De NRC Handelsblad heeft een stukje daarover, of je kunt direct naar LibraryThing.nl. Wees voorzichtig, het is wel verslavend…

There are all these Web2.0 sites out there letting you “tag” stuff. Some have excellent tagging interfaces and some are more primitive.

What about a single app that talks to all of them?

Or, more reasonably, a combination of two things:

1. A standardised tagging API which these sites can choose to adhere to, and
2. An app to grab a bunch of tag-object mappings according to the API and manipulate them.

That way you can focus the design of the application on tags, rather than photographs or books or bookmarks or whatever, and your implementation isn’t constrained by AJAX and web-browser restrictions.

I’m imagining here something for ‘hygienic’ purposes: periodic cleaning up rather than day-to-day use (for that you’ve got the sites themselves, after all). Plus this raises the possibility of tags crossing over from one site to another — what do the music of Tom Waits, the novels of China Miéville and the film Fallen Art have in common?¹ (Actually I’m not sure quite what the answer is, but when I work it out I’d want to tag all three with it. Perhaps ‘junkyard aesthetic’?)

PS There is already a related product on the market: the EasyUtil recommendation service promises to do the number-crunching for “Customers who bought X also bought Y” matching. The LibraryThing recommendations show that this isn’t necessarily something you can successfully abstract away from the type of data under consideration (they’ve got filters for apparent global popularity, so you don’t get Hairy Pothead topping your recommendations every time, and various other “special sauce” additions, which you can’t see unless you’ve got an LT account I’m afraid — so go sign up!) but still it might work for some applications. And I think a generic solution is likely to work better for what I’m suggesting here.

Notes:

1. Is there a tag-your-favourite-movie site? If not, there’s another idea for the taking.

Thanks to a LibraryThing review by princemuchao I can point you to the Riddley Walker Annotations project, which is marvellous. Only don’t visit it if you haven’t read the book already, you’ll spoil all that lovely discovery!

It turns out that Russell Hoban also wrote a book that I loved as a child: How Tom Beat Captain Najork and His Hired Sportsmen, illustrated by Quentin Blake, which I also recommend most highly.

(I don’t, as a general rule, do social networking. But I’m genuinely interested in the books people I know are reading, if only so I know what I can borrow off them.)

The good

It’s very handsome. The design and typography is great, mixing up faux-Victorian and grunge to great effect (check out the Moorcock interview and the following two-page spread, for the sort of contrast I mean). The more I look at the front cover (which illustrates one of the stories) the more I love it — especially the punk kid with clockwork tattoos.

There’s a good mix of content too — first issues of two serials, two short stories, interviews (as well as Moorcock, musicians Thomas Truax and Darcy James Argue and the band Abney Park), a DIY how-to for electrolyte etching (reprinted from SteampunkWorkshop), a sort-of DIY how-to for a flame-powered –musical– organ (“The Pyrophone, or, Thermo-Acoustic Flaming Organ of Doom“), a historical piece on anarchist regicide, an excerpt (on Ostrich-hunting) from “Earth Sea and Sky” (pub. 1887) and a couple of pieces of self-conscious “What is this thing called SteamPunk” overanalysis.

The story by J.T. Hand is especially lovely (The Baron: A Short Fancy of Airships, Smog, and Questionable Friendship). It’s very short, you could just about read it online. (Go on, I’ll wait. Wasn’t that great? Ok, where was I? Ah yes.) The Abney Park interview is also fun, possibly because the band “at the time, unfortunately, were the worse for drink.”

The bad

The biggest let-down, content-wise, is the self-analysis. I suppose it’s expected, since this is a “Movement”, but it’s pretty hard to take the rhetoric seriously. “We stand with the traitors of the past as we hatch impossible treasons against our present.” Okaaaay…

Sadly, the budget also shows (it should: they don’t have one), particularly in the photo reproductions and some of the illustrations. Apart from Hand’s, none of the short fiction pieces struck me as especially interesting — in fact they seemed almost formulaic.

This is my biggest worry for the zine: is SteamPunk really big enough to support them? Or will they be forced to either go outside the sub-genre (in which case why bother?) or print one after another a line of samey grunge-Victorian knockoffs? If SteamPunk is really the “aesthetic technological movement” they’re asking us to accept then its literature should be wild and free. By golly, I think I might write something myself.

The bottom line

It’s a first issue, and it’s a bit patchy, but I’ll be watching the next with interest. I don’t honestly believe there is (yet) a SteamPunk community, but one might just form around a zine like this. Speaking of which: the deadline for the next issue is April 15, and they’re real keen for all sorts of submissions.

(Below the bottom line)

The group who handled the publishing, strangers in a tangled wilderness, is seriously worth checking out. They’re anarchist zine-writers and musicians, as far as I can figure out. Lots of cool stuff — check out “said the pot to the kettle: feminist theory for anarchist men“, which “explores feminist thought as un-dogmatically as possible and encourages anarchist men to stop being such jerks” (yes, there’s more to it than the comic — a lot more). And lots of music, free, including some accordion. I recommend “Oil and Hell in the Sky”.

I can’t help wondering, though, how many thousands of copies of that email went out with a name and blog title filled into the template… (“I will appreciate it if you can post a comment at your blog”…)

Anyway. BooksPrice is a price comparison site for bookshopping, I haven’t used it yet but it looks like it might be a good replacement for BookBurro (which died after a Firefox update a while ago, and which I never bothered to fix).

Apparently I should be buying my books from Wal-Mart, which neatly illustrates the biggest disadvantage to this sort of scheme. I don’t want to buy from Wal-Mart, or from Amazon, or from anyone big enough to offer really cheap prices. So I don’t know how much business BooksPrice is going to get from me, but I applaud their marketing.

And if any publishing houses feel like sending me review copies of anything, well, it looks like I’m for sale.

Update: I bite my tongue. This wasn’t spam: unsolicited, but not mailed in bulk –Lucy chimes in in the comments– and sent to me because I’m likely to be interested. In fact, it’s the sort of commercial mailing I should be encouraging, not shying away from. (Which doesn’t make it any less weird to get asked by a stranger to endorse their website, but keeping a blog does make you a public figure, in a ridiculously minor fashion. Just something to get used to.) My reservations about using the service haven’t changed: price just isn’t that important to me most of the time, compared to a bunch of other factors. Rank your hits by how pleasant the staff are when your order goes astray, or how dusty-and-Victorian the store is to visit, and you’d be guaranteed my business…

Update #2: Ask and ye shall receive. Lucy has extended their book offer (see Brendan’s comment below) to me (“just because we like you”). So I still don’t really know how good the service is, but my guess is they’d be delighted if you told ‘em how to make it better. After all, that intensive marketing effort should give some sort of payback, no?

(I’m not the only designer to have this difficulty. Searching on my own name gives in third, fourth and fifth places Victor Selivanov, Sandra Quickert, and Jouko Väänänen — each considered me by Google — then from the same site the real picture of me, but named Samson Abramsky — whose own picture doesn’t appear in the results at all. Irritating, if you’re an infinite game theorist.)

I eventually reworked the page into a table, since there’s another site using that technique that also returns images for the same query, but only the right ones. It’s irritating though, since my WordPress plugins don’t play nicely with tables which means I have to write the html by hand. And of course I’m still not sure that Google is going to do the right thing.

Anyone know a cleaner way of doing this? The problem is basically, how to indicate that a page is divided into logically unrelated areas, so that keywords in one area should not be taken to relate to images in another. (I’m assuming that Google simply skips over <div>s for this sort of thing, although if anyone knows different then that would be a solution. Same WP plugin complaints, but slightly lighter on the markup than tables.)

(Robin is also responsible for eMusic/J, the unofficial —and very nice— linux eMu download app.)

I could try and draw some parallels between Abe and LT, community-focus and blah blah, but actually it’s just nice to see old friends get together. Congrats to both of ‘em.