A thought about tagging, one that’s been niggling for a while: when I first encountered de.licio.us, I happily forged tags to suit myself, in my own idiosyncratic style (bloggery, culturewars, cyberia, geekery, memery, metastuff, musics, knowledge_web, to name a few tags that have caught a lot of items), thus insuring that I wouldn’t be contributing to tag clouds, since I was using terminology that nobody else was using. I set myself up to be an isolate, with the implicit notion that it’s desirable to do things in unique/idiosyncratic ways. That’s a stance I’ve occupied in many other realms: not many others play mandocello, few kick against the pricks of conventional “assessment”, being an anthropologist allows one to do whatever and it counts… call it all ‘personal style’. Anyhow, in the context of social software, my strategies are pretty anti-social. Goes back to Third Grade: (“content to play with like-minded others…”). Thus, my blogging activities, like my logfile activities, have very small audiences, often just the one…

I ought to be thinking and writing more systematically in these realms, and ought to be joining conversations that I lurk on the fringes of. That’s never been comfortable for me, as a matter of style. Even this commentary is intended for… well, whom? Principally myself, though I’m happy enough for anybody to read it, if they happen upon it via some serendipitous clickage of links. I wonder if there aren’t legions of people out there who do the same thing?

But where does this page belong? It’s part of the slipstream of reading and thinking, and it’s developing in the context of some processes of redefining what I do or might do… so it should be linked to Endgame, I guess.

Here’s an example of the utility of the social: technorati ‘reboot7’ actually gathers together postings that collectively inform one another… instant Community. I see that technorati ‘memery’ does link to one of my uses, likewise technorati ‘metastuff’, so the stigmergic trails are there…

And here’s Spike Hall saying “No common tag rules means problems, even dysfunctionality”. A posting well worth revisiting, and yet another example of the nowness of blogspace. Here’s just what I was thinking about, reflected in what somebody I sort of know was saying just yesterday, brought to me via Edu_RSS…

That’s one way to think about real school.”
sez Gardner Campbell, in a post describing a breakfast conversation at Frye Institute. Indeed, this sort of talk is just what real education is all about. It’s stimulating in that it makes the hearer want to know more about what passes into the ears. The wonder of this medium is that the rest of us get to participate vicariously. And THAT’s real school.

Read quickly, this one may seem irrelevant to the serious business of Information Wrangling… but just under the surface is something pretty remarkable: A rocket launcher of our own describes (a) capture of a data stream, (b) import into CAD/CAM software, and (c) export to a milling machine or 3D printer…
Science fiction, you say… but listen to Bruce Sterling and Alex Steffen (summary here, and audio). Fabjects and object processing are the stuff of Wired and MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms at the moment, but don’t say I didn’t warn me…

This comment on Weinberger’s dictum that ‘The cure to information overload is more information’ seems pretty right-on:

It’s (the flow) not gonna stop, and the traditional ways information and knowledge have been classified, ordered, made accessible, distributed and stored have had major change visit, as you have pointed out many times. We now need to become, and feel, adept art skimming, dot-connecting, pattern recognition, and deciding well and wisely when to delve more deeply and in more concentrated ways into issue X or issue Y.

Gardner Campbell points me to another very eloquent summary of what’s going on, from Wade Roush’s 10,000 Brainiacs: Let’s Write a Social Computing Story, Socially!, soon to be a Technology Review article. Try this bit on for size:

Walk around any college campus or visit any café with a Wi-Fi hotspot, and you’ll see that these new tools are already changing not only the way we interact, but the way we think, learn, and relate to our physical environments. And this change is accelerating. In fact, it’s spreading through world cultures so fast–and upsetting traditional notions of communication so radically–that even the last half-century of revolutionary technological change is beginning to seem calm by comparison.

Readers using Firefox see interlarded comments by mousing over hyperlinks, and are invited to contribute others for inclusion. Something happening here, Mr. Jones…
More:

…need for a new term to describe the current moment in information technology. Continuous computing doesn’t simply mean computing continuously: few people, in fact, want or need to be jacked into the network at every moment of the day. Rather, it also connotes computing that’s continuous with our lives as humans, in all their messy, biological, biographical, social richness. Computers and software don’t have to disappear behind the scenes in order to blend more naturally into our existence. All they have to do is respect our real human needs—prime among them, the need to communicate.

What marvelous clarity:

On your blog, you can document your public agenda better than anyone else can. If you’ve ever been interviewed by a newspaper reporter, you know the drill. An hour of careful explanation may be reduced to a quote that makes you cringe. What hasn’t occurred to most people yet is that you can publish that careful explanation yourself. Or that, when you do, the web’s aggregation engines will surface your words in appropriate contexts, and will help people measure their impact.
…. In a knowledge-based economy, narrating your work becomes part of everyone’s job. That narration produces artifacts we call blogs. They’ll transform Big Media, but only because they’ll transform society.

The whole post is eminently worth reading, and mostly on the subject of the transformation of journalisms. What it says to me is that all that log-file making and process-collecting that I’ve been doing in the last decade really does amount to something: it’s a record –a narration– of where I’ve been and what I’ve thought about, imperfectly connected though it surely is. I wish I’d been better able to convey this to my students…
(found via Gardner Campbell’s posting just this morning…)

Sez Marc at O’Reilly Radar:

It’s definitely true that “RSS” is not a helpful term to describe feeds to the world at large. Yet another acronym, spewed into the environment by the worst language polluters on the planet, the tech industry. But you know what? It’s already too late. Just like ‘http://’, RSS icons are a usability disaster that will be around for the long haul. The tools will have to route around the damage.
(Atom has a Branding Problem)

My friend Ron Nigh and I have been exchanging bits of news about H5N1 for the last 18 months, starting from the monitoring of press coverage that I began in January 2004, and following the discovery of the issue by people better equipped than ourselves (Effect Measure, Pathogen Alert, The Coming Influenza Pandemic?, Henry Niman’s Recombinomics, and Connotea’s AvianFlu tag…) . Yesterday I forwarded to him a couple of links to stories about death of migratory birds in China, who seem to have come from India… Ron responded:

This is such a fascinating subject for anthropology and I will be forever
grateful to you for pointing me to it way back when. It has so many
dimensions, from the genetic, species diversity issues ,biomedical
issues to the social and political… All that is lacking is some GIS! Do you know if anyone is mapping bird
flu? It would be great to take this as a case for my anthro students in 2006. By
then it may well be a big story or may have faded away like SARS. Anyway it
would be fun to come up with some mapping and statistical exercises to do
with the students on the Internet, etc. An idle dream, I suppose.

I replied with some comments on the prospects for mapping:

Consider the myriad problems of mapping, which simply make the whole
thing even MORE ideal as a multidimensional whatever for anthropology:
there are so many actors (individual and corporate) whose Interest is in
NOT allowing Information about H5N1 to be public, and/or in distorting
the “facts”, that the inbound data stream for maps is completely
compromised –we can’t even know how bad (or good…) the data are. Sort
of like mapping gypsies. And that’s a good metaphor for the whole
problem of Data and Objectivity, innit? What we’d like is some proxies,
ideally overlapping proxies, for the data we’d really like but can’t
get…
A lot of the stories I read via those blogs say pretty much the same
thing: the world of officialdom is bumbling and slow to get it, and
basically interested in not being caught in Type II Error (having cried
Wolf with public monies, when there was no lupine personage…), so the
testing that MUST be done to provide the data we need isn’t being done,
or is being suppressed, or in any case isn’t being fed into the channels
where troublemakers like Niman can get their mitts on and
misrepresent… etc etc.

Ron sez:

I don’t think anyone has said it quite as clearly as you. At least put your
thoughts on oook…

…so here they are.

Dave Winer’s post this morning, ruminating on the ecological niche(s) of podcasting (It worked!) includes a characterization of Public Radio that is, I fear, pretty much right on:

Thinking more about it I realized that the role of an owner of a public radio station is twofold. You listen and you pay. Occasionally, if you don’t mind waiting and getting totally nervous, you can call in and ask a question of an expert — someone who is probably just saying politically correct bullshit, but you never get to speak, what you think isn’t important, your job is to pay, and if you like, listen, while they lull you to sleep with their relaxing talk that’s only intelligent when compared to the other crap that’s on the radio.

He’s right:

…we stand at a historic moment when we’re witnessing the transition to a fundamentally new kind of media.
Media will change more in the next five years than it has in the past 50 years.
(Darknet minibook intro)

Y’all just wait and see…