Never has Euan Semple’s The Obvious blog been so aptly named. You’ll have to go to his site to see a not-to-be-missed snippet of English as it was never meant to be uttered… [Tags: euan_semple academics]

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I’m sure I’m heading for a D’oh! moment, but, much as I enjoy the ambiguity of the URL www.lumberjacksexchange.com, why aren’t spaces allowed in Web addresses? URLs are already delimited by quotation marks in HTML markup, as in <a href=“http://www.lumberjacksexchange.com“>. In fact, couldn’t we make a rule that whatever is the first character after the “href=” is the delimiter, a tactic I learned about when I worked at Interleaf? That way, you could even include quotation marks in the address, as in <a href=|http://www.lumberjacks exchange.com/call me “Carla”.html|>.

Allowing spaces and flexible delimiters would let us express URL’s in ways humans can more easily understand. After all, should Web pathnames be harder to read than Windows pathnames?

In fact, when we need to make it clear that we’re expressing a path and not a space-delimited series, we could learn from Windows’ conventions: Use quotes as delimiters for paths such as “C:\My Programs\Whirligig Anti Virus Pro\read me.txt.” Having to use explicit delimiters on paths on occasion seems to me a small price for being able to use spaces as delimiters between words.

Now, what is the big point I’m missing that’s so obvious that I’m about to go D’oh! ? [Tags: html markup a href="http://www.technorati.com/tags/everything+is+miscellaneous" rel="tag"> html everything_is_miscellaneous]

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I had the honor of keynoting the New Hampshre Society for Technology in Education Christa McAuliffe Technology Conference, and then led two conversational sessions (where “led” means “sat while knowledgeable and committed people engaged in conversation”).

I came away realizing why media literacy programs often bother me. Frequently, the idea even is that we have to teach our children how to recognize the Internet sites that are as reliable and safe as what they’ll find in a library. That’s a useful skill, but the overall picture is wrong. If you want to know what’s going on in a field, the static and credentialed sources generally aren’t where you want to go. The credentialed sources are great for certain types of information—the solid and stolid facts, the commoditized information, the boring truth—but the real intellectual action is usually occuring in the blogs, newsletters, and forums. Confining students to the credentialed sites is likely to kill their interest and enthusiasm.

And then we have them write reports. Is there anything more likely to throttle curiosity than a report?

The two discussion groups this morning, however, were full of good ideas. For example…

Students need help “decoding” search engines, one participant said; she gets bibliographies that list Google as a source. (I’d like to see students build bibliographies together, in a class wiki. That way they could teach one another about how to evaluate a site, and the teacher could always step if they’re going wrong.)

Another participant set up a del.icio.us page for her class.

Someone has his students observe how they talk about the game sites they visit, for they’re evaluating those sites using valuable and sophisticated criteria.

Someone has her students using wikis to create study guides.

One person is concerned about the study that shows that students spend only 20 seconds evaluating a site. That seems to me to be appropriate, although students need our help learning how to evaluate a page in 20 seconds. Or 10.

In an AP calculus class, every day a different student is the note-taker, posting the notes on a blog. The note-taker is also responsible for answering questions on the blog that day.

In an art class, each student has a blog. Peer feedback is encouraged.

A kindergarten teacher uses a blog as a replacement for the traditional bulletin board, writing posts of interest to parents. She also uses Bubbleshare.com to post photos and audio about the photos. She has connected her students with New Zealand kindergarten students where there are no bears and it’s summer in the winter.

One teacher said that a parent printed out his daughter’s MySpace page and told her he was going to post it at the mall. When the daughter objected, mortified, the parent explained that MySpace is as public as the mall.

One teacher has a book club blog for the kids.

The discussions weren’t, however, merely lists of things you can do on the Web. That’s just what I recorded, in a haphazard way. (Where was the note-taker student posting things on a wiki? :)

I so much enjoy getting to hang out with teachers. Along with with librarians and journalists, they are the heroes of democracy, as far as I’m concerned. [Tags: education social_software wikis blogs teachers everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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RageBoy points out in an email that Amazon recently recommended that he buy a book titled Cataloging and Classification. When RB clicked the link that explains how they came up with that recommendation, he was told:

RB thinks this is yet more evidence that Amazon’s recommendation engine is deteriorating. But, RB would like that book on library classification, so maybe it’s evidence that some correlations are non-obvious but useful nonetheless. Or possibly it’s just evidence that RageBoy is outside the hump of normality. [Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous taxonomy rageboy christopher_locke amazon libraries marketing ]

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Google and “consumer”¹ groups are lobbying against proposed laws in Michigan that would let the telcos violate net neutrality and that would likely result in increasing the disparity in service levels among rich and poor communities, according to an article by Tom Siebert in Online Media Today.

The bill would allow the telcos to introduce TV service—along with bundled Internet cable access— without first having to get local or county permission. That was part of the Sen. Ted “Tubes” Stevens’ bill as well. It sounds like a good idea because it would increase competition, but (imo) it needs to be balanced by steps to counteract the invisible hand of the market rhythmically stroking only those communities with the bucks to pay for high-end service. And those offering Internet service ought to (imo) be required to offer true Internet service, which means not discriminating among packets based on who created them.

BTW, I recently spent a day—sponsored by an activist think tank—with a dozen people who understand Net tech deeply, going through exactly which of the 496 permutations would constitute a violation of Net neutrality. Caching packets within a particular application area but not according to source? Caching application-based non-cached application-based packets? Saying “Hi” to all passing packets, but adding, “Howya doin’?” to only the ones you like? Patting all packets on the back but refusing to buy some lunch? The whole thing makes my brain hurt. [Tags: net_neutrality digital_rights google michigan ]

¹The quotes are there so Doc won’t yell at me for using the “c” word.

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SJ Klein is giving us a quick overview of the One Laptop Per Child project.

They have deals with five countries: Argentina, Brazil, Libya, Nigeria and Thailand. Each will be getting 1,000 laptops.

The monitor can run in ultra-low-power mode, reflecting ambient light. “The display technology is the most remarkable technology in the laptop.” The display “IP” is co-owned with the screen producers.The OLPC is working to make it reusable in 3 years wrt patents.

It weighs 3lbs. A pound of that is plastic. The plastic is 2mil instead of the 0.7mil of a typical laptop, e.g., a Thinkpad.

It comes with Squeak, JavaScript and Python as programming languages. And MediaWiki. (And more.)

Q: What is it missing? What will the critics say, “It’s fine, but it’s missing a ____”?
A: It’s not a normal desktop computer. It has a 512MB flash disk and 128Mb of RAM. It can run lots of apps simultaneously, but not typical office apps.

It has an integrated browser.

Q: Does it run Flash?
A: Yes. There’s a lot out there in Flash. But it’s not an open format.

Ethan points out that the bulk of the machine is behind the screen, so there isn’t a lot passing through the hinge; the hinge is the most common point of failure in laptops.

SJ says that the battery runs about 2 hours if you’re running flat out. But for reading, he hopes and thinks kids will get about 8 hours. The best recharging technique is a pull thingy that’s sort of like a lawn mower starter. The battery is nickel metal hydride.

It’s designed to last six years.

Q: (Me) The social software?
A: WikiMedia. Drawing/chat program that lets you see everyone that’s there is part of the operating environment (= Sugar). Etc. [Sounds like an opportunity. What social software might work in these environments and cultures?]

Ethan worries about students wanting to use them to the max while the teachers want to confine the usage to class-focused activities. Ethan doesn’t want the laptops to assume that education has to be entirely webby and non-traditional.

The OS is a modified version of Fedora. The file system is different because it’s compact flash. E.g., you can’t use swap and they’ve had to write low-level stuff to keep Linux from writing to the first sectors of memory until it burns out.

[Tags: olpc sj_klein berkman]

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SJ Klein has brought by a working $100 laptop (for the One Laptop Per Child project). It is way cool. You want to pick it up and give it a hug. And the darn thing works.

The screen is pretty bright and very clear. It twists from the usual clamshell into a tablet configuration. The integrated camera works nicely. The chiclet keyboard is small for my fingers, but the whole device is only about 8″ square. It’s got PlayStation controls on either side of the screen. (EthanZ points out that when the antenna ears are up, it acts as a mesh node, using very little power. When the ears are down, it’s asleep.”

There are a zillion questions that have to be answered right for this project to work. The hardware has to be robust and/or easily repaired (although repairing it in remote locations would be a problem). The software has to hit every goal of commercial software and then some. And the whole project has to be fetching.

Fetching they have definitely achieved. And some very smart people are working on those other questions.

Meanwhile, I’m watching two smart adults fail to figure out how to open the case. SJ says it takes three year olds 30 seconds, but adults much longer. My guess ended up removing the battery. “This will be fixed by the next release,” says SJ, who meanwhile is happily making a video of us failing to crack the code.

(See Chris Blizzard’s blog for the continuing story.)

Pictures by J. Thanks!

[Tags: $100laptop olpc berkman]

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Nancy Hafkin, co-editor (with Sophia Huyer) of Cinderella or Cyberella: Empowering Women in the Knowledge Society, is giving a Berkman lunchtime talk on the topic of the book. Rather than focus on knowledge societies within economically advanced cultures, she looks at empowering those who need it. (What follows are real-time notes, full of errors and omissions. Sorry.)

“Cinderella works in the basement of the knowledge society,” she says. “Cinderella has little opportunity to reap its benefits and waits for ”her prince’ to decide the benefits she’ll receive.” Cyberella, on the other hand, is “fluent in the uses of technology, comfortable using and desinging computer equipment and software,” finds information to improve her life, becomes an active knowledge creator and disseminator.

Sue Rosser at Georgia Tech outlines 4 stages of ICT inclusion. (1) Women’s concerns aren’t noticed by the IT sector. (2) Women’s issues are “added on” to existing structures. (3) Women are seen as workers, users and designers of ICT. (4) Women are included as equals.

There are few statistics available globally about the situation of woman and IT, she says. “Without data, there is no visibility. Without visibility, there is not priority.” The International Telecommunications Union is the major source of such stats. Until 2003, they didn’t break out women. They haven’t updated it since 2002. And it only covers 39 countries—only one in Africa, one in the Middle East, in Latin America it’s the five richest countries…The data reflects the digital divide.

Orbicom.ca, an organization of UNESCO chairs, had a project measuring the info society. In 2005, it tried to look at stats on women. It’s the first systematic data collection about the situation of women. It found that the Internet penetration does not correlate with the the proportion of female Internet users. It happens sometimes but “there are all sorts of anomalies.” France, Netherlands, Germany and the UK have a high level of Net penetration but the rate of women Net users is fairly low. Conclusion: Tech won’t trickle down evenly by itself. “The gender divide and the digital divide do not move in tandem.”

Where is most attention going? In the West, it goes to women in the IT industry, especially the intersections with globalization, e.g., “issues in women and call center employment.” People also pay attention to women in science and tech ed, comparative access of women and men to the Internet, and women using ICs for political empowerment.

The major challenges: ICTs for poverty reduction and for empowering women. ICTs for women’s health, well being and income. ICTs applied to existing business and enterprise (as opposed to ICT-enabled businesses). E.g., Muhamma Yunus Grameen VillagePhone is exemplary. But she’d like to see more of things like Anastasia in Uganda, a 78-yr-old illiterate chicken farmer when she came in contact with a project called Rural Women Earning Money [pdf]. Using sound and graphic interfaces, it showed them many techniques and skills for improving the fficiency, productivity for increasing the income of their existing enterprises. In Anastasia’s case, it helped her be a better chicken farmer. Anastasia has gone on the road as an evangelist for the program.

Why single out women? Because otherwise the myth of gender neutral technology will cause us to ignore women’s situation. While there is growing awareness of the role of gender in development, but not enough yet.

The existing constraints: Little access. Gendered access. Public access in non-women-friendly spots. Lack of education. Language barriers. Geographical location. Lack of disposable time. Limited mobility. Lack of appropriate content. Technophobia. Gender socialization about technology.

There are also policy-level constraints: Women are absent from IT policy. [I missed some points.] “Are the technology choices being made making technology equally available to men and women?”

“So, is info tech a silver bullet for women or the latest problem for women?” As a problem, the Net increases porn, facilitates trafficking, and is “associated with increased domestic violence and assertions of patriarchy” (citing two African studies) because the men see “their” women using the cybercafe as an attempt to break out. On the other hand, ICTs “can contribute much to the process of realizing human capabiltiies, potential, freedom, as basic components of development.” (She notes she’s citing Amartya Sen’s definition of development.)

Q: (Rebecca Mackinnon) Are there useful stats in any country about passive use vs. creation on line, etc.?
A: The info is scattered. One of the best is by WorldLinks. (She refers to Mar Coumba.)

Q: Do you know of any grassroots projects, where women are designing the programs or technology themselves?
A: Not a lot spring to mind. The Village Knowledge Centers in Southern India are an example.

Q: (Ethan Zuckerman) Are there correlations to cultural issues?
A: We’re trying to get funded to do country studies. Obviously, the factors are varying when you see countries like France and Kyrgyzstan with the same rates of women participation on the Net.

Ethan: In the Philipines you’re likely to find that people jumped on the Net for basic communications use: VOIP, etc.

Nancy: Korea does a good job with the stats. Korea has a program called “Train a Million Housewives.”

Q: (Colin McClay) I think the distinction between productive and nonproductive uses is misleading. Use is like a gateway drug.
A: I agree. In developing companies, the Net offers a way out of isolation.

Q: I’d like to see stats about wome ncreating content as opposed to just using the Net, broken down by country. If you had more women creating, you would have more usage.
A: There are no statistics on that, to my knowledge. On a qualitative basis what’s happening is…that it’s happening. Certainly it does lead to greater usage. You can see it anecdotally.

Q: (Rebecca) In many places, cybercafes are not women-friendly. How do you educate men so they can interact with women in a more welcoming way, rather than repeating online the negative patterns of the real world?
A: The only guidelines I’ve seen come from IRDC…

Q: Is there a project along the lines of giving seed money to the neighborhood grandmother to run a little cybercafe in her home?
A: VillagePhone came to be like that. Many of the village kiosks in India are run by women.

Q: It sounds like we’re assuming the Internet is culturally neutral. Maybe the solution isn’t to create cybercafes in a particular culture, but maybe some of the resistance to the tech is because of the technology. We are in danger of imposing an information imperialism. Should we be using a laptop where a book would do? When you import a laptop, you import the heavy, toxic metals.
A: The emphasis on developing local content is a reaction to this.
e

Q: How many books could you buy for the $100 cost of the $100 laptop? [Brewster Kahle says you could make 100 books for $100. But the $100 laptop will give access to thousands and thousands of books.]
A: (Ethan) Leaders in the developing world don’t want to be left behind on this. You can’t disseminate your info by buying books. Some developing nations see ITC as a way of developing their economies. There’s a lot of pull. In my work in the field, I never had to “sell” what I was doing. The concern about imperialism might be slightly misplaced.

A: It could be intellectual imperialism. It’s the Enlightenment Project spreading itself. E.g., we’ve assumed that extending lifetimes is a good thing…
A: (Ethan) If we’re going to question the Green Revolution and the extension of the life span, there isn’t much common ground for discussion…[Colin sends it ofline.]

Nancy concludes by saying that there’s so much work to be done…

[Tags: berkman gender women nancy_hafkin]

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I received a notice today from PrivacyGuard (a “service” of Trilegiant), telling me that if I don’t write or call, they will continue to charge me $10.99/month. I did not sign up for PrivacyGuard knowingly; there must have been some box I didn’t uncheck on some form I filled in somewhere.

Fine. Well, not so fine. In any case, I called their 800 number. After the robot gathered my information, I was transferred to a message that said that because of the unexpectedly high volume, due to the “popularity” of the program, they are unable to handle my call at this time. Then they robo-hung up on me.

So, I’m writing to the snail address to unenlist. There is no way to unenroll over the Web. I somehow suspect that my letter will get “lost” in the mail.

These seem to be first-class thugs. If you can avoid them, do. [Tags: privacyguard fraud]

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I’m honored to be giving the Henderson Lecture at the University of North Carolina on Dec. 7. For it I’ve written a presentation that’s a bit more philosophical and lecture-y than usual for me, on my same-old topic of tags and knowledge.It asks how closely aligned knowledge and taxonomies have to be, whether and why some taxonomies have special standing, whether tags can ever be false, and whether folksonomies really have anything to do with knowledge at all.

On Monday, Dec. 4, at 7pm, I’m going to read a draft of it at a Web of Ideas session at the Berkman (23 Everett St in Cambridge [map]), and then throw it open for discussion. Any and all are welcome. We even serve pizza. [Tags: tags folksonomy taxonomy everything_is_miscellaneous berkman]

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A member of Governor-elect Deval Patrick’s transition team, Michael Wilcox, has sent out an email that I hope is indicative of how Patrick is going to govern. The message says:

As you may know, I have accepted, with great pleasure, an invitation to serve on the Patrick/Murray transition team, as a member of the Economic Development working group. I hope you will join the effort by submitting written suggestions concerning the issues that matter to you. We, as citizens, have an unprecedented opportunity to have a voice in our state government. Deval and Tim have expressed a genuine desire to receive public input during this transition process.

For a complete listing of the membership of each of the 15 working groups, see this link. If you’re interested in submitting suggestions to a particular group, you might take a look to see if you recognize any of the members, and submit them directly to that person. Otherwise, there’s a link here to the transition website, where you can fill out a form with your ideas. There is also a link on the transition website to an “Employment Opportunities” page, which provides instructions on how to apply for a job in the new administration.

I encourage you to submit suggestions, either via the website, to someone you know who is in one of the working groups, or to me via email, and I will be sure they get delivered to the appropriate people….

I’ve whined about the transition website because it doesn’t allow us to talk to one another. But I’m also encouraged… [Tags: deval_patrick politics epolitics masschusetts ]

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The daily NPR news and features show, “Here and Now,” for which I am an occasional techno-cultural resource (or something like that), ran a piece on SecondLife, featuring me, Gary Goldberger of Games for Change and Pathfinder Linden. You can hear it here. (It begins 5:02 in.)

During the interview, I chickened out of saying that the Harvard class being channeled through Second Life is in fact CyberOne, taught by my Berkman overlord, Charlie Nesson, and his daughter Rebecca Nesson. It just felt too pluggy. Nevertheless, it’s way cool and it’s open to anyone. [Tags: secondlife here_and_now npr charlie_nesson rebecca_nesson pathfinder_linden gary_gikdberger education]

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asphalt

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purple flowers 2

Originally uploaded by dweinberger.

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Steven Levy has a column about what could make the Zune better. He’s not nearly as negative as Andy Uhnatko (whose article I blogged about here), but he certainly seems underwhelmed. Steven focuses on how Microsoft could put the Zune’s wifiability to good use.

As is acknowledged under the column, Steven is the author of a book about the iPod called The Perfect Thing, which gives you sense of where he stands on the iPod. (Not that you’d want to stand on your iPod.) I’ve been greatly enjoying the book even though I don’t own an iPod, because (a) it’s about the iPod as a cultural phenomenon; (b) it’s about how something creative and elegant comes out of a commercial enterprise; (c) Steve writes real good. (I have a Creative Zen Nomad. It works.) [Tags: ipod zune drm ]

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Andy Ihnatko has a scathing review in the Chicago Sun-Times of Microsoft’s music player, the Zune. His thesis: Zune sucks because it was designed to meet the music industry’s needs, not the users’.

We can only hope that this isn’t a harbinger of Vista’s loyalties. [Tags: drm microsoft vista zune ]

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Jay Fienberg points out an additional capability of Flickr’s new sort-by-camera feature:

Additionally, each view may be filtered using a conventional controlled vocabulary, which is available via a drop down menu, and that has options like: portrait photos, night photos, landscape photos, etc.

One of the things that’s neat about this is that the data that drives this system comes, in large part, from the cameras themselves. With each photo, each digital camera records some data about itself and about how the picture was taken (e.g., at night, in landscape or portrait position, etc.), and the Flickr team has mapped this data into the hierarchical structure through which the photos can be browsed.

In another post, Jay reminds us that the way we sort information depends on what we’re trying to do, so becoming a champion of a single way of sorting is like becoming someone who insists on only using a saw. Important to keep in mind. But it’s also important to recognize—as Jay does—that with the advent of the digital, we’re now all able to use whatever tools we want on the same pile of scrap wood, simultaneously.

And thus the metaphor, extended like a fresh stick of licorice, snaps… [Tags: taxonomy everything_is_miscellaneous jay_fienberg flickr ]

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David Isenberg has three reasons to be hopeful that cellphones are going to be opened up, maybe sometime soon. [Tags: cellphones networks david_isenberg ]

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Pres. Bush had his photo opp with a Thanksgiving bird yesterday. Of course I’m delighted at the thought of the turkey being sent to roam a farm freely for the rest of his days…and I also like that the bird was set free. [Rim shot]

I don’t understand why Americans like the oddly Roman turkey-reprieve ritual. If you like seeing turkeys saved then here’s a festive holiday idea for you: Don’t kill one.

That aside, Thanksgiving is one of my favorite holidays. It’s actually got a good heart. So, happy Thanksgiving to all my fellow citizens. Most of us have so much to be thankful for. [Tags: thanksgiving vegetarianism]

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“All Things Considered” yesterday ran what was perhaps my oddest commentary. I’m not even sure what it was about.

Also, I was interviewed by “Here and Now,” an NPR news-and-culture show, about SecondLife, along with Gary Goldberger from Games for Change. I didn’t think I did a very good job explaining what SecondLife is, mainly because I was so intent on getting across that it’s a platform where people can build what they want. It’ll air on Friday. So, remember: To air is human, to forgive, divine. [Tags: npr commentaries humor secondlife all_things_considered here_and_now ]

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Frank has some sharp comments about Elaine Peterson’s article on the philosophical implications of foksonomies. [Tags: folksonomy taxonomy everything_is_miscellaneous frank_paynter elaine_peterson ]

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Mohamed Taher of the Multifaith Library in Toronto, in response to my transcription of a talk by Ranganathan, links to a list of photos of the great library scientist, and the work of Lennart Björneborn who, among other things, has transposed Ranganathan’s Five Laws of Library Science into Five Laws of the Web. [Tags: ranganathan libraries mohamed_taler lennart_bjorneborn everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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What packaging makes your blood boil?

I hate the thick, clear plastic, blister-packaging that’s sealed all the way around and inviolable except with a serious knife or possibly a band saw. And puncturing it isn’t enough. The plastic is so thick that you have to actually carve the product out of its container. Because the cut plastic is itself sharp, I worry about amputating a finger if the knife slips.

I also hate the way the cut plastic smells, but now I’m just piling on.

On the other hand, I find this to be funny to the point of being depressing…

And you? Vent your packaged ire!

[Tags: doep puzzle packaging marketing]

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Elaine Peterson, associate professor and information resources specialist at Montana State University, has published an article called “Beneath the Metadata: Some Philosophical Problems with Folksonomy” in D-Lib Magazine (doi:10.1045/november2006-peterson). Since she spends some time disgreeing with my “Tagging and why it matters,” I figured I’d reply.

Elaine’s article begins with a clear, straightforward explanation of taxonomies and folksonomies. Then she gives reasons to dislike folksonomies.

First, she says folksonomies are unlikely to be “good for the average user…since folksonomies will not produce an efficient index.” It’s not clear what Elaine means by “efficient.” But if she means that users won’t be able to to find information efficiently relative to traditional taxonomies, then there’s evidence that she’s wrong, at least in some instances (e.g., Flickr).

Then she moves to her philosophical critique. In essence (so to speak), Elaine objects that folksonomies are non-Aristotelian. Ironically, that’s a theme of Everything Is Miscellaneous. The difference is that for Elaine, the fact that folksonomies are non-Aristotelian means they’re wrong, whereas for me it means they’re probably important and definitely interesting.

Elaine writes, “Some of the problems with folksonomies can be traced to problems inherent with relativism.” But, folksonomies represent the weakest form of relativism there is. You organize your home library alphabetically by author while I put the books I consult most often on the lower shelves. Our taxonomies are not making statements about how we think the world is. They are not making statements at all. They’re making our libraries more convenient. They are relative to how we think and to the fact that I’m rather short. Even Aristotle may have stored his clean togas in a different order than Plato without having to get into a metaphysical dispute.

But Elaine sees this as perhaps “the strongest criticism one could make of folksonomies”:

Because tags are relativized, personal, idiosyncratic views can coexist and thrive in the form of tags, in spite of their inconsistencies. Readers of texts on the Internet become individual interpreters, despite the document author’s intent.

This is a double-barrelled criticism.

1. Tags may be inconsistent with one another. Again, not even Aristotle would object to this. If he tags the photo of Alcibiades as short, Plato tags it as tall because of their relative heights, and Socrates tags it as dreamy, the set is inconsistent, but the cosmos continues unaffected.

2. Tags may be inconsistent with the author’s intent. Sure. Author’s intent is not the only way we look things up. Even if we are tagging what we think the book is about — Alcibiades tags The Republic as “politics” and Aristotle tags it “philosophy” — surely no metaphysical damage is done. The author’s intention is not unarguable. Nor is it the last word on what a book is about. Within the realm of intent, there’s plenty of room for disagreement, even when the aim of the classification is not simply to organize bookmarks but to encapsulate the significance of a work. Tags are metaphysically disruptive only if one believes that (a) there is one and only one way of categorizing The Republic, (b) that way has to be according to Plato’s intent, and (c) tags are intended to state the single, true classification of The Republic. If Elaine is right, then what is that true classification of The Republic? I don’t know, I don’t think Elaine knows, I don’t think Plato knew, and I’m pretty sure the entire question is technically nonsensical.

Elaine then raises the question of whether, granting the possibility of multiple interpretations, there can be false interpretations. This is not a concern if tags are mnemonics by which people re-find resources. She then worries that if all interpretations are of equal worth (a point she disagrees with), “if users can continuously add tags to articles, at some point it is likely that the whole system will become unusable.” This is an empirical claim. We have reason to think it’s false: Flickr’s clustering has gotten better as it has gotten more tags to analyze.

Her final criticism of folksonomies “is that their advocates seem to assume everything on the Internet needs to be organized and classified.” I would ask Elaine to find a single advocate of folksonomies who makes the claim she’s disputing.

Elaine concludes with two comments.

1. “Folksonomists are confusing cataloging structure with personal opinions and subsequent social bookmarking.” Actually, we’re not. Folksonomies exist—even terminologically—in distinction from traditional cataloguing structures. We may disagree with Elaine about the role, utility and philosophical significance of folksonomies, but we’re not confusing them with traditional taxonomies.

2. “A traditional classification scheme based on Aristotelian categories yields search results that are more exact.” I don’t know exactly what Elaine means by “exact,” but there are certainly practical advantages to traditional taxonomies. They are more predictable and thus can be easier to learn how to navigate. They are expensive to create, so the task is usually given to people with genuine expertise. They can engender a common vocabulary that facilitates discussion. But, most of all, we have no practical choice but to use traditional taxonomies when organizing physical objects: The physical book can go on only one shelf. The physical metadata about the book—the card in the card catalog, typically—allows a few more ways of categorizing and organizing it, but more than that and the catalog gets unwieldy. The simplicity of traditional taxonomies, reflecting a single-termed Aristotelian essentialism that few current philosophers take seriously, imposes on the realm of understanding a limitation inherent in the physical realm. That simplicity is no longer required. Indeed, it gets in the way of our ability to navigate the digital domain.

There’s an argument to be had over whether there is a single, universal, non-relative way in which the things of the universe are ordered. There’s no serious argument about whether there’s a single best way to lump and split our bookmarks or laundry.

And I’ll take one step further toward the metaphysical: Folksonomies are not only frequently more useful than top-down taxonomies; they better reflect the bottom-up, messy, ambiguous, inconsistent, social nature of meaning—despite Aristotle and the tradition his genius spawned.

[Tags: tags folksonomy aristotle elaine_peterson everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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Chris Locke and Jeneane Sessum are recommending the new Kat Herding blog. She sure is perky! [Tags: kat_herding say_wha?]

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Chris Lydon’s Radio Open Source, one of the most encouraging experiments in moving broadcast past broadcast, needs bucks as it looks for a new institutional source of funding. Read about it here. [Tags: radio_open_source christopher_lydon radio ]

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Tim Spalding’s LibraryThing has a really cool new feature: An unsuggester.

Unsuggester takes “people who like this also like that” and turns it on its head. It analyzes the seven million books LibraryThing members have recorded as owned or read, and comes back with books least likely to share a library with the book you suggest. The unsuggestions come from LibraryThing data, not from Amazon. LibraryThing also produces great suggestions.>

Here are some of the results I generated:

The unsuggestion for Cluetrain? King Lear. Ouch. [Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous librarything books]

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Wikimania, the Wikipedia conference, will be held in Taipei next August. Wikimania 2006 was held at Harvard and was a fascinating event. Wikipedia is one of those phenomena that seems to be without bottom: There’s always some group wrapped up in a level one deeper than you knew about. I don’t think I’ll make it to Taipei for this one, but I’m sure I’ll regret it.

Meanwhile, a happy front-page story by Robert Weisman in the Boston Globe touts the spread of wikis. It begins well with a quote from Dan Bricklin, but for some reason, it takes Wikipedia as an example of a wiki that “stumbled” and as a “fiasco.” Why? Because “it had to deputize a cleanup crew to enforce quality standards, catch mistakes, and restore stories altered by pranksters or partisans.” Isn’t that a bit like saying the Boston Globe is a fiasco because it has had to hire a cleanup crew to enforce quality standards, catch mistakes, and check facts? There are obviously problems with Wikipedia, and it’s subject to a type of error that mainstream encyclopedias are not, but it also has strengths, including its topicality, the amount it covers, its linked architecture, and its ability to correct itself quickly. I do not believe that history is going to put Wikipedia into the fiasco category. [Tags: wikipedia wikimania wikis]

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Deval Patrick, our shiny governor-elect, has picked an outsider as his chief of staff. Joan Wallace-Benjamin’s got a Ph.D. in public policy but she’s also has a big heart and lots of administrative experience: She was CEO of The Home for Little Wanderers (Best-named. Nonprofit. Ever.) and used to head up the Massachusetts Urban League. So far, Patrick is making good on his message of hope.

On the other hand, Patrick’s team posted a disappointing site to help with the transition into office. It’s got some good information, and many pages have a link you can click to submit your own ideas. But the ideas go straight to the Patrick team. There’s no place for citizens to post in public and talk with one another. Judging from this site, the Patrick campaign—administration—still thinks it’s the hub of the universe. Let us talk together in public and we’ll come up with ideas isolated individuals won’t…and we’ll be directly engaged in our own governance. Now that’s a hope for democracy.

[Tags: deval_patrick politics epolitics massachusetts ]

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BuzzFeed figures out, through a combination of trend analysis and sweaty editors, what the buzz is on the Net. It says it “distinguishes what is actually interesting from what is merely hyped.” And you know it must work because the #1 topic there right now is “nip slips” of the rich and famous.

Kottke’s got more on it… [Tags: buzzfeed everything_is_miscellaneous news]

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Zack Exley explains why RootsCampDC is now only accepting people—anyone—who worked on the elections this cycle. Space is limited and it was filling up with executive director types, whereas RootsCampDC is supposed to be

a place where the volunteers and precinct organizers would analyze the elections together with directors, candidates and consultants as peers. We also wanted to bring in people who worked on the elections in new ways: bloggers, guerilla ad makers, programmers and others.

I’m with Zack on this. Applying any explicit admission criteria goes against the BarCamp philosophy, but I’m more interested in having a good meeting that nudges democracy forward than in being a BarCamp purist. Diversity of experience and position matters a lot here.

I’d already signed up to attend the second day—I have a family event on the first day—although I don’t fit into any of the categories. Making get-out-the-vote phone calls for the Deval Patrick campaign doesn’t put me in the same solar system as the folks who poured their time and hearts into campaigns this year. I expect to listen a lot and learn a lot at the get-together. [Tags: politics netroots zack_exley barcamp ]

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In advance of the American Anthropological Association annual meeting, a group has put together a call stop charging for access to anthropological research. From the group’s wiki:

Scholarly societies are in crisis, and the AAA is among them. Dwindling revenues from sales of AAA Journals are among the causes, and if we don’t staunch the bleeding now, we are warned, there will be nothing left to give.

How has the AAA gotten to a point where its solvency seems to be based solely on the sales of our scholarly work? Work that has already been paid for by public and private granting agencies which we pay registration fees to present at conferences organized by the scholarly society we pay membership fees to join? Why must we also charge our readers?

Recently, the AAA publicly voiced its opposition to Federal Legislation that would require federally funded research to be freely available to the people who paid for it: citizens. This public opposition is clearly not in the interest of AAA members — and the AnthroSource Steering Committee has publicly said as much, proposing a range of initiatives to make our collective work more accessible. For this criticism, the ASSC was dissolved.

Clearly, something needs to change.

1) we need a solid open access policy to make anthropological research widely available;

2) we need a more transparent financial arrangement between the association and its members;

3) we need a form of financial sustainability that does not compromise our ability to disseminate our research.

There’s more here and updates here.

Access to scientific work is a scarcity that now is artificial. It’s bad for American science and disastrous for global science…and since there all science is global, it’s just plain disastrous for science.

[Tags: open_science anthropology ]

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Technorati has introduced a promising new feature. Click on the “Blog reactions” link at the bottom of a post and you’ll be taken to a list of other blogs that have linked to that post.

This is functionally like trackbacks but instead of including only blogs that actively notify other blogs when they link, it takes advantage of the fact that Technorati is indexing so much of the blogosphere. If it sees a link to one of your posts, it adds it to the list of blog reactions.

I am on Technorati’s advisory board (disclosure) and will be advising them to let blog owners set the color of the link and to get rid of the Technorati logo. [Tags: blogs technorati trackbacks]

Later that day: The blog reactions are making my page load too slowly, at least intermittently. Or maybe I just hit a rough patch on the Information Highway. In any case, I’m removing the links until I understand better where the problem is.

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Lessig explains and weighs YouTube’s cease-and-desist message to TechCrunch that inists that TechCrunch take down some code that lets you save a YouTube video to your machine. John Palfrey adds another layer of explanation.

Notes Lessig:

For a company that was built upon the unauthorized spread of other peoples’ copyrighted work to threaten legal action against someone simply enabling people to save that work to his machine deserves at least special mention in a book by Alan Dershowitz.

To save you the mousing, the book is Chutzpah! [Tags: drm copyright lessig youtube techcrunch ]

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Fon (Disclosure: I am on their board of advisors, a compensated position) and Skype are making available a combination of a Fon router (La Fonera—a nicely designed piece of hardware that automatically creates two networks, one public and one for your private use) and a wifi phone that lets you make Skype calls wherever you can find an open wifi signal. It’s $159 (£99, €139), and it comes with a bunch of SkypeOut minutes for calling regular phones (as opposed to calling computers running Skype). Judging from the Skype accessories page, it looks like this combo is a big price break: A skype wifi phone by itself costs $219 (after a $30 rebate).

You don’t need the Fon router for the Skype phone to work, and it doesn’t work only with Fon signals. It looks like the bundle is intended to encourage those of us who rely on open wifi signals to provide free wifi signals at home, which is more or less Fon’s raison d’être. [Tags: skype fon wifi]

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Gary Shapiro, CEO of the Consumer Electronics Association, responds to the op-ed written by Cary Sherman, CEO of the Recording Industry of America, in response to the CEA’s Digital Freedom campaign.

Personally, I think the RIAA’s op-ed is probably correct that the right to do what you want with a recording that you’ve obtained legally—including freely moving it around your digital devices—should not be pegged onto Fair Use. But, I am not a lawyer, so maybe I’m wrong about that.

That takes care of the part where I agree with the RIAA.

I don’t see much in the Digital Freedom campaign about Fair Use, other than a passing reference by former Berkman fellow Derek Slater in a blog report. The RIAA’s Sherman goes after Fair Use because he has a better defense against that. The real issue is: We want to be able to use what we’ve bought the way we want to use it, we want to be able to share music at least as freely digitally as we do in the real world, and we absolutely do not want the government mandating technology be crippled to prop up an industry that can’t keep up with the demands of the free market.

The urgent issue is the RIAA’s current push for a lame duck “Audio Flag” bill that will mandate that technology have built into it the inability to record radio signals without the permission of the broadcaster. This would mean that you just can’t save music off the air for personal use. It would also kill TiVo for radio, an option that becomes really interesting if you’re an XM or Sirius subscriber (as I am not).

[Tags: drm riaa cea digital_freedom audio_flag eff ]

Matt McKenzie has an excellent article in Computerworld explaining how Windows Vista turns your machine into a player owned and controlled by Big Content. He doesn’t quite put it like that, but it’s hard to draw another conclusion. [Tags: vista]

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Tagedu lets users submit, tag and rank sites that might be of interest to researchers. The sites are reviewed for “appropriateness,” and then added to the collection. The idea is that researchers should be able to search by tags, not just by text.

I found this link at Library Stuff, which also points to Quotiki, a Digg-ish site for group grouping of quotations. [Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous tagging tagedu quotiki taxonomy ]

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Yesterday, I gave a talk at a small customer seminar (um, it was the seminar that was small; the customers seemed to be of average height) for Fast, a remarkably successful search service provider. In his talk, the CEO, John Lervik, pointed in passing to ThisIsTravel.com, a travel site that aggregates customer and professional reviews from other travel sites. For example, the page about the Holiday Inn Select Opryland rates it 5 out of 10 on the basis of 25 customer reviews the site found at IgoUgo.com, TravelGuide.com, etc. It also pulls links out of Fodors.com and others. The page links back to each of those reviews. If I understand correctly, the reviews are each evaluated by hand in order to assign a numeric ranking (although the Fast engine also does automatic sentiment analysis…a tough computing task).

I find our continuing climb up the meta tree to be fascinating. [Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous travel metadata fastsearch thisistravel]

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I’m in NYC to talk with my publishers about their plans for marketing my book. That’s this afternoon. This morning, i’m going to be a guest participant in a grad seminar Steve Johnson teaches. (Note to self: Buy a copy of The Ghost Map so Steve can sign it…and so I can read it. I am a huge Steve Johnson fan.) So, I’ve been looking forward to today…

…Except now I’ve caught the attention of the unswerving god of Irony. Oh mighty swinger of the axe of overturned expectations, enforcer of whim, doer of random acts of randomness, gleeful splasher of cold water and placer of banana peels, oh pants ripper, invincible reminder of one’s inconsequence, interrupter of plans, thruster of the lance that finds all smugness, please forgive thy servant’s moment of happy anticipation. [Tags: steve_johnson i_am_but_a_worm do_not_smite]

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Brad of BradSucks has thrown together an RSS aggregator for himself that he calls his Temple of Ego (because he is the most self-deprecating person around). It puts out a feed of all that’s been outputing—his delicious tags, his Google shares, his Flickr photos, his blog posts. So, if you subscribe you get a stream of everything Brad, and you can be assured of continuing to get, say, his photos even if he switches from Flickr to some other photo site. (Brad says he saw the idea at Adactio.) [Tags: bradsucks rss ]

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