Intelligent Human Agent ™

Can I just say, I am very excited about our impending move to Drupal as our website CMS. I'm here at taxonomy bootcamp, where tagging is the new black, and so last night I reluctantly revisited my three and a half year old delicious page, only to discover a few new bells and whistles, such as networks and bundles, that make delicious more of a social networking tool and a little bit more of a content organizing tool. But the real excitement came when, seemingly no matter what path I took through friends and keywords, all paths led to Drupal! And this morning, here in San Jose at the Marriott, a palpable cloud of post-conference exhaustion hanging in the air, left by the phantom dust of KM/search enterprise/taxonomy bootcamp attendees, I pop on to Facebook, spy a message from a librarian colleague I've never met, try to remember why he's talking about "the uber meta data model of the future", find the reference on Google (after which I finally remember I joined a Facebook group called "tagging is the uber meta data model of the future", and notice that the founder of that group has a prominent link to Drupal on his blog.

Long story short, my RL colleague and I are off to Boulder next week to talk to the consulting firm that will help us get Drupal up and running. I'm radically stoked about it's taxonomical/tagging capacities and only hope I can get the "processes" (hate that damn word - heard "business processes" too many times this week) in place to do justice to and leverage these capacities.

I just can't get the hang of Gmail. I'm the kind of person who doesn't keep their inbox very clean, even though I create lots of folders that help me file away emails for future perusal (for example, at work I use Eudora. I have 369 emails in my inbox, 26 folders [i.e. mailboxes], and about 86 sub-folders).

So, yeah, Gmail is all about search, not filing. But I can't help myself. If they didn't want us to file, why did they give us labels? OK, so I guess I'm supposed to treat labels like tags or keywords, and stop thinking of them as folders. Problem is, they're listed on the left side of my screen and dagnabit they sure look a lot like folders. So periodically I have an overwhelming urge to get some of the crap out of my inbox and I dutifully go about selecting emails, giving them labels, and then archiving them to remove them from my inbox. Uh, talk about labor intensive! I need drag and drop bad.

This is kind of cool.



create your own visited countries map

I had no idea. All of the basic beautiful people from Orkut are over on Flickr. I found this out from Henrik, who committed Orkutcide. Then I found Adam Rifkin's contacts and browsed them and so many of the old gang are there, and are kindly using their same old handles. Flickr is good for photos, but not so good for Social Networking though. I can't figure out stuff like where to write people Testimonials or even how to view their contacts - I had to reverse engineer the URL for that. I'm sure it's in there, but you have to be in the right part of the site to navigate to other parts. Anyway, it was still cool to see everybody there.

I post my photos on Flickr. Like del.icio.us, there's the tag thing. And you can view the "most common tags". And this just strikes me as a very good way to suss out the best keywords for search within a given user environment. I mean, on Flickr, it becomes very clear that beach, wedding, family, and friends are going to work for people as tags. Of course there are authority problems. Some people use cat, some people use cats. That's probably the main difference between librarians and computer people. Computer people prefer to find a way around the messiness without cleaning it up: just make sure people know there's the "cat" tag and the "cats" tag. Or program it so results for both come up. Librarians have a hard time constraining the impulse to force people to choose a discrete tag. Librarians would probably ask the programmers, "can you make a little pop-up note that tells the user, 'you wanted to tag this as cat - please use the tag cats instead.' "

I like the visual Flickr uses, when you look at "popular" tags, or your own tags, or someone elses tags, it shows you which ones have the most photos associated with them by using size.

Wow, clusters. Flickr has a new thing called clusters. You check out all the photos people have tagged with "Red", then you can view clusters related to red. All the photos that were tagged "strawberry" or "autumn" in addition to "red". I am to be liking this.

UPDATE: OK, I guess I am just an idiot - no, I am just out of touch. Apparently there is actually a name for the whole phenomenon of user-created tags. Either that or Adam Rifkin coined it, but he has a delicious tag called "Folksonomies". I really need to keep up. But that's not likely to happen now that I'm a Mom.

ADDITIONAL MUSINGS: OK, so one problematic thing about these tags is how people handle phrases. Some use social_networking, some use social-networking, some use socialnetworking. So, again, there has to be a way to either bring similar tags together or exert authority control. Otherwise, valuable categorization work is lost, or subject to the vagaries of serendipity (which is not altogether a bad thing, but messy).

Apparently my hit counter got re-set somehow. Maybe I should use a different one.

So, I took Google Q and A for a real quick spin just now but there's a few things I don't get. I tried, who is peter norvig?" Surprise! I got an answer. But at the beginning of it it says "Property". I didn't know how to interpret that. I guess they're trying to say that the content string (all of 16 words) is property of the attributed source, Wikipedia. I think this could be worded differently.

Then I tried, "who is Abraham Lincoln?". Strangely, no response.

"Who is Jerry Garcia?" worked just fine, though. Again, Wikipedia was the chosen source. Kind of a no-brainer since it's copyright free, I guess.

Another slightly awkward thing is that the response under the query says that the words who is "are very common and were not included in your search". However, I have to assume that it is the words "who is", and/or the question mark, that tipped Google off to the fact that I was asking a question.

Gotta run, more on Q and A later.

Thanks to Mary Minow for blogging about Google's new library project, which is officially called Google Print.

To see it in action, try performing a regular Google search on a classic author. All of the following worked for me: William Blake, Charles Dickens, Edgar Allan Poe. Certain subjects will work also, such as English Literature.

You'll see "Book results for" with a cute icon of some colorful books on a shelf.

You are then led to a page somewhat like Amazon's "look inside the book." All you really get is a random look at a few pages, though, if the book is copyrighted. Not sure what good that does anyone.

I tried to find a book that might be available in its entirety but wasn't able to. I reasoned that some of the books available at Project Gutenberg might be likely to also show up on Google Print, but that wasn't the case. I couldn't find The Odyssey or A Christmas Carol. Then I decided to try Google's own example of a book in the public domain, but when I searched for "books and culture" nothing came up. Then I tried "Hamilton Wright Mabie" and it did come up. OK, now I'm hooked. By reverse engineering the URL and putting a high page number at the end I was able to verify that the whole darn book is in there.

What else can I say at this point except Google Print is Cool?

Whenever Google comes out with some cool new thing I usually rejoice, but sometimes it does feel a bit like they're encroaching on librarian territory. I particularly remember some of my colleagues grumbling about Google Answers. Today they announced their library project. The first article I read was on the CNN Money page, and I couldn't help but feel the rivalry sentiment encroaching. But then I checked out the New York Times' coverage, and noticed that Larry had strategically sucked up to the librarians, mentioning, "the incredible breadth of information that librarians so lovingly organize." Well, geez, how can you get mad at that?

It's human to be proud of one's relatives accomplishments, right? I mean after all, if I'm related to somebody smart then maybe my genes aren't too shabby either.

When I was 3 or 4 or 5 I had a very vivid dream that I remember describing to my Mom. I told her I had dreamed about God. When she asked what he looked like I said, "Just like Peter (my older brother), only older and with a beard."

OK, so I'll admit that I run a Google alert on my brother just to see what he's up to, and today it alerted me to this article in Search Engine Watch, describing Peter's book as "the Bible of Artificial Intelligence." Now my dream makes sense.