output of a MOM net stimulation

No, the MOM project is not gone. Because of a horrible 14-hours workday (incl. 4 hours commuting), I simply lack the time to work on MOM. However, this night I found some time to twiddle around with it, developed a very simple kind-M net net generator in Ruby which features node salting, dotty output and progression over time. Below, you find a screenshot of its output. This screenshot shows three different states of the same MOM net.

The top one is almost the initial state. All nodes were set to a value of two, thus were active. Additionally, the net was salted. That means: Some nodes were randomly picked and their values were increased by a random value. That's why there are floating point numbers in the graph at all.

To keep the node shapes small but stay able to watch the values, I added helper nodes. Those display the values and link to their respective real node. Those helper nodes obviously aren't related to anything other but to those nodes they serve as labels for.

Note, despite the bright box in the bottom left corner of each graph, the screenshots show immediately consecutive states: Top is state 1, middle is state 2, bottom is state 3.
 

The center graph shows the net after one iteration. What happened to each node by now was: Every successor node (top level) got its value divided by 2.0. Every active predecessor node stimulated their successors by 1.0, every predecessor node -- active or not -- got their values divided by 2.0 too.

You may notice a color change: Nodes being still active are colored green, as well as their edges to successor nodes. Nodes not active anymore became orange now. You might also notice a different edge style now: Dotted lines means the predecessor node may have change, but at time of the screenshot it didn't effect its successor. That's for: In case some node turns green but didn't effect its successor, the dotted line makes that clear.
 

Another step in time, bottom graph, you notice the color of most of the nodes faded out furtherly. The links between label nodes and real nodes are solid as always. The values of originally unsalted nodes is down to 0.5.
 

Why this new verve? -- I just thought, it'd be a good idea to present MOM and share it with others to improve it together, rather than aiming and aiming for a perfect outcome but having that rather slowly only, because of lack of time.




Well, actually Nathan Sobo's presentation of Treetop inspired me.

      
Updates: none so far

Tagging The Links Might Reveal (The) Content Of Linked Web Pages

The 'link payload' -- tags assigned to a link, the users tag themselves with these tags when they click them, thus generating a cloud of tags of possible interests applying to the clicking individual user -- could be applied by a company that hosts its own site on its own server -- at least on a server it can set up the way they prefer.

In my previous example for such a link payload, I focused on a news company that provides a news overview consisting of nothing but the news articles headlines linking to the articles. That forces the users willing to read the article to click the link, thus tagging themselves by the tags assigned to that link. -- If the company provided the full text by RSS feed, they'd never learn the tag cloud the users would generate/reveal about themselves by clicking several such links.

Learning the interests of a current visitor in realtime might allow to pick more fitting ads to present.

Aside of that immediate advantage of tag based user tracking on a single site, what about the web? Aside of user tracking, a (tagged) headline link to a news article page reveals another particle of content, even without the chance to track the user at all: The link tags tag the linked page too. -- If there are multiple links pointing to the very page, a cloud of tags for that page cumulates. In other words, the page gets a content aside of the text written on that page: the tag cloud. Since that content is not present on that page, I'd call it content assigned to that page, not actually there. For short, maybe something like "content [assigned] to a page" instead of the familiar "content of/on a page".
 

One question is, whether content can be mined from the web immediately, without processing the text presented on the web. Mined in a way like determining tags for links, for users, for web pages.

One goal of processing the tag cloud assigned to a web page (or any other item, of course) might be to gather a MOM net, a condensed form of content. A multi-level directed graph storing distinct content by each of its nodes. I see, it might be helpful to go more into depth with this, explaining what a MOM net actually is and what it stores and how it does so.

I keep that in the back of my head for another post to come.

      
Updates: none so far