Joho the Blog
An Entry from the Archives

"Rather than feeling beleaguered the way so many big media companies do when they look out over the Internet sea, the BBC-ers use words like "liberated.""

The BBC is not a company, it is an organisation that is paid for by extorting fees from anyone who owns a TV set. Granted, for an organisation that is paid for using involuntary contributions it is giving back a remarkable amount. But that is only remarkable because the past has taught us that extortionists are generally not very nice people.

If the BBC had a racket like that going in the US, it would have been thrown into the bay after the tea a long time ago, and rightly so.

I am not critizing the quality of the BBC product, which indeed seems high, but rather the comparison between an organisation that gets money thrown into its lap, and companies that have to earn every last penny themselves. I am pretty sure that if I got a bag with 2.6+ billion UKP (ca. 4.7 billion USD) every year, giving back would come easy to me too. (I probably wouldn't know how to spend it all.)

Branko, how you Brits choose to fund your public broadcasting is up to you. The fact that the BBC has money while PBS/NPR are currently threatened with the zeroing of their funding is obviously crucial to why the BBC is able undertake projects such as the Creative Archive. To be precise, the fact of funding is necessary but not sufficient. My article is looking at the gap between the necessary and the sufficient...

Well,
Linnaeus categorized the species in a tree structure although it may not even be the best way to organize the living. He probably did so because it had to reflect the sample specimens he had gathered.
How about that for an explanation?
Implication: If he had had an image/file in an internet database, would he had categorized in a web like structure? Or would he have used faceted metadata?
How would the world look to us, if the creatures of the world were not put in a tree like hierarchy?
It reminds me of something I once read in Roland Barthes (this is many years ago) - about a Jorge Luis Borges story, about an old chinese encyclopedia where dogs were classified into something like: big dogs, small dogs, dogs that drank all the water and ran away, dogs painted with a very fine brush, dogs seen from so far away that they look like ants... etc. (this is memorized so please bear with me).

On the internet no one knows you're a dog, so that may be a problem in this particular case! ;-)

Best
Gunnar

I’m a new reader of your blog. U did a great job there n 2 thumbs up for the creative effort. Keep blogging…

Ray
http://www.ray7nyc.blogspot.com/

Gunnar, that's more or less what the book I'm working on is about.

By the way, it's by Borges, not Barthes.

Borges it is. Barthes just wrote about the Borges short story. I guess I have it somewhere.
I love that stuff. The way we categorize tells us so much about who we are. Off course you know "Women, Fire and Dangerous Things"?!
BTW: We had a very brief encounter on Reboot - between Jyri and Lee Bryant I think it was. I'd have loved to chat with you about these matters.
Some other time maybe.