english

Related spurls per category

english, features

The database is finally reaching significant size so I decided to start playing with some of the things that I’ve been planning to do when a critical mass of spurls were reached.

The new addition is very small on the surface, but I suspect it may become a favorite feature for a lot of Spurl users: suggesting pages based on category contents. To see the related pages for one of your categories, open the category (in the main window, not just the Spurl bar) and click the “related spurls” link besides the category name at the top. Spurl will fetch 20 relevant pages, based on other users’ categorization.

The results are better than I even hoped for. If you choose a category with 5-10 or more links, the “related spurls” usually turns up a pretty impressive list of pages. The better defined the category is and the more pages in it, the better the results. I hope you will agree with me.

Addressing this from a more philosophical point, I’ve always had problems with the “one-size-fits-all” category structure of web directories such as Yahoo, dmoz, etc. Even with the cross referencing (the @-sign after the category names), it does not serve its purpose. I know only a handful of people that ever use these directories – people simply have so different mind-models of the world that categorization that makes perfect sense to one user, the next one finds totally irrelevant.

At the same time users tend to group related things together even though the exact hierarchy is totally different. So the thought was: What if I could simply browse my own category structure and yet find pages that I did not put there myself? Every Spurl user has put up a unique category structure – and believe me, there are as many such structures as there are users and people have fundamentally different approach in how they organize their bookmarks – yet there are often close matches between the contents of two categories even though they have different names, in different languages and are a part of a totally different category structure.

This way, everybody can use their own structure, yet tap into the power of the user base – and it will most likely scale nicely. The more users and categories, the closer matches this method will find.

All and any comments are welcomed, good or bad.

Setting the Scenario

english, The Brain Revolution

This is a chapter from a book that I thought I was going to write, called The Brain Revolution

It is an odd scenario. In a room that looks like a cozy TV-room, three people are sitting in chairs back to back in a rather tight circle. On the floor in the middle of the circle stands a computer. The computer is connected with wires to what looks like swimming caps on each individual’s head. All three look as if they are sleeping, in the comfortable looking chairs.

These people are designing a house. One of them has just bought a little piece of land, and is sitting here with her architect and an engineer laying out the details of her future home. Using the equipment in this room, these 3 people can think as one mind. The equipment enables them to pool together their different fields of expertise and preferences, giving “brainstorming” a whole new level of meaning.

As they work out more and more details of the house, the computer in the middle gathers their thoughts, creating on the fly the architectural drawings, the wiring plan, the color codes for the paint on the walls, the kitchen interiors and so on. The product of the session is a detailed three dimensional drawing of the house including all the details they have thought of so far. If it later needs to be refined, another session will be started and changes made as needed. Others will also come in to work on the finer details and give artistic input. What is certain is that once someone is connected to the equipment he or she will have as clear picture of the design as anyone involved in the project thus far has thought them through. The equipment also makes sure that when more than one person is working on the project simultaneously, their communications are completely seamless and the time spent on explaining different views and possibilities is reduced to the time it takes to think of them.

This is roughly the thought that I spent one night in the spring of 1997 thinking about, marveling at the possibilities that technology like this would enable if it existed. I allowed it to go wild in my mind, not bothered by the fact how utterly impossible it is to implement.

You can probably, just as well as I, improvise around the narrative above and find numerous different and more interesting samples of how such technology could be put to use. I will get back to more examples of my own later on.
This idea has ever since kept popping up in my head. This has been one of those ideas that rather feels like it had you, than you had it. I started looking into the practicalities involved. What would be needed to implement this kind of technology? What is the status of the sciences and technologies that would be involved? What would be the stepping stones on the way from here to there, and would these stepping stones maybe be of significant interest in themselves? Is there maybe an impossible hurdle somewhere on the way? If so, what is it and how close could we get?

On and off during this time I’ve been seeking the answers to these questions and even though I don’t have much of the answers yet, my findings on the way have been interesting in themselves.

In what follows, I want to share some of these findings. As you will probably already have realized, the opening scenario is still far-fetched science fiction. At the same time the building blocks for it are being made and what will be made of them will be fascinating, regardless of whether we will ever reach this opening scenario or pass far beyond it.

We are at the dawn of the Brain Revolution.

The Brain Revolution

Brain technologies, english

Once I was going to write a book. As a matter of fact I started writing a book. The subject was brain technologies from technical, philosophical, historical and futuristic standpoints.

As all of my time now is devoted to developing Spurl.net further, I realized that this book is not going to be finished. At the same time I have a lot of material that I have already written and it won’t do any good lying around on my computer, therefore I’ve decided to publish this material bit-by-bit on the Wetware blog (that has also been neglected due to Spurl).

Take it for what it is – more or less provisional work, unedited and not necessarily in the order it would have been in a completed work. The first chapter follows and other bits and pieces will come in during the next weeks.

The latest batch of updates + policies

english, features

A few updates in the last couple of days worth noticing.

  • Moving multiple spurls: I finally got around doing this. Should have been done ages ago. There is now a checkbox in front of every entry in the lists on the My Spurls page. Check the appropriate boxes, select the category these entries should be moved to in the dropdown box at the bottom of the list and click “Move”. As easy as that. I’m sure you’ll agree that this is a major usability enhancement.
  • Faster recommendations and now time sensitive: The recommendations now take into account that your interests may be changing over time and bases the recommendations more on the last things users have added. The recommendations are also faster now, but still need some work on that front, especially for users with a lot of spurls. I’m becoming happier with the quality of the recommendations but there is still a list of improvements that I think will make them more relevant. The most involved of you will notice that there is a new scale of measurements for the recommendations, ranging from 1-5, where 1 is a vague connection and 5 a very strong one. Obviously the longer the period you choose for your recommendations, the more relevant matches you are likely to get.
  • Recommendations in Spurl bar: You can now access your recommendations on a new tab in the Spurl bar. The recommendations there are additions from the last week. They will therefore be gradually changing, so you won’t miss things that Spurl thinks you will find interesting.
  • Speed improvements: I spent quite some time during the week on optimizing various things. The database has been growing really fast over the past two weeks and that resulted in some things – especially database queries – becoming quite slow. I’ve been focusing on the most used things, such as the front page, and the tabs on the Spurl bar and am working my way through other, less used parts of the system.

As for the practical part, Spurl now has Terms of Use and a Privacy Policy. I don’t think there will be any surprises there, it’s basically: We’ll be good to you and you should be good to us 🙂
The main points are:

  • We don’t collect personally identifiable information and we’re not interested in it.
  • We use cookies to make the service more user friendly, nothing is stored there other than a few preferences and an id to recognize a revisiting registered user.
  • We may study collective trends and information in the database. Such studies will not involve the trends of individual users and will only be used in an aggregated way. And btw. anything that is marked “private” will be left out of any such studies, and is for your eyes only.
  • You’re not allowed to store illegal material. If we become aware of such data, it will be deleted immediately.
  • Don’t try anything stupid.

Even though it doesn’t say in the ToU or PP, I want to emphasize that Spurl is and will always be free of charge and free of ads for personal use. See the FAQ for details

Spurl.net grows fast

english, Spurl.net

After a quite positive article about Spurl.net in Lockergnome – Windows Fanatics newsletter, Spurl.net saw a lot of new faces last week.

Traffic has grown significantly and a lot of uploaded bookmarks should be making the recommendations and other Spurl features that use aggregated data from the Spurl community even more interesting.

Spurl.net welcomes all our new users and we hope to see you spurling a lot in the future.

We are always working to make Spurl.net better. An upgrade is scheduled by the end of the week where the latest improvements and additions will be revealed. Stay tuned.

– – –

BTW: Several users have been posting ideas and support requests to the blog, which is fine, but not ideal for keeping track of them and for other users to find the information later on. I’m therefore looking for a good bulletin board solution to install on Spurl.net. Preferably PHP/MySQL based. Any suggestions?

Multiple categories and other updates

english, Spurl.net

The last few days have been spent on some good rearrangements. Most of them will not really show on the surface, but here are some of the changes you might have noticed:

  • It is now possible to put a spurled page in more than one category at once (press the “multiple” link in the Advanced spurling window).
  • I’ve been simplifying the setup process and putting more emphasis on that users also install the Spurl bar which seems to be a real hit with everybody that installs it.
  • The front page has been changed somewhat to try to better explain what Spurl.net is and does (only new/logged out users see that bit). As you know, Spurl is many things so all suggestions for a short and catching description of what Spurl.net is are welcomed!
  • The help and tips and tricks have been updated a bit, but there is more work to do there.

Introducing: The Spurl bar

english, features

Spurl steps aside…

I just completed wrapping the core functionality of Spurl.net into a neat toolbar that sits on the side of your browser.

At the top of the bar is a search field, for searching your spurls (spurls are essentially “Bookmarks on steroids” for those of you that need a tagline).

Below the search field there are 4 tabs:

  • My most used: A list of the pages you have most frequently visited through Spurl. After using Spurl for a couple of days, this tab will hold more or less all the pages you visit on a regular basis. I have found this to be a personal favorite.
  • My spurls: A treeview holding all your spurls in categories.
  • Hot now: The pages that Spurl users have spurled the most in the last few days.
  • Just in:The freshest spurls from all users.

Note: The icon in front of a spurl ( ) is a link to your details on the spurl, and allows you to change them.

This new bar gives an extremely easy access to the spurl functionality with minimal interruption to your normal browsing behavior. I don’t know why I didn’t implement it like this from the beginning, but here it is.

Enjoy!

– – –

The installation is as simple as it gets.

For Opera and Mozilla (etc.) users it is a single click of a link.

Explorer users must restart their systems for the full installation (why is Bill so difficult?), but they are in for an extra treat. The installation will also create two new buttons in the Navigation bar (next to the Back and Home links, etc.). One for toggling the Spurl bar on and off, the other one for spurling pages. So in that case you don’t even need the good old Spurl! link in the Links bar any more – the new button has all it’s functionality.

And don’t worry, no software is in fact installed on the computer, just a few registry changes and the install page holds a link to uninstall it as easily as it was installed.

To install the Spurl bar, go here. If you are a new user – go to the front page of Spurl.net and register. The last step of the registration shows you how to install the Spurl bar.

Note: If the buttons in the Navigation bar (Explorer only) don’t appear after you have restarted the computer, you have to go to View / Toolbars / Customize… and locate them there. This only happens for those that have previously customized their Toolbar somehow.

– – –

Update Apr 14, 2004: Mozilla / Firefox / Firebird / Netscape support now completed as well – unfortunately Safari does not support sidebars, but a workaround is in the making.

Right click to Spurl!

english, features

Internet Explorer users can now add a Spurl! link to their right-click context menus.

This has several traits:

  • It allows users to spurl pages that appear in frames.
  • It saves space on the desktop for those users that don’t use the Links bar for anything else.
  • It bypasses pop-up blockers

To install the right-click option, go to the Spurl link page and see “Version 3” at the bottom of the page.

Hope you like it.

Private spurls and various minor updates

english, features

I may have been quiet for the last few days, but busy none the less. You may notice a new checkbox in the “Advanced” spurling window, labeled “Private”.

This allows you to spurl pages that you don’t want to go through the public listings on Spurl.net. If a page is marked “Private”, the only place you can find it is through “My spurls” on the web, and of course when searching your spurls. These pages do not appear in any lists anywhere on the Spurl.net website and not in syndicated lists. So, now you can happily take advantage of Spurl.net without fearing that your competitors, friends or spouses will be aware of what you have marked 😉

To change the “Private” setting for a page click the “Change comment/category” icon next to the page on the “My spurls” page. I will be changing that later on to simply “Edit entry”.

Other changes are not as obvious, but still worth mentioning:

  • The search results, especially when searching the entire spurl library should now be much more relevant, and searching your own spurls should also have improved. The relevance algorithm is rather complex, but in short it puts a certain weight on the title, description, comments and categories people have used for the spurl. It then also takes into account how many people have spurled the page, as an indication of significance. When searching your own spurls, the text of indexed pages is obviously searched as well, and other people’s comments and likings play a far smaller role. I will play around some more with this code, so if you have comments on search results, please let me know.
  • The recommendations have also been tweaked a bit, so they should be more relevant now.

All for now – but more to come during Easter.

Successfully implemented CD purchase protection

english, General

My girlfriend bought me a CD yesterday. It was one I really wanted so it was a well appreciated gift.

Now, we have our entire 5-600 CD collection ripped and stored on a server in our home. There is no stereo in our living room, only iTunes. So obviously the first thing to do with a new CD is to rip it and store on the server.

But NO, there is this wonderful copy protection mechanism on the disc and I would probably need to go to some lengths if I wanted to surpass it. This means I will probably not listen to the disc a lot – our CD collection is stored away in boxes and I will probably not be keeping this one disc around to be able to play it – and by the way on a lousy custom built player that comes with the CD.

So, for me, this CD is flawed. After all, I’m pretty sure my girlfriend was buying me the music, not a piece of plastic – the bits, not the atoms as Nicholas Negroponte would say. And my bits are flawed. Usually when you buy something that is flawed, you can return it but the store will probably not be accepting my compaints in this case.

From now on we will be checking any disc we’re thinking about buying for signs of copy protection, and if it has one – we won’t buy it. It’s as simple as that.

All of a sudden the intended copy protection has become a successfully implemented purchase protection!

Nice one – music publishers. No wonder you’re going out of business. If we could only buy our bits without hassle, you would be doing great.

So, next time you’re in a CD store – check for a copy protection label. If its there, don’t buy the disc. You want to be buying the bits – not the atoms.