A Networked World

Jon Udell Delivers Again

The guy who gave us LibraryLookup is getting closer and closer to delivering my ideal of how the blogosphere, or in fact any connected network of people, can operate as an expert community for validating and extending my knowledge environment.

In The On-demand blogosphere his 4 Minute Screencast is the latest series of steps in connecting the work of bloggers, through an aggregator of his RSS feeds, contributing that to Del.icio.us and then using a little squad of bookmarklets to find out who is saying what about the things that are important to Jon.

Bottoms Up - Emergent Metadata and IA - Folksonomy

The monthly IA meeting and dinner, (OK, dinner and talking shop) always tosses up interesting ideas and last night's event turned up a conversation between Thomas Vander Wal and Gene Smith with kibbitzing from Clay Shirky on folksonomy.

If the net is doing anything at all it is creating neologisms like weeds.

Its Thomas's term to describe the kind of thing going on at Furl, Spurl, Deliciousm Flikr etc where the Google-like power of very large numbers enables dumb systems to generate meaningful relationships. Folksonomies.

Semantic Behaviour - Getting Somewhere

I think Dave Weinberger has unintentionally gone off on a tangent with an interesting post looking at what he calls a Semantic Behaviour Index, following Jon Udells' thoughts about a Google desktop.

Dave quite rightly gets nervous about privacy issues of software trackling our every keystroke, application launch and mouse click, but what he describes in his table of Semantic Behaviour strikes me as too broad and not in the right mindset.

Why Blogs Are So Successful from Tom Smith

JOn Husband links via Seb to this from Tom Smith

Its one of those lists, like the Cluetrain, that you read through and the immediate response is "YES!", and then you go back and think, "But why?" and then you move into "I haven't a clue" followed by, "and I disagree with some of it".

Its called being seduced by clever stuff and disengaging the thinker.

PurpleSlurple making the Rounds

Matthew Schneider left me a comment on an entry the other day and helpfully logged his Blog as well. Now I'm a sucker for a good name so I checked out PurpleSlurple and came across a fascinating idea that takes a while to sink in. I still haven't got it all but there's an underlying intelligence here that makes me think something very interesting is up.

Update
One of the most interesting things about all this Purple Numbering/ Hash Marks/ Pilcrows stuff is the speed with which it is evolving as new, and damned smart people take up the idea, critique it, adopt, adapt and improve (Thank you Rotary) it. As the idea takes hold and many minds go to work on it, they are converging on a good model that will actually start work pretty soon. At which time I'll be hanging off the Typepad people to get with the programme.

Points From Gary at Teledyn

In the slightly facetious piece yesterdsay on the service that teledyn is providing, Gary has responded with a couple of points that are worth mulling. He says

By the way, thanks for the kinds words about my aggregator :) ... my original intention had been two-fold: First, when I built that aggregator, few of my collegues could use RSS and needed some place to read the collected works of the knowledgeboard and other blogger groups, and my own 8-year history reading RSS leads me to believe that microcontent aggregation is the only viable, sustainable surfing strategy; there are just too many pages that change too infrequently to visit and sift each one, but on an integrating aggregator, it's easy.

Two notes, Awasu has a plugin that lets you create a synthetic feed from multiuple sources so at least someone is listening, and yes, I like the idea of microcontent aggregation, even if it spells the end of publishing as a business, while it ushers in a new model of shared communications and traded ideas.

IA Meetup Fallout

Last week's IA meetup at Out of India was a bit small for the first of the year, but the discussion ranged over some interesting things that started this train.

There was a little kvetching about websites that invite people to "try their new faceted search engine", some people plainly haven't got past the "tell us what you think of our website" era, and I had a beef with those who think a sitemap is somehow associated with IA. But the biggest problem with IA, as with many other ideas we are playing with, is that there is hardly any definition of it, and certainly none agreed even by a majority of those who use it. Subject to that caveat, here goes.

Memigo Joins the List of Very Cool People

Thanks to the excellent Jenny Levine at Shifted Librarian I came across Memigo the other day and set myself up an account.

There's a lot I like about Memigo, as does TSL, but the thing I like best about it is Costas, the guy who set it up.

In Honour of Vagueness and Shirky

As usual, Clay Shirky does a better, and more complete job on the vagueness that is real language, and the language of any actual communication, internet or otherwise. Which is why the Semantic Web is a fascinating exercise, and a hiding to nothing. The Semantic Web, Syllogism, and Worldview

I especially like this bit.

The people working on the Semantic Web greatly overestimate the value of deductive reasoning (a persistent theme in Artificial Intelligence projects generally.) The great popularizer of this error was Arthur Conan Doyle, whose Sherlock Holmes stories have done more damage to people's understanding of human intelligence than anyone other than Rene Descartes. Doyle has convinced generations of readers that what seriously smart people do when they think is to arrive at inevitable conclusions by linking antecedent facts. As Holmes famously put it "when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth."

This sentiment is attractive precisely because it describes a world simpler than our own. In the real world, we are usually operating with partial, inconclusive or context-sensitive information. When we have to make a decision based on this information, we guess, extrapolate, intuit, we do what we did last time, we do what we think our friends would do or what Jesus or Joan Jett would have done, we do all of those things and more, but we almost never use actual deductive logic.

As a consequence, almost none of the statements we make, even seemingly obvious ones, are true in the way the Semantic Web needs them to be true.

Mhmm.

The Metadata of Me and Saddam

When I was a kid my father once told me that he could always tell when I was lying, because I laughed when I was making some assertion. He interpreted my laughter as nervousness and thought he saw a reliable "pattern" of behaviour. I never told him he was wrong. What I was laughing about was the fact that I couldn't be found out because I was, in fact, telling the truth. This may say something about my propensity for lying, but it also goes directly to the reliability problem of information that cannot be solved by classification.