Matt Hampel | matth.org

The New York Times divides tags into several groups:

(Des) = Descriptive subject terms assigned by Times indexers (subject headings)
(Geo) = Geographic locations
(Org) = Organizations (includes companies)
(Per) = People (persons)

We can do the same thing using a civic wiki.

You’ll need four categories: Subject Headings, Locations, Organizations, and People (we’ve already got people on Arborwiki). Doesn’t look like adding more complexity will be helpful.

Use the MediaWiki API to export each category as a list in whatever format you need. CSV, JSON?

The modify your publishing software’s tagging system. It probably has an auto-suggest feature. Use the API as the data source for the auto-suggest instead of the built-in tag list.

There you have it — a central database of important things that can be publicly negoitated by everyone who uses it it.

You don’t have to have a turf war over whose tags are the best (Your newspapers? Mine?). This makes it easier to track subjects over time — the same phrases will describe roughly the same things across local websites.

You can also automatically pull in the B-Copy from the wiki using the tag.

Page redirects will work even if the page that is forwarded has category information.

So you can write a page for AATA with content like this:

#REDIRECT [[Ann Arbor Transportation Authority]]

[[Category:Acronyms]]

Which will auto forward the user to the correct explanatory page.

The bonus is you  get a nice listing of everything categorized as an acronym (ArborWiki example)

I updated the AADL search-by-keyword Firefox plugin. You can download it at this address: http://mycroft.mozdev.org/search-engines.html?author=Matt+Hampel
The AADL upgraded their catalog search recently, and one of the excellent new changes is clean URLs. For example, something like this:
http://aadl.org/catalog/search/keyword/Julia Child

is a valid address — even with the space!

But this also means that search plugins were borked; hence the change. Thanks to Katherine Lawrence for prompting me to fix this.

That mycroft page also has a super-easy form for creating new search plugins. You can load any plugin into the first field on that page to see what it looks like — the ID of mine is 33816.

Still thinking about social energy / water meters after a conversation at Berkman last year.

Here’s one example from a greenwash / happy-marketing-speak site. (you know there’s not much to a company if they only post renderings)

Someone (Gruber?) linked to a description of how an iPhone app grabs images of Sudoku puzzles and digitizes them. Probably wouldn’t be too hard to do the same for different kinds of [water/energy] meters. But it requires discipline on par with a non-Bluetooth pedometer and Walker Tracker: you’ve got to snap the photo or enter the numbers every day.

The other option is to install your own flow meter after the official meter — here’s a McMaster-Carr page  for costing. Set up an X-10 for wireless capture?

How social do you need to be? Lots of levels. Your private dashboard. Some sparklines on your homepage. A weekly email telling you how you compare to the other folks you know on [insert social network].

Use some central site to contribute anonymized stats from users with addresses verified (postcard method)?  Then sell the ostensibly aggregated data to a utility lobbyist for large profit later. How private is your water usage?