj is back

Post author By Gautham Pai
Post date November 9, 2005

A long time since I posted on Khoj. So here goes:

* Morfik – Google's Web OS initiative.
* Live – Windows/Office over the web? (That too Microsoft doing it!!!?).
* Blummy – Bookmarklets in one place.
* Clipmarks – Annotation tool for the web.
* Rollyo – Customized searches.
* Blinkbits – News, blogs, articles on favorite subjects.
* Stumble Upon – Great Firefox extension.
* Furl – A good bookmarking tool.

Tags khoj

World Wide Web

2 days, 2 experiences

Post author By Gautham Pai
Post date September 5, 2005

September 2, 2005:

As usual, after my office work, I improve my gyan in my fields of interest. I am trying out the newly discovered Clusty and hit upon something very interesting.

This site is called KurzweilAI.net. It is not something that I can describe, but here are some things it deals with:

* The Singularity.
* Living Forever.
* Will Machines Become Conscious?
* How to Build a Brain.
* Visions of the Future.
…

If you are not already excited, then you better not continue reading this blog. But if you are, then I suggest you start off with this:

Chapter 1: The Evolution of Mind in the Twenty-First Century.

I am tempted to tell you what is in there, but let me not, or else you will criticize me for curbing your interests after you read it.

September 3, 2005:

Early morning, I find myself attending a workshop in Le Meridian hotel, Sankey Road. This seminar is about:
Model Driven and Service Oriented Development using Eclipse, J2EE and Web Services.

The workshop was lead by Shridhar Iyengar, a distinguished engineer from IBM. It was one of the best workshops I had ever attended. It was jointly organized by Rotary Bangalore West, IBM and OMG.

Why I specially liked is that, this workshop dealt with upcoming trends in Software development. It talked about concepts like Modeling, Metadata, Service Oriented Development, Model Driven Architecture, Reverse Engineering, Reusable Assets etc.

I come to office today and find more interesting stuff:
Microsoft suing Google and Ballmer using offensive words against Google, making comments like Google will disappear within 5 years etc! (Is this more because of desperation?!)

Tags ai, google, ibm, khoj, microsoft, semantic-web

World Wide Web

Clusty – Not Just Yet Another Clustering Meta Search Engine

Post author By Gautham Pai
Post date September 1, 2005

It has been a long time since I did any khoj on the Internet. So here is one good one:

Clusty is a meta search engine. As the name suggests, Clusty clusters the search results. The best part of Clusty is that it is integrated with Wikipedia. So, you can just search for words in this search engine, see what the related categories are. In fact, it is not even necessary to open the pages. The results (especially in Wikipedia) itself give you what you are searching for.

If that is not enough, you have customization features, preview etc. There is also a Firefox toolbar for Clusty.