Hello World

Is there a diagram of how social tags work?

In  the next few weeks I'm giving three talks about transliteracy and folksonomy - a seminar for my colleagues at De Montfort University, a paper at Interfaces: English Studies and the Computer, Newcastle, 3/4 November, and a talk at the Leicester Cafe Scientifique, 8 November.

However, I'm getting a little worried because as part of my talk I want to give a simple visual guide to how social tagging works, and what I'd really like is to be able to show a nice plain diagram. However, I've hunted around and can't find anything like that, which seems rather odd. Surely someone somewhere has produced something like this? I'd much appreciate recommendations from anyone who knows of such a diagram.

Traveling Through Cyberspace: Tourism and Photography in Virtual Worlds

This interesting paper by Betsy Book (June 2003) describes tourism in graphical virtual worlds and reminds me of the fun trips I had in the Hyper Hovercraft(#94256) at LambdaMOO. I just checked and it's no longer there, although it exists in my personal list of rooms (@rooms). It was a very clever piece of programming - you could climb in with a few friends and take off, swooping over the assembled Lambda hordes in the public rooms. Great fun. There were balloon trips there too - I wonder whether they still exist? Have emailed *research to enquire.

Ever wondered just how far you move your mouse?

A freeware odometer for your mouse.

Track how many miles your mouse has travelled!

Mouse Off-road 2.16.2

(with thanks to Catherine Gillam)

VisitorVille

VisitorVille turns realtime web traffic into something that looks like the Sims - but it's real. Watch your site live as visitors come and go and interact. I imagine you could even turn it into some kind of game by changing the design of your site to see how it influences their activities. Fantastic!

14 Where are we?

Page 119

Traceroute is a technique used to follow this passage of data across the web. When the user sends an email, it is first broken down into packets which are then sent one-by-one to their destination. But they do not generally travel direct – they have to pass through hubs of exchange, and traceroute programs count how long the journey takes between each one. If a journey is particularly slow it means there are problems in that sector, and if a hub is out of service the data-packet will be seen to have not progressed beyond it. It is, effectively, stuck there until it finds another route onwards. For a system with no physical geography, the net is extraordinarily good at mapping itself, and a traceroute report builds its own cultural and poetic landscape.

Experiment with traceroute here. If you know your IP address you can enter it in the box - otherwise just use the one provided, and select a location from the checklist.