Yesterday I explained my progress concerning specie integration in JungleDragon v2. Much to my delight, I received a few very positive comments. I need those to fuel my motivation. This part is hard, complex work with constant setbacks.

Anyway, I also explained I was playing with the idea to automatically integrate Youtube videos with the specie page. Quite a simple, yet powerful way to see a specie in action. My theory was to simply use the Youtube API and to pass it a search string, in my case the name of the specie.

You can see above how this is not going to work. The Impala, other than a specie, is also a car. A Polar bear, other than a specie, is also a cartoon, dance event, and part of the song title of various music tracks. In these two simple test cases, about 90% of the search results have nothing to do with the specie.

So this is a failed experiment. Funny, though: Henriette asked what I was doing and I explained the problem to her. She suggested to use the scientific name as a search string. As this was a 5 second code change, we could instantly see the improvement in relevancy: up to about 80%. Much better, but I'm thinking it's still not good enough. I then had the task of explaining to my beloved one how brilliant her remark was, yet how I was going to ignore it anyway. I'll spare the details. 

How to move forward in this area? I still believe in the power of video to enrich specie information, so here's my plan:

1. Ignore it for now and focus on testing what I got and bringing it live. This feature is non-essential for a first release of the specie identification feature.
2. Once step 1 is stable enough, solve the video challenge as follow: allow users to manually add videos, simply by entering a Youtube or Vimeo URL. Not that hard to implement, much greater relevancy and quality of videos.

What do you think?

Life and work is quite hectic at the moment, which explains my relative silence. Yet I keep pushing JungleDragon v2 development and hereby I want to give you a more in-depth teaser. Let's get to it. Note that the below screenshots are of the development environment.

Here's a photo uploaded to JungleDragon, of which the specie is identified as a "Polar Bear":

As a result of this identification, an interesting side panel appears. Let's have a closer look at it:

This essentially is a summary of this specie, with the following data visualized:

• Common name of the specie in the header 
• The first 500 characters of the description of the specie, wrapped around the photo of the specie that has the most karma in JungleDragon
• An interesting visualization of the IUCN conservation status and trend of the specie. You should really compliment me on this one as I wasted 6 hours styling it.
• The 2nd, 3rd and 4th image of the specie in JungleDragon, sorted by karma

There's a lot more that JungleDragon knows about this specie. To learn more about it, there's the obvious button "Learn more about this specie". Clicking the photo of the specie will also you bring you to the specie page, which currently looks like this:

So this is the dedicated specie page, which tells everything JungleDragon knows about it. This is only a fragment of the page, in reality it is about 10 times longer.

First, we start with a large header containing a larger version of the most popular image, as well as the full description of the specie.

Below that are a set of dynamic links, the ones with the arrows pointing down. These represent the areas of which JungleDragon has information about the specie. For example, rather than scrolling the entire page, you can instantly jump to "Diet" and from there go back to the top. JungleDragon does not copy all text blocks from Wikipedia, only a select few. 

The left column below the header contains the actual text blocks. These come from Wikipedia, yet they are transformed so that it becomes natural language with various Wikipedia elements removed (such as links, citations, etc). Another interesting element to the text display is that it is mixed with JungleDragon photos, not Wikipedia photos. You'll notice the first text block containing a left-aligned photo. The next text block will have a right-aligned photo. This keeps going until we run out of text blocks or photos. It makes for an attractive format of reading and an interesting way to mix Wikipedia content with JungleDragon content, or so I think.

Moving on the right column, we have a "Distribution and status" block which contains an image of this species' distribution (if available on Wikipedia) and again the IUCN status, richly illustrated.

Below that is the taxonomy block which classifies the specie in the biological "tree". As you can see, the elements in the tree currently are not links. Initially they will not be, even when I bring this live. If I can, I will implement this though. It would allow for tree-like browsing. For example, you could jump to a page of the family "Bears", to see all bears, not just Polar Bears.

So for now this concerns the overview tab of the specie page. There's also a photos tab:

It does what you expect: it shows photos of that specie, and you can sort them by popularity or upload date. 

The third tab "videos" is not implemented yet. It's just an idea I'm having. The idea being that I use the Youtube API to shows videos of this specie based on a search string. I will give this a try to see if I can get it to work reliably.

There's about 10 other things to implement to fully implement the v2 vision of JungleDragon, but this teaser definitely represents the core functionality. Your feedback is highly wanted!

In the last few updates concerning JungleDragon, I mentioned how I'm working on the specie engine, the part that integrates specie information of Wikipedia with JungleDragon photos. None of this is live yet, so you can't see it. Neither was there any development UI to demonstrate, it was just me complaining how tedious it is to get structured data out of Wikipedia. 

That is still true, and my struggles in that area continue, but hereby I do want to share some first UI work of the specie engine. The scenario is simple: you have uploaded a photo and are asked to identify the specie on the photo/ For that there is an "Add specie" button, which brings up this dialog:

Since multiple species can appear on a single photo, you can add more than one specie, yet you add them one by one. As the dialog states, you can search both by common name (i.e. "Polar bear") as well by the latin name (i.e. "Ursus Maritimus").

As you type a specie name, the list will help you using suggestions. These suggestions concern species known to JungleDragon. This means they are used before. I do not have a database with all species. Instead, as you add a specie not known to JungleDragon, it will be a known specie from that point on. 

What makes a valid specie? Here are the current rules:

• There must be an english Wikipedia page for your query, or a redirect to such a page
• That page in particular must be a specie page, meaning:
  • It has the "taxobox" on the right
  • It has to be a specie or a subspecie, meaning it has either the "binomial" or "trinomial" name property. For example, "Bear" is not a specie, but "Brown bear" is.

Ok, given that you entered a valid specie name, one of two things will happen:

• If the specie is known to JungleDragon already, it is instantly associated with a photo.
• If the specie is not known to JungleDragon, yet it is a valid specie, I will parse it from Wikipedia in real-time, which takes a few seconds. A loading indicator will make this clear. From that point on, it is a known specie to JungleDragon.

So, that's how the "Add specie" dialog works. It's how you identify a specie on a photo. Once I know that relationship, I can visualize rich specie information next to such a photo. Here's a very early preview:

Check out the sidebar on the right. This photo of an Impala has been associated with the specie Impala, and as a result, it shows the common name, binomial name, description, and range map. 

Be aware that this is just a simple start. I have a lot more data about the specie and I can also visualize it any way I like. Take note of the concept though. This is where JungleDragon v2 is all about. Instantly learning about what is on the photo. And of course, later on you can click through on the specie name which will show a full page with everything there is to know about it.

Wiki parsing engine updates

I need to reserve some room in this post once again for self-pity. To complain about parsing Wikipedia. The overall complaint is that each time I extend my test set of specie queries, I find new problems, new ways in which Wikipedia pages are structured, that my engine cannot handle yet. It's one step forward, two steps back. Here's two recent situations:

• I've been relying on the taxobox on a specie page to parse the species' taxonomy. Finally I had my engine robust enough to deal with the unlimited ways in which that taxobox can be structured: levels in the taxonomy can be there or not, the amount of levels varies, the spelling of levels varies, the value of a level can be plain text or contain any Wiki markup. Until I discovered yesterday that some specie pages do not use a taxobox, they use an "automatic" taxobox, a complex variations based on specie keys.
• Another problem as a result of testing is this. Say you'd have a photo of an African Elephant. In the "Add specie" dialog the instructions are clear: "Elephant" will not work as it is not a specie, and thereby not specific enough. So you try "African Elephant". You'd expect this to be specific enough, unless you're a zoologist. See, in this case, even "African Elephant" is not enough. It's not a specie, instead "African Bush Elephant" is the correct specie, according to science and according to Wikipedia. But probably not according to you. In these situations, I have therefore implemented a routing mechanism. It's a manual table that I maintain in which I map a source, in this case a commonly failing yet well-intended query, into a valid target specie. So if you'd type "African Elephant", I will map it to "African Bush Elephant" for you. Over time I'm hoping this table will give you a better chance at the result you expect.

Without a doubt, there will be dozens more problems coming my way. But I will persist through them, because I dearfully believe in the concept. No matter what it takes, this will get done, and it will be done right.

I love Google Analytics. It is astonishing to have such an incredibly advanced statistics tool at one's disposal for free. I also believe most owners of small to midsize websites do not get the most out of it, I'm certainly guilty of that. That's why I first want to briefly revisit two earlier posts concerning features you may not expect in Google Analytics:

Measuring your site's speed as seen by your visitors

Change a single line of code in your GA tracking javascript and GA will then sample your site's loading speed. This is a big deal. You can easily see how your site performs based on different bandwidths, locations, browsers, any dimension you like. There's enterprise solutions charging you tons for such a service. In GA it's free, and all you need to do is to add a single line of code.

In-page Analytics

My absolute favorite. We know we have tons of metrics available in GA, but its hard to bring them down to meaningful conclusions. In-page analytics changes that. You will see your page as you designed it, and visually attached you see the click-through data, amongst other metrics. 

This is the first-ever easy way to test your design. Recently I wanted to redesign parts of the navigation of a site, yet I was worried that users would be confused, as some options would be relabeled or removed alltogether. Until I learned that option in question was hardly ever used at all. It is quite powerful to make design decisions based on data, rather than gut feel, personal preference or emotion. This also seriously strengthens your position amongst stakeholders, in case you have to defend a design decision.

Real-time analytics

Ok, so those were the earlier posts. They are game changers, please check them out in detail.

The new one, which actually has been available for several weeks now, is Google Analytics realtime. Where all of GA's former metrics had data with a delay of about one day, realtime analytics show you those metrics as they occur. Perhaps you tried to launch a viral campaign in social media, this way you can check the actual effect as it happens. You can also learn about traffic patterns related to timezones. 

The opening screenshot shows a glimpse of the realtime view, with the currently active visitors, their locations, target pages and more. Truth is to be told though, this really is only interesting in case you have critical mass, meaning a large website with many visitors.

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