The W3C just completed the first draft of the Emotion Markup Language (EmotionML 1.0).

Um, why?

Use cases for EmotionML can be grouped into three broad types:

1. Manual annotation of material involving emotionality, such as annotation of videos, of speech recordings, of faces, of texts, etc;
2. Automatic recognition of emotions from sensors, including physiological sensors, speech recordings, facial expressions, etc., as well as from multi-modal combinations of sensors;
3. Generation of emotion-related system responses, which may involve reasoning about the emotional implications of events, emotional prosody in synthetic speech, facial expressions and gestures of embodied agents or robots, the choice of music and colors of lighting in a room, etc.

I love crap like this!

The WikiReader is a funky Hitch-Hikers Guide style gadget that gives you Wikipedia in your pocket. I love the form, the touchscreen, the low power consumption, the low price and that it uses a MicroSD card. You can subscribe to bi-annual updates and they will post you the cards, or you can download the (4GBs of) data yourself.

     

Click here to download:

WikiReader_tag_brainfart_gadge.zip (179 KB)

I know this isn't huge news to anyone, but I thought it was interesting to see how much IE usage dips at the weekends. Despite being fairly far behind IE overall, it's pretty clear which browser many would rather be using. (source)

Anil Dash made an interesting comment in the most recent This Week in Google podcast, that Google should hire the flickr designers away. I think that suggestion is pitch-perfect: both sites have a minimalist aesthetic, but flickr can be almost a joy to use, whereas Google can be unintuitive and frankly a little fugly.

Design is a feature.

I also learned that flickr was developed from a web based MMORPG the company were working on, Game Neverending, which goes some way to explaining how flickr has such a satisfying reward structure.

The idea is simple:

1. Send out a tweet like '#blockparty for Sarah Palin' and encourage your friends to get on board.
2. Twitter search for something like sarah palin i'm OR im OR fan OR supporter  -not :), and then block all the deranged Sarah Palin fans you can find.
3. Visit @AKGOVSarahPalin and block lots of her followers.
4. Pick another target on another boring day, and do it all again.
   

Search Engine Land have an interesting post about optimising for re-finding searches, which has got me thinking. They have pointed out a user behaviour which I think is actually fast becoming a primary method for navigating the web:

Here’s an example. One usability test participant likes to view funny videos. She wanted to show me a really funny cat video after she learned that I have a tabby cat. She did not remember the name of the video or the title of the video. But she did remember the search engine she used to discover the video (Yahoo! Video) and the keywords she used to discover the video. So she went to Yahoo! Video and performed a search. I watched her scroll through multiple pages of search results. She wasn’t using keywords to identify the correct search result. She was scanning the video thumbnails, trying to recognize the particular tabby cat in the video.

Not I think about it, I'm sure many are already working on ideas like this. Still, it's a revelation to me.

There are many things Twitter could do to encourage the use of favourites more. I like the idea of putting a users last favoured tweet right on their profile, something like I've mocked up here.

I had an idea for a project today: to take photographs and composite in highly two dimensional illustrated characters. I'm sure this has been done before (Who Framed Roger Rabbit? etc.), but the image of a Miyazaki-style sea strider popped into my head, almost exactly as I've rendered it here.

I'm not sure about the result. Think I'll have to try a few more and develop the style a bit.

Robert Scoble posted an interesting comment on FriendFeed earlier.

I really screwed up today. When the plane crash happened I should have opened a friendfeed room. Here's why:

1. A room can hold multiple searches from http://search.twitter.com so I could have tracked a lot more items.

2. A room would have been a permanent repository of info about that event.

3. I could have mixed searches from Twitter search along with searches from Google News and Google Blog searches. For instance, for the CES/Consumer Electronics Show I created a room ... this room has feeds from quite a few blogs and from quite a few live searches.

This got me thinking: Google News does a good job of bundling stories about the same event. Maybe FriendFeed should do a similar thing. It would monitor the buzz coming through its pipes and when a significant term starts getting a lot of buzz, a special 'newsroom' gets auto-generated and starts aggregating items.

Posterous has recently added support for Google Analytics, making the service instantly more valuable. Not that I strictly need this myself, but I do find the stats fascinating.

Sadly though, I just discovered that the blog does lack one important feature I had assumed it would have: RSS feeds for each tag.

Being able to filter content by tag is tremendously useful, and I can already see from my analytics that people do filter my content. The Torchwood tag seems the most popular. I also like being able to filter just the photos. It would be nice to syndicate content in this way.