Trope: Turning to New Sources
3 September 2005 by Jeremy Price
After my critique of connectivism and the emphasis on the conduit, I have decided to release two conduit-oriented Greasemonkey scripts: Trope for del.icio.us and Trope for Flickr. Basically, Trope is an extension of the Flickr Tag Convergence script, yet with a funky new name and a stand-alone page on this blog (see the Trope page). Social folksonomy-based services now supported are CiteULike, del.icio.us, Flickr, Odeo, and Technorati.
According to Wikipedia,
Trope comes from the Greek word, tropos, which means a “turn”, as in heliotrope, a flower which turns toward the sun. We can imagine a trope as a way of turning a word away from its normal meaning, or turning it into something else.
In the same vein, the Greasemonkey script Trope provides an opportunity for the user to turn to a new type of source based on a descrete packet of information, the tag. A user can start out looking at a photograph tagged with the word “outdoors,” just as an example, on Flickr , and easily be “turned to” a podcast discussing “outdoors” and environmentalism on Odeo.
These scripts are not perfect. I will be improving them over time, and encourage people to check out the “To Do” List and take a stab as well.
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One Response to “Trope: Turning to New Sources”
1. you should enable comments on the script page
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2. I was pondering about a greasemonkey script that fires but itself (no need to have a page on which it is “embedded”).
http://moloko.itc.it/paoloblog/archives/2005/08/31/greasemonkey_script_can_create_a_page_from_scratch_how_do_you_fire_it.html
For example the greasemonkey could be started by tipying greasemonkey://tropeo_on_connectionism.user.js
The script would aggregate info from flickr, del.icio.us, citeulike and others and produce a page similar to
http://technorati.com/tag/learning
but all of this client side, fired by you when you want
[let me know if I was not clear, english is a tough challenge for my "this idea want to go out of my brain and rest on some bytes bed"
I would add it to the to-maybe-do list