Here’s another article with a bit more blurb in it.

I nearly fell off my chair laughing when I read:

"one of the best-known computer games programmers in the UK"

Crossed wires somewhere I suspect - certainly not a claim I would have made. Nice to get a name check though.

I’m delighted to be able to announce that I’ve been invited to join the new Learn3K research centre, based at the National College of Ireland in Dublin, and headed up by Professor Stephen Heppell.

To quote a press release on the NCI website,

The new Learn3K Research Centre in the National College of Ireland has been established to locate Ireland at the heart of a renaissance in global learning. The Learn3K Research Centre is in a unique position to bring together international best practice, industry, educationalists and policy makers to engage in a series of high impact practical implementation projects, both local, national and worldwide.

Exciting stuff. The exact details of my project are yet to be thrashed out, so I’ll post more when I can, but I’m likely to be working on authoring tools, with the emphasis on mobile devices.

A came across a Jeffrey Zeldman post about tag clouds (via something that was via Kevin Marks).

I agree with many of the comments that others have left, the gist of which being that Jeffrey is wrong to assert that tag clouds are supposed to replace taxonomies.

I do also agree with Jeffrey though that the tags aren’t nearly as interesting in isolation as they would be if some sort of taxonomy of tags could be created.

Since tags are user defined, the taxonomy would also have to evolve on its own.

I wonder if it might be possible to do this by looking at two things.

1) the relationship between one tagged item, and another linked tagged item

2) items which have multiple tags

Both of these situations suggest some kind of linkage between tags. I’m not quite sure whether it’s enough, but it would be interesting to see what could be done by looking at these linkages.

Reminds me of an article I read in Scientific American about using google searches as a way of inferring the semantic ‘connectedness’ of words.

I wonder whether it would also be possible to look at the relationships between the people who use tags, the tags that they commonly use. Perhaps people who are at the centre of hot topics of conversation would somehow allow some of that heat to rub off on other tags that they use.

That might be a way to combat the problem of obscure tags withering and dying. The analogy would be - “well, that’s an obscure topic, but Ms X is talking about it and I like what she normally says so maybe I should take a look”.

Tom Smith had a link about An End To The Toilet Seat War, which reminded me of something…

Bizarrely, I managed to prove to Caroline once that if we both leave the seat where we needed it to be, then she’s more likely to find the seat down when coming to it next time, so she actually gets the better deal.

The maths really works too :)

I suspect that this should have some sort of fancy mathematical name with the words “Sam’s” and “Theorem” in there somewhere. Any suggestions?

Yet another late match report… get your finger out Deane!

You can get the BBC summary here, which I won’t bother rehashing…

We played well in the first half, and I was particularly impressed with Rossi’s distribution - often rolling the ball out to the full backs or giving a quick throw to the wings rather than the aimless punt up field which has been the norm this season.

Thorpe started well, looking lively, but faded as the game progressed. As he’s now been released, I guess that was his last chance and he blew it. Possibly a bit harsh given his bad luck with injuries.

It was great to see Birch scoring. I hope that he has a good rest and comes back rejuvenated next season.

Overall, the season ended with a whimper rather than a bang, but in a weird way it was nice to have nothing immediate to worry about.

I say nothing immediate, because there’s plenty to worry about next season… like, for example, will we have any new players, or even enough of our existing ones?

On a positive note though, I’ve felt that for most of the season, a lot of our key players haven’t been doing half what I know they are capable of. Whilst that’s not a good thing, it does open the possibility that we could really get going next season if a few people come back firing on all cylinders.

Time to cross my fingers and renew the season ticket… O we’re the R block we’re the R block we’re the R block Shepherds bush…