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Everything is Miscellaneous |
About David Weinberger's book (May, 2007) and how we're pulling ourselves together now that we've blown ourselves to bits
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- Creative Commons govYesterday
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Change.gov, the transition site, has moved its content to a Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution license. So, anyone can use it so long as they attribute it back to its source. Very cool.
Open content is, of course, a creativity magnet. Already, apps have sprung up that let you get Change.gov content on your iPhone and as a widget elsewhere.
A government whose first instinct is toward openness! What a difference a mere 69 million votes can make!
Next: Putting government under revision control, as Tim O’Reilly advocates.
[Tags: obama e-gov transparency creative_commons tim_oreilly ]
- Meta-concept mapsDecember 1
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Howard Rheingold has noticed a concept map of concepts.
All that it’s missing is a “You are here” marker.
[Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous howard_rheingold concept_maps ]
- Philosophical problems with folksonomiesNovember 30
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Elaine Peterson, associate professor at Montana State University, has an article in D-Lib Magazine called “Beneath the Metadata: Some Philosophical Problems with Folksonomy.” It’s good to see the issues taken seriously, and many of her premises strike me as true. But, I disagree with her pragmatic conclusion that “A traditional classification scheme will consistently provide better results to information seekers.” And I think I disagree with her philosophical critique, although I am not confident that I’m understanding it as she intends.
I read the article two different ways. At first I thought it was a critique of folksonomies on the grounds that they contradict traditional philosophical premises. The next time I read it, I thought it was simply pointing out the differences. Now I’m tending toward my first reading, in part because her section on the traditional defends it against some objections while about half of the section on folksonomies is critical of them.
Her philosophical criticism seems to be rooted in what she presents as the Aristotelian approach to classification: Things are lumped with other things like them, and simultaneously distinguished from them. Most important, she says, is the idea that “A is not B,” which means that A cannot be truthfully classified also as a B. But what about digital items that “can reside in more than one place”? That
- LibraryThing vs. Library of CongressNovember 27
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Vincent Sterken has posted his master’s thesis, which examines LibraryThing.com to understand the dynamics and utility of social tagging. It begins with an exceptionally clear backgrounder on tagging and taxonomies, and then moves to a fascinating exploration of LibraryThing’s folksonomy, including a comparison of how LibraryThing’s community and the Library of Congress classify books.
[Tags: tagging taxonomy folksonomy vincent_sterken librarything library_of_congress everything_is_miscellaneous ]
- Control doesn’t scaleNovember 27
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I sometimes put up a Powerpoint (well, Keynote) slide that says “Control doesn’t scale.”The assumption that large projects only succeed if they’re centrally controls led and managed turns out to have been true because we limited the scope of what we we considered realistic. You can build a Britannica using a centrally controlled system, but you could not build a Wikipedia that way.
But I know that there are some important counter-examples, so I’ll frequently add, “Except at an huge cost in expense and freedom,” for we know all too well that some regimes have managed to maintain intense control over massive populations for generations.
Today there’s an interview in the Sydney Morning Herald with Isaac Mao, pioneering Chinese blogger and Berkman fellow, in which he says the Chinese authorities are unable to keep up with increasing volume of social communications the 108M bloggers, millions in social networks, and people texting and twittering away.
So, maybe control doesn’t scale after all.
