Jason Griffey

Sometimes when a new technology hits the Interweb, especially the blogosphere, it just spreads like a virus. Two of these things are Folksonomies and Flat namespaces. A flat namespace is a form of faceted classification (something that may or may not have popped up in some of your time at SILS) . The most popular sites that are good examples of this are del.icio.us, Flickr, and Gmail. For those of you not familiar with any of these, the big deal about a flat namespace (especially those mentioned above) is that content is given metadata by either the user or the community, which allows for filtering/searching of the data by its tags.

I’m just starting to play with del.icio.us, and I’ll say that it certainly looks like an interesting way to deal with classification, and is radically different than the hierarchical methods traditionally used by libraries (Dewey and the Library of Congress system). Imagine this: a library system that, via RFID tagged books and the right cataloging system, allows for users to virtually tag the books in the system. Given a large enough user base, a library could build a HUGE amount of data not only about their collection, but about how people use the collection. You may never expect people to catagorize books the way they do, and finding out how they see your books may give you a ton of information about circulation patterns and collection development that you would have never had otherwise.

Of course, you’ll still need a tradtional system like LoC for locating the works…for physical organization there’s still a need for some form of heirarchy. But if you add on top of that a searchable layer of user tags, we might have an exciting new way of dealing with physical information.

An interesting event today online that I’m calling “instant commercialism.” Here’s the breakdown:

• At roughly 10:03 am, someone named Jeremy emails BoingBoing about a picture in a slideshow on the MSNBC site for the Bush Inauguration that features the First Daughter Jenna Bush showing off the manu cornuta. Here’s the BoingBoing post.
• Someone points out that the MSNBC site has taken the pic down and replaced it with some shots of fireworks, but mentions that it would make a great parody T-shirt a la this one from the guys at Penny Arcade.
• At 12:30pm, Grant Henninger has the photo photoshopped and ready, and a Cafepress site ready with the shirts for sale.

Of course…Jenna is probably not pledging her allegiance to either rock or the Dark One, but is more likely giving the “horns” from the University of Texas where she is a student. Judging from the fact that her mom and dad have both been caught on camera doing it, seems a family kinda thing.

In any case…in a roughly two hour period we went from “odd pic of first daughter” to “buy the t-shirt”. Behold the power of the Internet!

I want one of these as my secret escape pod. I’m sure that I could rig it up with some appropriate hover jets/rocket pods/antigravity units.

Short of that, I just want one as a cool little hideaway. Would be a great place to hide and write, or just as a treehouse to re-enact childhood pirate/ninja/spaceman fantasies.

Among the many, many reasons that I will ensure that a Mac Mini is purchased this year are:

• I want a DVR, but don’t want to let Tivo or whoever decide to shut out something with DRM.
• I want a dedicated box to manage my digital media, including music and video.
• I’ve used Macs for a long time for business related things (photo editting, layout, etc.) but never owned one. It’s about time.
• There is amazingly freaking great software like Delicious Library out there, and it’s NOT for Windows.
• It’s got BSD underneath the OS, and it’s trivial to run linux programs from a command line.
• OS X has built in support for a webserver, file server, etc…

This is just another cool way to view Google results, but wow…it’s an amazing piece of coding.

Touchgraph

I had heard the term, but had never actually looked at the website or read any of the articles on “blended librarians.” Turns out, I am one!

An academic librarian who combines the traditional skill set of librarianship with the information technologist’s hardware/software skills, and the instructional or educational designer’s ability to apply technology appropriately in the teaching-learning process.

That’s pretty much the description that I use for my skillset whenever I’m interviewed. As a matter of fact, that described a lot of my classmates from SILS. I’m going to investigate what these guys are doing with the concept.

This one’s for you, Jerry.

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