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December 07, 2005

New issue of JOHO

I've just published an issue of my newsletter, the Journal of the Hyperlinked Organization. Here's the table of contents:

The year of unique IDs: We're about to get very interested in assigning meaningless numbers to lots of things. Very interested.

Last year, it was Web 2.0 and tagging. This year, it's going to be unique IDs (UIDs), and for the same reason that Web 2.0 and tagging matter: The Web is going miscellaneous. (The fact that I'm writing a book about the invigoration of the miscellaneous could not possibly have colored my perception. Nope. All of this is based on highly scientifical research done by people with clipboards who were teased as children.)...

Living on an Internet houseboat: Save the Net for aging hippies? Probably not going to happen.

As we survey the damage being done to the Internet by (sometimes) well-meaning regulators trying to save the Net from itself, I find myself asking: Are we living on the same Internet planet?

The answer pretty clearly is No. And it's not just regulators whose vision of the Net is so at odds with mine. There are plenty of academics, librarians, and even some of the Net's creators who view it as an occasional resource, a place to go to do research, and a swamp of filth.

To me, the Internet is a social world...

My book: Progress report: Here's what chapter 3 looks like.

Although readers of my blog might not know it, working on Everything is Miscellaneous is my full-time job. Here's what chapter 3 is currently about, although it may undergo drastic revision...

Posted by D. Weinberger at December 7, 2005 06:08 PM


Comments

Nice! I especially liked the unique ID piece.

Related and probably of interest is the new info: URI scheme:

http://www.loc.gov/standards/uri/info.html

URIs can be used as unique IDs (e.g., permalinks), and info: is an interesting effort to have a standard designed for identification rather than access or naming.

Regarding your note #1: I don't know if I'll launch anything before you're done with your book, but my project, the iCite net, is built on a globally unique ID mechanism, iCNS, that is a DNS-like approach to maintaining a globally addressable collection(s) of unique identifiers (for electronic things, e.g., documents, people, bits, etc., acccessible via computer networks).

Posted by: Jay Fienberg | December 8, 2005 03:13 AM


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