“The only sin in the world is ignorance.” – Henry David Thoreau
I was looking through my pictures and found this .. I stayed at a hotel called the “Hotel Gutenbergs” in Riga, Latvia, a couple of years ago. In the foyer there were these Gutenberg bibles on stands and in a glass case. I asked the guy behind the counter if they were real? I suddenly thought of my mother who always asks the butcher if the meat is fresh …
He really started something, I guess.
A friend of mine took this picture in Trondheim, where I used to live. You can’t take anything for granted, I suppose!
Well, I guess everyone knows by now. Yahoo! is safe from the grubby hands of Mickeysoft, for now, anyway. So I am sticking with you!!! Well done Jerry Yang and co ….
Here is an interesting quote:
"``Unbelievable,'' said Laura Martin, an analyst at New York- based
Soleil Securities Corp. ``This is management putting its employees and its
job security ahead of current Yahoo shareholders' interest.''
Er … am I missing something? Since when has it become BAD to put your employees ahead of a bunch of people who don’t care about anything except the expansion of their purses????
I hope it is not to be, but I have already found a new web hosting company to replace Yahoo! hosting, who run this blog …. should the unthinkable buyout from Mickeysoft go ahead.
I have also kind of found a replacement for Flickr …. del.icio.us will be hard to replace
So PLEASE let sanity prevail and don’t let share market greed win this one!!
I have Yahoo! email, business email, Flickr accounts, and even this blog is hosted on Yahoo!
I even applied for a job with Yahoo!, and at one time I thought about heading to Yahoo! research in Barcelona.
The thing is I hate Microsoft.
How will I replace all these services if Microsoft buys you out???
So what do you make of this?
This picture shows a number of tags that have been grouped according to high level linguistic analysis of the terms. I will not explain the specific semantic abstraction in this post, because I want to see if people (if there are any out there watching my poor blog!) can make any sense of it? That is, do the terms in each branch seem to belong to the same “kind”?
Enough for now.
There a story in the Wall Street Journal that Microsoft is planning to buy into Facebook. I saw several bloggers pick this story up, commenting on the Microsoft catchup aspect of the story.
But no one seemed to have picked up this ironic fact: Facebook runs on Linux (and Apache). So Microsoft wants to use innovative new products built on superior technologies to prop up its boring, aging, and second rate technology.
How sad it was to read the news on Jem’s web site. For those of you who don’t know, Jem is a brilliantly original Welsh singer/songwriter whose first album “Finally Woken” was stunning!
Unfortunately (?) it was also somewhat successful and now she is in Los Angeles recording her second album with hip hop producer Jeff Bass who worked with Eminem, 50 Cent and so on. Now even though I like some of Eminem, who IN THEIR RIGHT MIND would EVER think of mixing Jem’s unique style with some cardboard cutout hip hopster? Then if this wasn’t enough, it turns out that she is also working with Lester Mendez, who was the idiot that RUINED one of my other favorite creative singers, Nelly Furtado. Why, oh why must creativity end in such horribly mundane and boring ways these days, gravitating to a stale predictable yawn? Money I suppose is the answer?
“I’m sorry .. so sorry .. I’m sorry it’s like this …”
Prophetic words, Jem ….
This has nothing to do with folksonomy … or does it? I was loking for pictures of Bergen in Norway .. and somehow this picture showed up as a main result. It is in Austria. Still, an awesome picture! Guess tagging really works 😉
The idea for this entry came from some very interesting comments on my previous ramblings about the nature of tagging. It seems to me that there are a lot of strange notions out there about the relationship between concepts, words, and tags. Let me first give you my simple view on tagging, which I think is probably right.
1. Our heads are filled with concepts. We don’t really know what these are like, and philosophers and psychologist (and, unfortunately, computer scientists, mathematicians and witch doctors) will argue for a long time about the best way to characterize them. Nevertheless, we know that children have them before they learn to speak. For example, the psychologist Liz Spelke has done fascinating work on the nature of “innate concepts” in infants. I think animals also have a pretty rich conceptual system.
2. Humans (but not animals) have an instinct to communicate with language. Language provides words and grammar to communicate the concepts in our head. I won’t talk about grammar. Words are pretty much arbitrary sounds that we use in speech. Words have a sound that we learn. They also have some syntactic properties that tells us how they should be used in sentences. So I am thinking about cats. I can say “I am thinking about cats”. “Cats” is the sound I use to talk about the cute furry things I am thinking about. If I was talking to a Hungarian about cute furry things I would say “macska”. It pretty much doesn’t matter which sound I use as long as the other person also knows it. But I wouldn’t say “I catted home today” because I know that the word “cat” is a noun and I shouldn’t use it as a verb. I might also suspect this is the case because nouns tend to be about things, and we can’t use them in place of actions.
3. So words are pretty handy. So now I go to del.icio.us and find a web site which I think is about cats. What should I tag it? Geez. Hmmm.
So there you go. Of course there are some messy steps here. There always are. How do I decide the site is about cats? We don’t really know, but this popular blog suggests one mechanism by which humans (and birds) can make quick intuitive category decisions. But once I decide it is about cats, why wouldn’t I tag it “cats”??? Of course I might add other tags. I can add adjectives which are usually descriptors of some sort. “cute” comes to mind.
I don’t believe that adjectives form categories the way nouns do. So I don’t think there is a category of “cute things” or “big things”. Nouns have pretty fixed meanings, but adjectives like “big” are practically meaningless without the nouns they modify. A tiger is a big cat, but is it a big thing? So of course tags which are adjectives are a lot more personal than nouns, and don’t represent categories.
There are of course other issues. There is ambiguity: someone might label a bulldozer a “cat”. Or, maybe someone thinks the site is not about “cats” but “obsessions”.
But neither of these issues is a problem for my simple view. Ambiguity occurs because we chose not to have enough words. We have the same sound for two different categories. But the process is still the same: “categorize then name”. The second issue is also O.K. as far as I am concerned.
Tagging works because people are free to go with their “gut feeling” on what categories things belong to, and they are free to use the words they have always used to describe those categories. And then they get to put some spice into the mix with some colorful adjectives (emotional terms?), proper names, and verbs (action words?).
Simple! And what is the alternative? I have not seen one. All I have seen is suggestions of magic …
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