Akshay Surve

To start with I must say BarCampMumbai was as coOL as its theme ‘Bindaas Geeks | Hackin over Vada Pav’

Some highlights :

• 3 simultaneous tracks named ‘VadaPav, Bhaji on the Beach and … don’t remember the name (?)
• I just loved the wiki-like scheduler at the venue. Stick a note with ur name and topic on the board. I moved my my note thrice ;-) . Finally I just let it be….. and then Tarique moved it to the best slot (first on after the lunch break)
• Loads of people who I knew but never seen/met in person. http://barcamp.org/BarCampMumbai#ConfirmedParticipants
• The food… :p
• Some thoughtful sessions
• My talk (…LoL! Now I can say Been there | Done that! … a nice experience for me)
• … Lots more… check the BarCampMumbai wiki for what others had to say.
• The conference extended after sessions too. Mahesh Murthy from Pinstorm decided to drop me and Barkha home. We ended up at his office and him showing us around his coOL work place. By the way his was one of the coOLest talks at BarCampMumbai. (Don’t tell me you missed it :p)

What I presented @ BarCamp ?

Topic:

TagSurfer - Extending the TagCloud

Motivation:

Unlike categories which are strict in nature tags are flexible. Flexibility of tags also comes from the fact that we use multiple words (keywords) to define a single item.
eg: barcamp barcampmumbai tagsurfer hacks

Now I would love to have a mechanism by which I could actually find some related content or may be just digg through the right content.

TagClouds is a good way of doing it. Its intuitive and looks good. But seriously its just 1D… I click on one tag and I am jst shown entries tagged with that particular tag.

As the number of tags entries (or no. of entries in your blogs or photoblogs ) increase one would surely need more intuitive UIs than TagClouds

I did give examples of del.icio.us and flickr in my talk. I also commented that deli.icio.us doesnt allow me to search for entries tagged with ‘ajax and css’. Here is what I meant. If I search for ‘ajax css‘ in the search box on del.icio.us I am given with links that are tagged with ‘ajax or css’ and not necessarily with ‘ajax and css’. Try ‘ajax on my bookmarks‘… you wud be shown links and on the right presented with ‘related tags’ links . Now this is interesting. If I click on the small ‘+’ sign beside scriptalous I get all the links tagged with ‘ajax and scriptalous’ only. (… correct me if i m wrong :)

Newways…. more importantly TagClouds are jst 1D! and there is a lot we can do to improve them…!

Proposed ‘TagSurfer’:

TagSurfer is a TagCloud with added functionality of surfing through the tags. Its more like getting deeper and deeper within the tagcloud.

Here is a small limited demo: http://akshay.zeeblo.com/soc/ *Check the right panel with heading tagsurfer.

• Just hover your mouse over any of the tags… * DO Not Click :d
• Number in brackets show the no. of entries you would find after surfing that tag
• Superscripts show the order in which you surfed
• Top panel with images resembling ‘<’ - Back and ‘o’ reload
• Lots of functionality could be added like if you surfed through a few tags and then clicked on one then you would be shown entries within that path only.

  eg: ‘barcamp -> barcampmumbai’ is what you surfed through and finally click on ‘hacks’ you would be shown entries tagged with barcamp and barcampmumbai and hacks

What it used:

PHP + Prototype ( ;-) Ajax )

Yup this was my first attempt to incorporate Ajax. TagSurfer needed Ajax and thats why I used it. It wasnt redundant at all.

Acknowledgements:

Pradeep for allowing me to make a presentation for TagSurfer on his laptop. And Mohit, Abhishek, Atul, Ajay, Hitesh, Ajay, Narain, Kiruba, Murli and everyone who attended for making BarCampMumbai a reality and offcourse RocKiNg!!!

Download:

http://akshay.zeeblo.com/tagsurfer.zi (http://www.akshaysurve.com/projects/tagsurfer/)

• Edit the tagsurfer.php file to customize font sizes and color
• Add <div id=”tagsurfer”>&ly;/div> to you template to get TagSurfer.
• Copy the whole folder to you Wordpres directory and then enable the plugin in admin section.

Comments:

There was a lots of discussion during the talk and even later. Things like ‘folksonomy’ to … collaborative filtering all came up and were spoken about. Now I know what ‘No spectators , Only participants’ means ;-). People were not just listening but were also thinking and improvising.

Hey …still open to discussion… would surely like to hear from you.

Requests:

Do wish me luck(I desperately need it )… my Final exams starting on 18th of May.

[Update] Some picks from flickr: