<6 weeks to go

I’ve got 6 weeks till i have to hand in my project.  In real terms as i don’t get all the time in the world to work that gives me 12 days.  12 days to write up 2 chapters detailing what i’ve done, describing the experiment, explaining the results, analysing the results and critical evaluation of the whole thing.  On top of this i remain completly baffled by SPSS and it really is the best way to produce my longtail graphs.  Although i am tempted to knock some out in excel if time runs out.  To top it all off i have writers block.  The chapters are running round in my head all jumbled up but i can’t get them out onto paper for some reason.

I’m also regretting ever finding facebook as it is a perfect distraction to stop me starting writing.  And it turns out so is this blog as i’m writing this instead of just mind dumping on paper to get myself started!

Almost Web2.0

I thought i’d check if VideoTag was web2.0 or not http://web2.0validator.com

It checks your site against a list of rules that are created through people bookmarking the site in del.icio.us. VideoTag scored 8 out of 66, so i guess i’m not web2.0, however according to the results, i don’t use tags, mention a long tail or use Ajax, which i do, so i guess that makes me 11 out of 66 which is still pretty rubbish.

It did say i was web3.0 though, maybe VideoTag’s too ahead of the game to be web2.0!!

Maybe i’ll set up a rule – “Mentions VideoTag” score an extra point!

The results:

• Uses python? No
• Denies the existance of Rocky V ? No
• Is in public beta? No
• Rocks out to the dance noise sound of Chinese Forehead ? No
• Uses inline AJAX ? No
• Uses the prefix “meta” or “micro”? No
• Mentions Tag Clouds? No
• Is Shadows-aware ? No
• Mentions Neowin.net ? No
• Apperars to use moo.fx ? No
• Appears to be non-empty ? No
• Has a Blogline blogroll ? No
• Uses tags ? No
• Appears to be web 3.0 ? Yes!
• Attempts to be XHTML Strict ? No
• Uses Google Maps API? No
• Has favicon ? Yes!
• Refers to mash-ups ? No
• Uses Cascading Style Sheets? Yes!
• Mentions startup ? No
• Mentions Less is More ? No
• Received a cease-and-desist from CMP Media or Tim O’Reilly ? No
• Uses the word meme? No
• Appears to use AJAX ? No
• Refers to the Web 2.0 Validator’s ruleset ? No
• Mentions an “architecture of participation”? No
• Appears to have a Google Sitemap ? No
• Appears to use RSS ? No
• Makes reference to Technorati ? No
• Refers to Flickr ? No
• JavaScript by Dreamweaver ? No
• Faviconized ? Yes!
• Refers to VCs ? No
• Mentions The Long Tail ? No
• Appears to be built using Django ? No
• Links Slashdot and Digg ? No
• Mentions Ruby? No
• Appears to use moo.fx ? No
• Mentions Cool Words ? No
• Mentions Nitro ? No
• Mentions Ruby ? No
• Has prototype.js ? No
• Refers to podcasting ? No
• Mentions Wisdom Of Crowds ? No
• Creative Commons license ? No
• Appears to use visual effects? No
• Appears to use MonoRail ? No
• Refers to Rocketboom ? No
• Uses Semantic Markup? Yes!
• Links to validator? No
• Refers to del.icio.us ? No
• Mentions RDF and the Semantic Web? No
• Actually mentions Web 2.0 ? Yes!
• Use Catalyst ? No
• Mentions Neurogami and Web 2.0 ? No
• Refers to web2.0validator ? No
• Uses microformats ? No
• Mentions a blog ? Yes!
• Does it use DWR Ajax Library? No
• References Firefox? No
• Appears to over-punctuate ? No
• Validates as XHTML 1.1 ? No
• References isometric.sixsided.org? No
• Appears to have Adsense ? No
• Uses the “blink” tag? Yes!
• Mentions Stickbob? No

you tube rss feeds

In order to analyse the quality of the tags VideoTag is generating, i want to compare them to the existing tags for the videos in YouTube.   So i set about the arduous task of collecting all these tags and entering them into my database.  I checked the YouTube rss feed and no example for favourites, so i googled it and found sites that use the youTube API to let you rss feed users favourites, but you only get the 10 off the first page, which is useless for my 60 odd videos.  So i resorted grudgingly to manually copying and pasting off each video.  Then i had the bright idea of seeing if i could rss feed my playlist.  After a quick google search i found this site:

http://www.ubeek.com/youtube/
I was kicking myself for not thinking of this sooner, it saved me lots of time,  especially when after entering all the YouTube tags for my 63 videos i got this error “possible deep recursion attack” and lost them all!!
Arghhh!!

So my annoyance at not having found it earlier, changed to being thankful i’d found it at all so re entering the 63 sets of tags wouldn’t take quite so long.  grrr i hate it when quick jobs to ease you into your working day take up half of it unexpectedly.

play as guest

i made my mind up and added a play as guest facility.  I decided as long as the tags were recorded it was better to have more players tagging than know their username.  However i have put limitations on the guest accounts, they cannot progress passed level 1 and can not be entered onto the leaderboard.

Cheating and future developments

I have changed my mind about leaving off the board of shame.   I have had my first cheater.  It didn’t take much to work out you could enter anything and score points i’m lucky so far only 1 person has discovered this.  So i have stripped him of his points and added him to the board of shame, hopefuly this will deter others from doing it.  It is too much for this run of the game and my MSC project to add dictionary checks on the tags, although i would like to implement this in the future.

I was considering adding a play as guest facility, but have decided to stick with my register at the minute, i don’t ask for much information, i feel if i have play as guest nobody will bother to register.   Again this is something i will implement in the future.  Maybe a try game before registering option and let them play for a bit but not score points.

I had another idea to try and keep players tagging and sustain interest – adding a Golden Tag.  This could be a highly descriptive tag that if found would award the user with a large number of points.  There would be one golden tag for each video.   I like this idea and it will definatly go into a new version of the game.

I might also enlist some graphic design skills to  give the look and feel of the game more impact, especially the homepage, i agree with feedback that this will attract more users.

One wierd thing i’ve noticed is that people are bothering to register, but then not playing, i would like to know why this is.  They probably think the game looks rubbish and leave, or their connections slow so the game doesn’t work properly.

It’s so interesting now my game has some users to disect it with the help of feedback and the data it’s generating and find ways to improve it.  i think even if i don’t get the oppurtunity to continue this project into phd level i will re develop the game with these additions added.

I keep thinking about the play as guest facility – should i allow it or not?

oooh another review

VideoTag’s also been reviewed on killerstartups.com

http://www.killerstartups.com/Video-Music-Photo/videotag–Game-to-Experiment-with-Tagging/ 

Not only is  it great for getting more users, it is really useful to read their comments on ways to improve the game.  It seems a big bone of contention is having to register first.  maybe i should add a play as guest facility?  i don’t need to know their username after all.

VideoTag on mashable.com

I am so chuffed, i sent an email to Mashable in my attempts to advertise VideoTag and they’ve posted a little review of it which is great. http://mashable.com/2007/08/01/videotag/

There’s another review in spanish too, i translated it and it’s positive so that’s good. the reviewer pointed out the problem of my return key being disabled, i knew that would annoy people oh well maybe i’ll discover how to fix it one day.

http://www.genbeta.com/2007/08/02-videotag-el-juego-del-etiquetado-de-videos

So what’s great is that i now have lots of data from people all over the world, which is more than i ever imagined. i also have some spanish tags, whihc i hadn’t accounted for. They could actually score very highly as the pitfalls are in english!!

VideoTag – live and ready to play

The VideoTag game is all finished, working and ready to play. I am pleased with it, i think it works well and should, providing people play it, be a useful vehicle at generating the data i want.

The all important link:

http://www.videotag.co.uk

There was only one thing that i couldn’t fix and that was the onkeypress problem mentioned in the Ajax post. I couldn’t stop it refreshing the page each time a tag was submitted, so the return/enter key has been left disabled. Not the best usability, but a more desirable fix than having a new video after every tag entered.

I have definatly reached the top of the MSC hill, the downward slope being filled with evaluating results and critically evaluating the whole project. Oh an writing up what i did and how i did it and creating some extra design document that i left to the end if i had time. So not too much work then! Roll on Sept 30th, then i won’t have a clue what to do with my time and my brain will have nothing to think about! I’ll be lost.