Microsyntax.org - Latest Comments in Microsyntax.org: A Messifesto

Re: Microsyntax.org: A Messifesto

JoeyShepp — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 20:09:02 -0000

Stowe, this is great work! There is a huge opportunity for more structured Twitter data. Reminds me that the Internet is 'human powered', literally.

I'm founder of OpenBrands and we're working with Microsyntax in Brands discussions. Our first initiative is encouraging the use of hashtags for intentionally talking with and about Brands. We call them 'brandtags'. For some companies, like #Apple, it really helps to follow a brand discussion.

We eventually see a currency and rating system emerging for discussing brand sentiment.

Let us know how we can help.

Re: Microsyntax.org: A Messifesto

stoweboyd — Thu, 28 May 2009 18:31:17 -0000

1. Are you aware of http://twitterdata.org/ ? They strike me as synergistic to your proposal.

Yes, I am in contact with some of those guys, and we are going to talk soon.

2. Do you plan on opening a crowdsourcing-type wiki to get user input?

Yes, and I hope to launch the wiki early next week.

3) It would be good to instill more commands about the nature of the Tweet, such as RT.

When the wiki is up, you could post these ideas.

Re: Microsyntax.org: A Messifesto

William Mougayar — Thu, 28 May 2009 16:22:22 -0000

Excellent initiative. 3 comments:
1) Are you aware of http://twitterdata.org/ ? They strike me as synergistic to your proposal.
2) Do you plan on opening a crowdsourcing-type wiki to get user input?
3) It would be good to instill more commands about the nature of the Tweet, such as RT. For e.g. pre-classify the type of Tweet. Some examples: 1) Something am doing, 2) Notification of a blog I wrote or article I saw, 3) Really original comment about something, etc. One area that could benefit is in dissociating the Twitter content that's replicating content elsewhere vs. true original Tweets.

Re: Microsyntax.org: A Messifesto

stoweboyd — Thu, 28 May 2009 12:50:48 -0000

You are ahead of what the tools will generally do. Although search on these multiword hashtags works.

Re: Microsyntax.org: A Messifesto

Rowan Price — Thu, 28 May 2009 12:17:26 -0000

> I am going to push for adopt of the closing hashtag for multiword tags, like '#web standards#

Glad to hear that; I like that syntax... just ran into an instance where I felt I needed to use it: http://twitter.com/roprice/...

Re: Microsyntax.org: A Messifesto

stoweboyd — Thu, 28 May 2009 09:38:50 -0000

Interesting way to look at it, that we loose data because it is not syntactically marked.

Re: Microsyntax.org: A Messifesto

stoweboyd — Thu, 28 May 2009 09:35:59 -0000

I am going to push for adopt of the closing hashtag for multiword tags, like '#web standards#'. Also, in many contexts, what we might want to use are subtags, like this '#sxsw.16bit' which would refer to a certain event at the SXSW conference called '16bit'. These would help in readability and finer granularity to tags.

Re: Microsyntax.org: A Messifesto

bit2bit — Thu, 28 May 2009 07:54:52 -0000

This is like the best news I've heard in months!

This is gonna be huge, industry is gonna love it. If there was any need for a native german speaker for any reason, I'd love to contribute, pls. don't hesitate to contact me :) Greetings from Vienna, M.

Re: Microsyntax.org: A Messifesto

Rowan Price — Wed, 27 May 2009 13:04:32 -0000

You know, I'm with you on subtags (and so many other ideas, including forming this organization). It bothers me, as it must you, that by running multiple words together into a hashtag, like #webstandards, you end up tagging your microcontent only once, when you could be tagging it thrice (web, standards, and "web standards"). For a while, I was using hypens, as in #web-standards, but that felt like spitting in the wind... with an initiative like microsyntax.org, less so. I think this will help boost signals everywhere :)

Re: Microsyntax.org: A Messifesto

digidave — Wed, 27 May 2009 03:19:53 -0000

This is awesome Stowe. There is an immense amount of data lost on Twitter every day. I think there is the potential, through some organization, to capture it.

Re: Microsyntax.org: A Messifesto

pkitano — Tue, 26 May 2009 20:19:21 -0000

We've been working on adhoc tag systems for hyperlocal city sites to aggregate by city location / category (#shopping, #events, #jobs, etc) that we've seen used in common sense fashion. As Twitter penetrates locally and used for local advertising, these tags will serve commercial purposes to catalogue local merchants' advertising into a timeline so the consumer can search for local deals categorically. Twitter will replace local circulars and Penny Savers.

Re: Microsyntax.org: A Messifesto

Russell Okamoto — Tue, 26 May 2009 18:02:26 -0000

This is awesome. To create sort of a universal glue language for the net called Celly, I'm working on a collective syntax that abstracts constructs and formats across a wide swath of net resources including IRC, Jabber, Twitter, Jaiku, email, rss, xrds, activitystreams, etc.. I think it will be great if microsyntax.org can help sort all this out! Look forward to your activities.

Re: Microsyntax.org: A Messifesto

jmccabegorman — Tue, 26 May 2009 16:58:53 -0000

Hola -

We're using the subtag microsyntax convention (already in practice > 2mos) at @polarwisdom and @organizedwisdom.

Love to help out.

Best -
Jen

Re: Microsyntax.org: A Messifesto

WyrdestGeek — Tue, 26 May 2009 16:03:51 -0000

It wasn't clear to me from the article (which I only skimmed) that they were going to try to instruct Twitter'ers on how they *must* format their tweets. I got the impression that this site was going to document known syntax as it evolves, and possibly (possibly) make a few suggestions for formatting, if and only if, it managed to gain enough clout.

So, supposing the site winds up only being good for documenting the existing syntax, what then? Well that would still be pretty useful, IMHO. If you were a brand new twitter-er, you could start here to figure out wtf all the /../ and RT and @... meant.

--
Furry cows moo and decompress.

Re: Microsyntax.org: A Messifesto

Chris Messina — Tue, 26 May 2009 13:46:07 -0000

Tiny URLs are the zip files of Twitter. I doubt we'll see much more compression than that!

Re: Microsyntax.org: A Messifesto

wmfischer — Tue, 26 May 2009 12:33:42 -0000

very interesting post. we've been using contextual intelligence to gather meaning from the words in a tweet and have also been appending metadata to each tweet hoping to turn data into information. be interested to get your feedback.

Cheers,
Bill
http://twitterjobsearch.com

Re: Microsyntax.org: A Messifesto

stoweboyd — Tue, 26 May 2009 08:07:08 -0000

Well, if you'd like to spend your time that way, feel free. And in general, people's grammar is very good, unless you are thinking proscriptively.

Re: Microsyntax.org: A Messifesto

dave — Tue, 26 May 2009 07:55:03 -0000

uh, nice idea - and great conceptual effort - but if folks can't even adhere (remotely) to the regular rules of grammar, why on earth would they adopt a new set of rules for an ad hoc service online? shouldn't we focus on teaching children how to write first?

Re: Microsyntax.org: A Messifesto

stoweboyd — Tue, 26 May 2009 06:42:17 -0000

I am not certain that we will be developing any compression methods, although we might comment about the issues surrounding them, if they come into use as URL shorteners have.

Re: Microsyntax.org: A Messifesto

stoweboyd — Tue, 26 May 2009 06:40:52 -0000

We will be making our plans for community involvement more clear in the days to come. Thanks.

Re: Microsyntax.org: A Messifesto

Chris — Tue, 26 May 2009 05:20:29 -0000

This sounds like the totally right direction where we should head to at the moment with the flourishing of short message services like Twitter. Besides giving advice to people new to those services in terms of abbreviations, I can already think of building services which convert over-the-size messages to fit into a certain amount of characters. Furthermore, status message research would highly benefit from an API providing translation service. Are you planning to do any implementations in this direction anytime soon?

Re: Microsyntax.org: A Messifesto

Andrew Velis — Tue, 26 May 2009 03:21:03 -0000

To whom it may concern, are there plans for heuristic learning algorithms? How will you know that you have succeeded with your goals? Do you think this is the evolution of tweet messages? Were there other steps brought up here? Of the advanced syntax recommended (and to be studied) do you have idea's as to what will catch on? I am asking alot of questions because 1: I have never seen anything really close to this and 2: advanced thoughts in twitters next steps I personally find intriguing. My hopes is to promote discussion like mentioned in the post. Could even bejumping the gun by posting this here and not in a forum which is TBD.

I have done some screen scraping to mimic search results using #python , list comprehensions, and TFIDF based algorithms (in college of course). I am willing share any thoughts to help contribute.

Good Luck.

I look forward to hearing more and contributing.

Re: Microsyntax.org: A Messifesto

Vaibhav — Tue, 26 May 2009 02:12:15 -0000

This post is music to my ears. I have been wanting to do something like this for so long (and haven't been able to work on it for lack of time). I am so glad that you are taking this up.

I will be following (and hopefully contributing).

Also, do let me know what I can do to help.