Listics

HighBeam works for me, and I’m getting it for free.

High thee to HighBeam and take advantage of their limited time offer.  The kimono opens at the CBO’s site, and the riches of the HighBeam database are yours.  For free.  Check it out, I think it’s a limited promotion.

Vegetarian Doctor Weinberger delivered the choicest tidbit of the webcred conference over dinner last night.  This little match girl, nose earnestly pressed to window, ragged sleeve wiping condensate from the glass in order to get a better view of what’s going on inside, found this morsel in the transcription from last night.  Drawing the three threads of his speech - ethics, blogging, and taxonomies - Joho said:

we’re engaged in a global project of taking down the trees and rolling in the leaves

Makes me want to hang up this consulting gig and get one of those high paid jobs blogging as a bioinformatics-ethicist.

David Weinberger has an interesting post with a discussion thread that is truely informative about the Technorati taxonomy effort.

I’m sure Adam Rifkin speaks for many of us when he says:

Why does having a blog mean feeling perpetually behind? (Not just in
having something to say, but in finding time to type it in, press POST,
sending the bits over the 802.11, out the 10Base-T, through the router,
down the T1, over the leased line, off the bridge, past the firewall…
nothing but Net?)

Has it really been a fortnight since my last confession?

I think the answer is to let go of the immediacy compulsion.  I have several thoughts I’d like to develop into long posts (i.e. very brief essays).  I have some tidbits of online research I’d like to share.  I have a couple of larger blog-proj items I’d like to get done, and I’m perpetually behind.  That’s just how it is.

David Weinberger has taken on taxonomy as a project this year.  A book will be forthcoming and the truth will be revealed.  Meanwhile we can only wait and wonder, and maybe pick up an $80 copy of next month’s Release 1.0.  Today David points us to Clay Shirky’s comments on Louis Rosenfeld’s observations regarding "Folksonomies."  Some of the discussion here relates to the relative merits of metadata taxonomies (think Dublin Core) versus "Folksonomies" (think FlickR and del.icio.us).

From Carl Linnaeus’ work categorizing life forms according to kingdom (plant or animal), and then  hierarchically by phylum, class, order, family, genus and species to modern phylogenetic systematics… from the DBMS data dictionaries of the 80s to the XML Document Type Definitions of the 90s and more recently the XML Schemas of the 21st century, we’ve been categorizing, coding, classifying, and otherwise discriminating one thing from another.  Geologists do it with rocks and minerals.  Linguists do it with languages and phonetics.  Hell, everybody does it.

I wonder if there isn’t a useful distinction between "searching" and "finding" lurking in here somewhere.  A large bank might be interested in searching and finding its entire agricultural equipment lending business collateralization.  Folksonomies might not be the best approach for making this happen.  Different loan officers might call those Massey Ferguson Corn Pickers by different names.  Maybe another axial distinction might be between "want" and "need."  I want to find information on free lance writing and kill fees.  I don’t need all the information.  Folksonomies might be good enough for what I want.

There will be problems, chiefly with commonality of tag assignment I think.  But many hits on a topic can be sufficient, when all hits aren’t required.  Of one  thing we can be sure, the term "Folksonomy" is here to stay.  We’ve needed a new neologism for a while now.  Is "new neologism" redundant?      

The ABC trope that bloggers are people of the year has caught the attention of more than a few good bloggers, and they appreciate thge treatment and the attention.  It’s my contention that it’s long past time for those of us who - (ugh) - "blog" - get over ourselves and get on with life.  I submit that journalists are better at what they do to the extent that they are NOT the story.  One good reason is that they don’t waste bandwidth on navel gazing.  While there are a lot of students, teachers, and critics of blogcraft, most of us are simple writers.  Some of us write fiction.  Some comedy.  Some journalism.  The web provides media and context, but it no more provides identification than the battered fedora and the portable Underwood.  Writers is writers.  Web crafters add dimension through better and broader control over content and layout than the average portable Underwood gives you.

I’ve been reminded by an email correspondent that there is a distinction between private email and blogging exchanges.  Many people have a disclaimer on their blog warning all who write to them that their words may be grist for the mill.  I never thought I needed that, and indeed thought that I had a good enough filter to selectively blog what comes my way without a lot of formal back and forth, permissions and all that.  I do not have a good enough filter, so new years resolution number zero here at Sandhill is to respect the privacy of email.

Sorry friend.  I fucked up.