Finnotype

Eleven years ago Tim Berners-Lee said that the next logical step for the World Wide Web was  semantic . The idea was that one day machines could read and understand Web pages. Content would be tagged in a meaningful way: a date would be tagged as a date and an address as an address. Relevance would replace ambiguity. Finding, sharing and combining information would become easier. Today the semantic Web remains a pipe dream. Here is quick proof: When in Basel, Switzerland, go to Google News . Look at the top stories. See a bunch of stories about bank liquidity requirements? Minimum capital levels for financial institutions? How are these stories relevant to you being in Basel? They are not. Google is doing simple string matching. It detects your geographical location to Basel. It then finds news stories that say "Basel". It doesn't know that the Basel III agreement that regulates bank capital adequacy just happens to be named after the city ...

AdminCentral is a Magnolia CMS user interface where administrators and editors work. In this post I show how to configure menu permissions for a custom user role. AdminCentral provides menus for common tasks. When you click a menu, workable items are displayed on the right. You can hide menus and move them around to promote often-used items or deny permission to items that users should not be able to access. Magnolia CMS ships with typical roles such as superuser, editor and publisher. While a superuser can see everything, editors only see items that are relevant to their job. Permissions for custom roles Suppose your organization has a very specialized editor role, Category Editor, who is responsible for maintaining a taxonomy of categories. Categories are tags that help site visitors find related, interesting content. Categories are managed in a custom data type under the Data menu. The  demo-project website  has an example taxonomy consistin...

This post was inspired by Amit Patel's question  on how to add images in a Magnolia category cloud. Thanks Amit! What is a tag cloud? Tags are words or short phrases that describe content such as articles or photos. A tag cloud is a weighted lists of those tags displayed as a group where popular tags are given more visual weight than less popular tags. The visual weight is accomplished by making popular tags larger or bolder. Here's a tag cloud from  Flickr  with tags that people use on their photos. Another cloud with trending Twitter topics. Magnolia category cloud Magnolia's category cloud paragraph has the same principle. Articles on a website are tagged with categories to make it easier to find related content. Categories can be displayed in a cloud just like tags. The Magnolia category cloud is an editorial paragraph rather than compiled automatically from popularity statistics. This means that editors can set the weights to promote c...

Have you noticed? It's kind of small and unobtrusive, hard to recognize unless you are looking for it. But it's there. And it may have a huge impact on how people find stuff on Amazon. I am talking about Amazon's decision to add a folksonomy-based categorization scheme to the vast online store. Next time you search for a book on Amazon's Web site, pay attention to the little Your tags box on the details page. The online merchant describes the new feature like this: "Tags provide an easy way for you to remember and classify any item on the Amazon site for later recall. For example, you might be shopping for holiday gifts and tag items with the names of the people on your shopping list. You might also want to tag items you've purchased in the past. Don't like the way Amazon has organized its science fiction or cookbooks? Tag the items you care about with the categories that matter to you. Because people's tags are visible to others, a great side effect o...