Semapedia is a project to annotate physical locations with 2D barcodes that link to Wikipedia articles. With the Semacode software running on your PDA/cellphone, you scan a barcode and it’ll take you to the linked-to article. There’ve been a lot of attempts at this sort of physical annotation of the world, WorldBoard being one of the earlier ones I remember.

I like the concept in theory, but I’m always disappointed by the quality and variability of the links. Do I really want a link about privacy just because I see a no-tresspassing sign, or about the Hofburg Imperial Palace just because I’m standing there? Perhaps, if I’m in the mood for ironic social commentary or I’m a tourist with an interest in architecture, but most people won’t be the right audience for any given link. One man’s art is another man’s graffiti, and the world-annotation systems I’ve seen are currently little more than virtual spray paint.

The variability is the real key. If 90% of the tags I come across link to something interesting to me, I’ll probably follow every one I see. If only 50% link to something interesting, I might look at the human-readable title printed on the tag and then decide whether I think it likely that the article will be well-written and interest me. If 90% of the tags wind up being useless, I won’t even bother reading the title — and then it won’t matter that there are 10% that I would have enjoyed if I had bothered to look.

I’m not totally pessimistic about this sort of technology though. With the right combination of filtering (to make tags I don’t care about completely invisible), subtlety (to make the tags I might care about still be unobtrusive in case I don’t want to be bothered) and community support (to insure relevance to me and to bond me to my community regardless of the link quality), I could see something like this finally taking off.

(Thanks to Eugen Leitl on the Wearables mailing list for the link!)

There’s interesting work going on between Brad Fitzpatrick at LiveJournal, Bob Wyman of PubSub and other folks at SixApart (who make the MoveableType blogging software) about making continuous streams of blogging content so large aggregators (like PubSub, Technorati or Google) can get continuous updates from large sources of blog posts like LiveJournal, SixApart or Blogger.

See Brad’s post on LJ for the inital proposal, these threads on integrating it with the Atom protocol and the Six Apart Update Stream for developments.

Or, if you feel like playing yourself, type this into a command prompt to see a continuous stream of “No one understands me. Should I dye my hair pink or blue?”:

telnet updates.sixapart.com 8081
GET /atom-stream.xml HTTP/1.0 

(Extra points for being the first one to plug it into a screensaver 🙂

I’ve been wondering when Google would get around to this. A few days ago they announced Google Blog Search, which indexes blog entries based on RSS or Atom feeds.

Google’s playing catch-up to smaller services like Technorati, but seem to have scooped Yahoo! and MSN, both of whom have been rumored to be coming out with an RSS-feed search “any day now” for months (Yahoo! even briefly revealed a test page before they realized it wasn’t being firewalled properly).

One feature Google gets right is that every page includes a link to subscribe to an RSS or Atom feed on that query, essentially turning any search phrase into an aggregator. Technorati has something similar with their watchlists, but you have to create an account and go through their page to create a new standing query. Google just creates the contents on the fly &mash; a big win in terms of ease-of-use since you’re likely to most want a standing query after you’ve just done the search as a regular one.

(Discovered via Political Animal, of all places, but there are also announcements at SixApart and John Battelle’s Searchblog.)

One of the folks helping to raise money for the Katrina relief effort is the site Boobs 4 Bourbon Street (it’s been slashdotted and is down right now, but check back later). People are donating pictures of their bare breasts (with the website shown in the photo itself, to insure they were taken with full knowledge and consent of how they’d be used), and anyone who donates $5 or more to one of the main relief charities gets an account and password to view them.

From the site:

Click on any of the charities in the right-hand column, go to their donation page, and make an online donation for $5 or more. (Please note: Habitat For Humanity’s minimum online donation amount is $10. If you try to make a smaller donation in their form, you’ll get a fairly nondescript error message.) Then, once they send you a confirmation email, forward it to us, at verify@boobs4bourbonst.com. At this point, one of our volunteers will see your email, then create an account with which you can access the gallery, and email you with your login information. The username will be the email address that you emailed us from. The password will be randomly-generated. Write it down or print it out or save the email.

To quote my friend Adam, this has got to be the least efficient way to use the Internet to get pictures of boobs since Archie, but hey — it’s for charity, and when I checked a couple days ago they’d already raised $3000.

I also note (so you won’t think this post is entirely about boobs) that they’ve got an interesting trade economy going here, where they’re providing a service (in this case light-porn) not for cash but for proof that cash was paid to someone else. It’d be great to build up the infrastructure to make this kind of thing easier, much as Software Ransom sites have done for pooling commissions for software (are you listening, PayPal?).