Bonjour! I’ve been back from Paris for quite a while, and brought back two really expensive small piggies, Cochon and l’Oink. I’ll add them to the Pigsonomy when I can catch up with the work.

Anyways, I’ve just browsed the web for any new piggies that may strike my fancy to purchase, and I’ve found some interesting sites. They made me realized I should have added a links page. So here it is.

I’ve just been thinking that writing about technical stuff may be quite dry. I should write about my collection, its histories, the passions, the twists and turns. Maybe I should even have co-bloggers to write with me. People who are fluent with the emoticons and winks. Or start a whole slew of pseudonyms, writing as each special character of my pigs. Well, after my France trip, and if I have more time to write, hopefully, you’ll start hearing from some of these interesting characters…like Thomas , doin’ it for his ‘beloved.’

I set up the Pigsonomy originally to help me catalog my plush pig collection. Drawing inspiration from taxonomy websites (community driven sites that use tags for metadata) like Youtube, Flickr, and del.icio.us, I seek to use tags to label aspects of each pig. An advantage of this would be that a common vocabulary would evolve in describing my pigs.

One application of these tags would be to provide a tags-based search interface. Visitors can find pigs based on the tags (keywords) used to describe them, rather than any free-form prose. This would support the taxonomy usage of tags on the Pigsonomy. However, this works better if only a few salient tags are used.

On the other hand, a rich set of tags to describe each pig in exquisite detail can provide a precise description of each plush pig. These characterizations can provide a basis for the phylogeny that I hope to build from my collection. Based on the presence/absence of certain characteristics, each pig can be differentiated from the other. Their similarities and supposed lineages can be inferred. (I guess some people may question how I can model my plush pig collecting after evolutionary biology and natural selection, but I’ll blog about it sometime in the future, maybe.)

As can be seen, the two objectives I have for using tags appear to be at odds with each other. Using fewer tags would make the information less complicated for visitors, and possible future collector-contributors, but would limit their usage for the phylogeny.

At the moment, I’m thinking of proposing two forms of tagging, one for each purpose, but we’ll see how that goes.

Thanks to those who have visited and provided your useful comments. To improve on the usability of this site, I’ve made a few ammendments and improvements, such as:

1. Re-arranging the View Pig and Search links in the header and renaming them for better understanding
2. View Pig section
   1. Allowing a random selection of a pig in the View Pig section
   2. Displaying a set of random display pictures of pigs.
3. Correcting some font display settings
4. Search section: (this is a little technical) the tag cloud now sizes tags based on the logarithm of tag occurrance, since a lot of low-count tags were showing up. This is substantiated with the assumption that the tags occur as a Long Tail phenomenon, when only a handful of tags are extremely popular, and the rest are not so, in an exponential decay relation.
5. A few little bug fixes
6. Added many more pigs (57 now! Almost half-way through).

Well, the CNY holiday’s over tonight and back to work tomorrow, so I’ll have less time to work on this. And I’ll be scooting over to France until next monday for a business trip, so I hope site will hold up well in the mean time.

Hi folks, and thanks for visiting the Pigsonomy. This website is dedicated to showcasing plush pigs (at the moment, only mine), providing a tags-based search interface to find the pigs. Ultimately, it would serve as a taxonomy of plush pigs providing information on each item and the collection as a whole. For more information, please see the about page.

As promised, I have launched this taxonomy website of plush pigs on the 18th of Feb 2007, the first day of the Chinese New Year (CNY). It is a poignant moment given that this CNY is the Year of the Pig and last December marked the 10th anniversary since I started my collection.

At the moment, I’ve only put in 26 pigs, even though I have over 125 of them. I’ll try to get them up soon, along with extra features to make this site more interactive, such as allowing visitors to rate entries.

Ok, enough talking. Feel free to browse around and leave comments on the blog.

And Happy Chinese New Year!