Arutz Sheva reports:

New Zealand’s first kosher restaurant will open by the end of this year, according to the island-country’s Chabad Rabbi Mendy Goldstein. It is being built on the first floor of Chabad offices in the city of Christchurch.

I’m really happy to hear this news. Honestly.

Remembering the reticence of Chabad representatives to use the word “Santa” in my hometown of Santa Monica (known by the Lubavitcher hasidim as “S. Monica”, in company with S. Barbara and many other California towns boasting Chabad branches), is it disrespectful for me to wonder how they are coping with the name of this Chabad branch in New Zealand?

I would like to note that I’ve been the recipient of so much gracious hospitality, food and personal referrals from Chabad representatives in Orlando, Helsinki, Tokyo, Barcelona (where they spell it, endearingly, Jabad), Bangkok and other locations that my gratitude is endless (even if my path in Torah is not the same).

[Note to self: Contact Finnish friends for requisite vocabulary before next trip to Helsinki.] 

In an attempt to curb vandalism, the Finnish Road Administration has implemented a system along Highway 1 which requires restroom visitors to text “Open” (in Finnish, of course) in order to let themselves in. [via Engadget]

If the FRA plans to send arriving foreigners text messages with the words they’ll need upon landing at Vantaa Airport or at the port, it might work. If they don’t, well, there may be even more of a mess to deal with than before.

Seen in a Helsinki hotel:

“Vegetal Base Soap”. I was surprised that this was important enough to bother shaping into the soap bar, although the effect is nice. Are many soaps still animal-based? If I were philosophically vegetarian, would this concern me in a hotel? What would I use if the soap had not been marked? Shampoo? Would I remain loyal to the hotel because of its consciousness, as demonstrated by the choice of vegetal soap? Is the green color (very unnatural for soap) meant to signal concern for the earth and its inhabitants?

Note: the plastic wrapper on the soap was so hard to remove that the housekeeping staff had left the package partially cut open.

I participated in the very exciting MobileMonday Global Summit* in Helsinki this September.

Arriving fairly early, I went to take a drink of water in the main hall.

Hm. I’d say this warning label pretty well killed my interest in having anything to do with this water dispenser. The caution has destroyed the utility of the whole, in this case. (I can say that because this was, after all, Helsinki. In Israel in September it is still hot enough that thirst will overcome squeamishness.)

Still, it’s interesting that the warning label was invisible from the front.

*Did you spot my brief appearance as an extra near the beginning of the video?

Note dated May 30, 2007:

“My gosh, there is so much going on in Search this week as to not be even funny.

“BTW, note that not only does Quintura offer search for kids, but ‘Coming soon Quintura for Women…’ Can you imagine what’s going to happen when Quintura for Men hits the web?!”

However, upon revisiting the site today, I see no sign of “Quintura for Women” (although the kids’ link is still up). What a pity. It would have been so much fun to see how the tag clouds formed.

I’ve been fascinated by tag clouds, and the utility they offer by presenting multiple levels of information in an integrated and intuitively navigated way. Why are tag clouds “acceptable” and used in some contexts, and not in others? Why do I feel that a desktop-viewed Quintura-like presentation is less likely to find uptake than the tag cloud in the right column of this blog? When are tag clouds appreciated, when avoided? Which factors have the most influence: type of information? UI context? interaction means? search context?

By that last suggestion (”search context”) I mean to ask, Does it matter what kind of search I am performing? For example, when I use a tag cloud to find a post in a blog archive, there is a limited amount of data being shown to me, but that data probably includes what I need to know (what tags are available + how many of them there are, or how popular they are). The tags do not tell me anything about the chronology of the blog postings, the authors of the posts, the server location where the posts are stored, or even very much about the content of the posts. But that’s OK for the purpose at hand.

On the other hand, when I do a search on my desktop (or laptop) computer, it’s already hard enough for the search engine to figure out what I’m actually asking. (Does “rice history” request information about the history of grain, politics, or a university?) Presenting the results with a little bit of contextual content allows me (the user) to sort relevance for myself, based on the actual data. Presenting results in a tag cloud makes it harder to embed that content, making it less relevant for my use case.

On the other other hand (think Thai goddesses here), embedding the contextual data within the tag itself would partially offset the limitations of the tag cloud. Even better, embedding the path to the data and its related data would provide a means of searching within the tag cloud image itself. Enter semantic visualization.

Semantic tagging (of whichever type) describes the links and connections between different “nodes” of data. Semantic tagging has been primarily focused on providing the ability to computers to search large amounts of data intelligently — meaning, with “understanding” of the relationships within the data. However, a user interface that organizes information based on semantic links provides an opportunity for the searcher to navigate through enormous amounts of data very rapidly, according to whichever connections are meaningful to him or her at that moment. It allows for new connections, new relationships, and new meanings to be elicited through visualization of data connections. In fact, I’m not sure whether the semantic web will turn out to be more important for automated search or for human navigation of the results.

Those Quintura tag clouds are not, strictly speaking, tag clouds. They just appear to be so at first glance. They are tags leading into semantic groupings of information nodes. [I just love the way they present the visual mapping. There is something so alive about it. Which is why my husband bought me the Visual Thesaurus from Thinkmap. Not because I use a thesaurus all that much, but because I love to play around with it, and to create interesting collections of words. (Stop snickering.)]

Which brings me back around to some exploratory work I did this summer on mobile search UI. You can take a look at the early work as presented at the MobileMonday in Helsinki here.