Psyberspace

Folksonomy, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Mess:

Clay Shirky, Stewart Butterfield, Joshua Schachter, Jimmy Wales
http://conferences.oreillynet.com/cs/et2005/view/e_sess/6329
At the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference San Diego, California, 16 March 2005
Impressionistic transcript by Cory Doctorow doctorow@craphound.com

Here is a section that sums it up:

Jimmy: Creating a large-scale category system, a small group of domain experts can’t even remotely compete with a large group of people. I wouldn’t even want to think of what it would cost to replicate the Wikipedia categories with paid labor.

Stewart: It’s a deep philosophical issue: Ontology is a controversial subject. The idea that it’s possible to cleave nature at the joints is controversial. Yes, there are countries, Uzbekistan is a country, but ask a physicist or a biologist and the categories are very fraught.

Joshua: The problem is that ontology doesn’t tie in with what my users are trying to do, like remembering something later. You tend not to be too broad nor too narrow, but rather try for a middle ground in your personal tags that serve as mnemonic aids. If you’re into insects, you might have BEETLES, MOSQUITOS, etc, but if you’re not into insects, you might just have INSECTS.

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I presume this is the Technorati office in San Farancisco. Clicked on someone’s technorati technorati tag and it came up. Feels quite intimate to see their office & learn where it is in the world with one click like that.

tags psyber

What to know about technology:

Sigmund Freud, the father of psychotherapy, had a student named Carl Jung. Jung believed we share a cultural consciousness, a just-below-the-surface sense of how we all fit together.

As it turns out, Jung was just a bit ahead of his time. We do now, indeed, share a just-below-the-surface consciousness. We call it the World Wide Web.

Dr. Benjamin Garber in this rather journalistic item on parenting has summed up (in the quote from the item) the essence of what tend to think about the www & the Collective Unconscious. It is an idea that I’d elaborate into a book… if I had the time 🙂 The rest of the article goes against the grain… my somewhat contrary wise parenting message would be “Always get the best Information Technology you can afford, and use it to the max.”

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Mutton Cove

We needed something to suit us all and this place was it! The photos are on Flickr – may it survive the purchase by yahoo.

Leonard Cohen – Democracy:

It’s coming from the sorrow in the street,
the holy places where the races meet;
from the homicidal bitchin’
that goes down in every kitchen
to determine who will serve and who will eat.
From the wells of disappointment
where the women kneel to pray
for the grace of God in the desert here
and the desert far away:
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.

Posted this snippet as part of a comment I made on John Perry Barlows blog BarlowFriendz: Terrorism and Democracy in Madrid

Tim Bray’s Comments are really good on the commercial aspect. But I feel angry and scared for another reason. Yesterday I was explaining this Google evil to someone and I realised just how I could be personally affected. I’d want to stop using the Net if I saw my writing on someone’s computer and it had links in there (no matter what colour or shape) pointing to things I did not point to! To me it would feel like a total invasion, like the day I came home and burglars had been in the house and fouled it up and opened all the Christmas presents. A sort of rape really, though I don’t mean to de-value actual physical rape. Google – do not violate my expression! Do not destroy the Internet. We (users on the net) have linked to Google voluntarily many billions of times – appreciate that and keep it so that we want to.

Sifry’s Alerts: Technorati Launches Tags This is a thorough explanation from the founder and CEO of Technorati. He also quotes Clay Shirky, who I will quote again here:

This is something the ‘well-designed metadata’ crowd has never understood — just because it’s better to have well-designed metadata along one axis does not mean that it is better along all axes, and the axis of cost, in particular, will trump any other advantage as it grows larger. And the cost of tagging large systems rigorously is crippling, so fantasies of using controlled metadata in environments like Flickr are really fantasies of users suddenly deciding to become disciples of information architecture.

Found this post via: http://www.promotetheprogress.com/ a legal blog on IP from J. Matthew Buchanan

BadMagicNumber He expleains a good proposal, and then later concludes with an update:

As it happens Del.ici.us already has support for querying on intersection of tags using the tag1+tag2 syntax. del.icio.us/tag/programming+python is the python programming tag.

Mormon Philosophy & Theology. This word entanglement is one that I use for the system of the psychotherapist and the client – with a conscious reference to its use in physics. The iedea being that it is a system and any introduction of an investigation of the system will change it! From the New Scientist

If you thought that quantum entanglement – the weird effect that allows two particles to behave as one, no matter how far apart they are – is too subtle to affect your daily life, think again. The phenomenon could be responsible for something as significant as the mass of everyday objects, yourself included, and could finally explain why the fundamental particles of matter have the mass they do.

Sometimes, the interaction of two particles, say electrons, causes their individual properties, such as spin, to become “entangled”. If you then change the spin of one particle it will instantly affect the spin of the other, regardless of the distance between them.