Intelligent Human Agent ™

Can't get the comments to work - maybe my template is too old? I'm not understanding how to enable comments, although the settings seem clear. And I already deleted the haloscan code.

I've been thinking about how I always have the greatest intuition about trends before they start, I begin to get involved, then I drop the ball. Maybe everyone thinks this.

Case One: When I was working for the small self-help publisher in the mid 80s I sensed a need for a book on caring for parents with alzheimer's. Never acted on it. Tons of books have been published since then.

Case Two: Got turned onto blogging by Steven Cohen and Jenny Levine at Internet Librarian back in 2003. Didn't keep it up. I think the cognoscenti within the then small circle of cybrarians would have read me if I had stuck with it, because there weren't that many library bloggers in the field back then.

Case Three: Around 2003 or a little later I started thinking I should position myself as an expert in writing "micro-content" because I could see that the web was calling for shorter and shorter ways to express more and more meaning. Didn't do nuttin', now I turn around and "micro-blogging" is the new buzz word.

Well, "woulda, shoulda, coulda" is my mantra, I guess. Ever since I was about twelve I've been struck by the William Blake quote, "sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires." Enough so to memorize it. But not enough so to follow its simple advice.

Now what about those comments? Am I gonna have to RTFM?

I've barely touched this blog in the last three years (and I have a three year old, so, hmm, go figure) but today I decided to remove the ancient hit counter that was slowing down load time, and the third party comment app, and see if I can get Blogger's comment feature to work. Here goes.

So I'm back to stalking the digerati, it seems. Yesterday I finally succumbed to signing up for twitter, but only by way of friendfeed. Which is to say, after checking out how friendfeed works, it became apparent that most of the cool kids have a twitter account, whether or not they use it to tweet. So, I've been spending the last few days seeing who follows who, and updating my social inventory of who's who in the digeratosphere.

At least it inspired me to make a blog post, my first in eight months. Yay me.

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.