Playful with Words

We’ve been focused on words in the last few months, nouns mainly. We have two approaches to words: top down and bottom up, Muddy and Wordr. Our top down version is Muddy. Muddy extracts entities (known words) from any document / site and says which of those entities are ‘notable’ (i.e. deemed to be significant), for which we use Wikipedia as a “controlled vocabulary“. Having done that Muddy can than say stuff about those entities, for example whether they’re a person and, if so, what kind of person (from Politicians to Playboy Playmates!). That can be quite exciting when you have lots of words, like the BBC, less so (as we’ve found) when words are few like on image abstracts. Our @channelography project for the BBC uses Muddy and you’ll see more of that next week. This week is ‘bottom up’ week. Wordr is a sort of folksonomy platform, with a simple call to action, “what’s your word?”. It’s twitter on a macrobiotic diet. Pixel-lab are using it today at their Playful gig to represent the event through the words of the attendees. If early use of the (very alpha) web app is anything to go by then we’ll get lots of concatenated words, neologisms and lots of “tea”, lots of tea

What started out as a joke in the office may end up as very little more than a joke between a few hundred people today at Playful, but I hope it gains some traction to celebrate the beauty of words, the slippage and the interpretation as much as the trying-to-signify; moments as words.

Do say hello to me @jamesb or Frankie @frankieroberto if you’re at Playful today.

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