Fluidinfo - Latest Comments

Re: Our new look and new products

Sudarshan P — Sat, 30 Jun 2012 08:13:50 -0000

Is this a pivot? How is this different from what is visible at twitter.com itself? Over time twitter plans to further enhance hashtags. So is there any real value add? What is the data that is coming out of fluiddb that is enriching the hashtag? I am not criticizing here. I am still trying to figure out what is going on...

Re: Our new look and new products

Luiz Siqueira Neto — Fri, 22 Jun 2012 13:14:07 -0000

I can't find a way to integrate my Tumblr account with Fluidinfo, is it suppose to be easy? Thanks about some enlightenment.

Re: Next-generation tagging

Best web Hosting — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 07:28:28 -0000

Thanks Nicholas. I am eagerly waiting for the mobile friendly version.

Re: Next-generation tagging

Nicholas Tollervey — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 03:44:48 -0000

Hey Ej,

The current version of the website is targeted at desktop browsers like Chrome, Safari and Firefox. We'll be releasing a mobile friendly version soon.

Re: Next-generation tagging

Ej — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 23:59:16 -0000

Not really working on an iPad, can't get passed the marked up screen after clicking on a tag. For example, recent activity doesn't seem to do anything.

Re: Fluidinfo as a universal metadata engine

Pakistani music — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 08:25:34 -0000

I think the problem is but solved but thanks for the advice.

Re: Indicating (shared) interest in things without disclosing what they are

Stephen — Wed, 17 Aug 2011 01:33:13 -0000

I developed a similar technique 2 years ago to track objects in Nova Initia.
While obviously hashes aren't completely secure, that wasn't the goal.
We track objects on URL's, but we didn't want to sacrifice player
privacy. This allows us to track player created objects without having
knowledge of where that object is. It has worked beautifully. Terry, I'd
like to speak with you further on this subject when you get some time.

Re: How we made an API for BoingBoing in an evening

@courtneyBolton — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 11:25:07 -0000

an openly writable API?
→"Fluidinfo can tag data to any object."
+Image | Attached

Re: Introducing the Fluidinfo Explorer

Terry Jones — Sun, 17 Jul 2011 20:46:42 -0000

Hi Matthew

The source is at https://launchpad.net/fluidinf... and the author is Pier-Andre Parent (http://twitter.com/paparent). He hangs out in #fluidinfo on irc.freenode.net where you can join us if you like! :-)

Terry

Re: Introducing the Fluidinfo Explorer

Matthew Norris — Sun, 17 Jul 2011 19:52:41 -0000

Is the source code available for this?

Re: Personalized filtering of friend requests in social networks

terrycojones — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 17:37:27 -0000

Hi Jeff - thanks for reading! Yes, you're right, that clarification is important. I've made a change above. Thanks!

Re: Personalized filtering of friend requests in social networks

Jeff Blaine — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 17:28:24 -0000

I think it's important to clarify "None of the resolvers needed to ask permission to participate." to "None of the resolvers needed to ask permission of LinkedIn to participate."

Re: Fluidinfo is funded!

Lauraine lee — Fri, 13 May 2011 06:18:31 -0000

Such a wonderful post. Its very informative. Thanks for sharing.
Formspring Backgrounds
Fiverr clone

Re: How we built the O’Reilly API using Fluidinfo

buy steroids uk — Tue, 10 May 2011 10:22:19 -0000

love that scraperwiki logo.

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Re: How we built the O’Reilly API using Fluidinfo

Nicholas Tollervey — Wed, 20 Apr 2011 07:18:37 -0000

Hi Dan (Publius),

Thanks for taking the time to comment. :-)

My point was simply that I didn't have time to learn/remember all about RDF/OWL and other semweb technology or learn how to use a library that allowed me to get where I wanted to be ASAP.

Put simply, it was simpler and easier to scrape the data than it was to use O'Reilly's existing api.

Obviously, we're very sympathetic to the aims and objectives of the Semantic Web. However, one of our primary aims is simplicity and a relatively shallow learning curve. Unfortunately that's not been the experience of my developers when encountering semweb technology (although I acknowledge this is a matter of opinion).

I personally think there's room for lots of solutions in this space and people will choose whichever one seems most appropriate.

With regard to you point about, "all the metadata in the world". As I said, we're just one service among many and people will use us if we meet their requirements. There's no nefarious plot for global domination of data.

You go on to discuss how Fluidinfo would have to do this or that given various situations. Fluidinfo *as a technology* doesn't have any opinion on this (although *we* care very deeply about the data we are custodians of). Put simply, we'd rather users work it out themselves via emerging conventions and the evolution of the data structures they define with their namespaces/tags and the objects they end up tagging. Differences in perspective are handled via the namespaces and the permission system imposes some sort of ownership and therefore trust in Fluidinfo.

I hope this makes sense.

Please don't hesitate to get in touch if you want to discuss these things further. I personally welcome dialogue about these issues since it's something I find fascinating. I'm ntoll at the domain of this site ;-)

Best wishes,

Nicholas.

Re: Top data blogs information now in Fluidinfo, with an API

TIDS API — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 17:39:33 -0000

If anyone is interested in a telephony data API we have one at www.tirs.us complete with docs and prepayment system.

Re: Examples of Fluidinfo O’Reilly API queries

Yosun Chang — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 20:09:38 -0000

is it possible to use aggregate functions, such as count() ? - just trying to find out the number of entries in a subset...

Re: How we built the O’Reilly API using Fluidinfo

Publius — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 12:38:27 -0000

This is the first time I've come to Fluidinfo, and I must say I am perplexed by your reasoning. You wrote that you didn't want to go through the trouble of parsing RDF, yet RDF is supposed to form the basis of a decentralized universal meta-language for generating ontologies in the Web Ontology Language (OWL). OWL resources can be reasoned-over and aligned algorithmically. How does Fluidinfo further this cause or make information more free? If the goal is to form a vast repository of metadeta, then why not produce software and ideology that furthers the burgeoning yet commercially vulnerable Semantic Web? Hypothetically, if Fluidinfo were to collect all the metadata in the world, I don't see how, as a centralized data store, it could discover or exploit the inherently loose-ended, implicit relationships found in natural language by virtue of its polysemy. In particular, supposing Fluidinfo had a single document "about" each item, Fluidinfo would end up with multiple fields with the same value keyed by synonyms (and by hyponyms, hypernyms, troponyms, etc). Consequently, you would have to merge these fields in order to make sense of them, which would result in either massive data duplication or an erasure of history by destructive updates. In contrast, one of the reasons for using distributing and querying RDF/OWL ontologies is to preserve original differences in perspectives, contexts, and naming-conventions for intersecting scopes and domains. By keeping ontologies distinct, the problems of storage space, semantic ambiguity (like synonyms, etc) can be resolved by generating separate merged ontologies and views that represent a *statistical* alignment, not an absolute one, generated by historical erasure. publius[at]ufl.edu. Anyway, as I said, I'm not too familiar with Fluidinfo, so please forgive my misunderstanding. -Dan G.

Re: Putting domain names onto data with Fluidinfo

George Pickett — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 13:14:23 -0000

Terry,

I think I understand this concept 80-90%. I'm not a programmer, just interested in tech in general. I watched your demo at "launch conference" on justin.tv and didn't understand your company, but researched more. I think you do a better job describing how it works and why it's useful on this post, "Putting domain names onto data with Fluidinfo."

However, to reach a wider audience I think you need to continue to work on making this easier to understand for the "average Joe." Maybe you could just create a bunch more of those images like you created with "book info."

Another thing to make it more clear would be to give us a vision of what your company would be at its ultimate success. If everyone in the world understood and used Fluidinfo, how would this look? How would most people use it? How would people benefit from it? In my opinion, giving a vision of your future success would help me to understand why this is bound to be the next killer app. I'd love to hear your thoughts on this. Thanks

George

Re: How we built the O’Reilly API using Fluidinfo

Patent Attorney — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 03:32:55 -0000

here is a similar story

O’Reilly Media is joining with Fluidinfo, an online information storage and search platform that supports openly-writable metadata of any kind, to launch a contest to encourage software developers to write applications for the O’Reilly Fluidinfo “Writable API.” APIs or Application Programmer Interfaces provide third party developers with a set of rules and permissions that gives them access to a content owners data and allows them to create apps and new information products quickly and easily.

Re: How we built the O’Reilly API using Fluidinfo

Francis Irving — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 12:05:44 -0000

Great stuff! You can find all Nicolas's scrapers, including these O'Reilly ones, on ScraperWiki here.

http://scraperwiki.com/profile...

Re: Importing data into FluidDB with Flimp

Nicholas Tollervey — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 05:25:54 -0000

Hey Jeff,

Nope. The about tag value for each object is created by concatenating the name of the dataset (data.gov.uk) with whatever the unique value from the referenced "key" field is (in this case, the "id" field), resulting in data.gov.uk:some_long_uuid4_from_the_uk_govt.

The description value, "Metadata from data.gov.uk" is used when creating the descriptions of the tags and namespaces. Having such a human readable value just adds context to the tags and namespaces.

Flimp needs some love and is on my radar for refactoring in the very near future. All comments and suggestions most welcome..!

Nicholas.

Re: Importing data into FluidDB with Flimp

Jeff Blaine — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 17:28:49 -0000

Just curious, wouldn't the about tag show "Metadata from data.gov.uk:1ea4bfa9-9ae1-4be0-ae73-e0c4a26caa6c" and not "data.gov.uk:1ea4bfa9-9ae1-4be0-ae73-e0c4a26caa6c"

Re: Fluidinfo named as Tim O’Reilly’s favorite startup

Patent Attorney — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 03:26:05 -0000

Here is a similar story

In the kickoff session of SXSW, Jason Calcanis of Mahalo interviewed Tim O'Reilly of tech book publishing fame. According to the program, Calcanis hoped to uncover "the secrets of Tim's success, and how year-after-year, and decade-after-decade, he remains relevant and engaged."

When Calcanis asked O'Reilly if he had a favorite startup, O'Reilly named Fluidinfo. This shouldn't be too big a surprise - O'Reilly is on Fluidinfo's advisory board.

Re: Indicating (shared) interest in things without disclosing what they are

terrycojones — Wed, 09 Mar 2011 22:02:35 -0000

Hi Eric!

No. You'd need to walk their tags and do a "has" query on each one. That's not too hard...