Technocrati or the World Live Web? Thing #14

World Live Web? Oh, please. First there was ARPANET, created by the Department of Defense in order to create a communication network that had several means of distributing information from one computer to another. ARPANET was more likely to survive a Nuclear attack than our telephone system because there was no centralized source that would be destroyed. Then, in the 1990s we created the World Wide Web, a graphical user interface for displaying information. The World Wide Web was always static, because people could put up webpages at any time, and change them whenever they wanted.

I don't even know how Technocrati is tagging the blogs it's tagging. The Widgets are of no value to me. I don't care what everyone else is looking for right now, I only want to find what I'm looking for. Again, Show Me They Money! (with all due respect to Tom Cruise and Jerry Maguire.)

Stalk Other Users? Men on the Internet Thing #6

Habit number 5 of Several Habits of Wildly Successful Del.ici.ous Users suggests that we stalk other users. Reminding us that this may be a community for good, or maybe not. The use of the word stalk is probably not intended to be disturbing (another reminder that the person writing this piece probably isn't thinking of the women reading it) but it bothers me. Why couldn't we find another less intmidating word?

Show Me The Money!!! Or the dirty underside of social networking sites

How are these informal tagging sites profitable? Is the information gathered from my browsing habits going to be sold? To whom? I've basically told people that I'm letting them peek into

By encouraging our users to use these networking sites, are we just giving data away to marketers to be used? Thoughts? Comments? Suggestions?

OCLC has published a study, Sharing, Privacy and Trust in Our Networked World, that looks very pertinent to my concerns.

Del.icio.us/Portability of Bookmarks

Given that I can think of many times I've wished I had my computer with me so that I could show someone a site that I had bookmarked at home, but now I have to wait to go home to email it to them, I can see an advantage of these social bookmarking sites.

But using these bookmarks to help "“less tech-savvy librarians have an equal voice in the collection,” instead of having one or two librarians editing a static web page."? Don't you have to be rather tech-savvy to feel comfortable using the bookmarks to begin with?

I don't particularly like Internet Explorer, and I much prefer my Firefox browser at home. Del.icio.us looks like it's intended to be used only with IE which I resent. What about people who are using older computers that don't work well with IE? What about people using linux to avoid the Microsoft issue altogether. Why is IE necessary?

Informal tagging Thing #13 A First Judgement

I like a formal vocabulary. I like having standarized search terms. I really like having an index where I can discover what search terms are being used. Therefore my automatic judgement of information tagging is that it's not terribly useful from a professional standpoint. I remember in graduate school when Yahoo.com had "categories" so you could limit your search to already sifted areas of the web. I thought it was great when Yahoo.com was using librarians to help "catalog" websites. Informal tagging violates all of this and doesn't necessarily help anyone find anything because we all use slightly different vocabularies; without creating any source where we can discover one another's tagging vocabularies (or what I might have called cataloging terms) the web becomes that more difficult to navigate.

Hidden books!

I've read two really good books this year and I'm wondering if mentioning them here (it is The Book Blog, after all) will encourage anyone else to read them. OK, one of them hasn't come out in the States yet. I got an advanced readers' copy at Book Expo America of Gods Behaving Badly, by Marie Phillips and I really want to recommend it. The Greek Gods are alive and living in modern London; Athena is a dog-walker, and Apollo has a television show where he pretends to be a psychic. (Are Gods psychic? Or are they just Gods?)

It's not really fantasy; it falls into that middle area where I'd put Rankin's Hollow Chocolate Bunnies of the Apocalypse. It's due out in December and I want to encourage people to read it. I think it could be the 21st century Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy, in terms of cult classics.

And The Word Was by Bruce Bauman is a powerful novel about the ability to continue living when faced with unimaginable loss. The book was very compelling and I would have stayed up all night reading it, if I hadn't had to go to work the next day. If you know you're going to be on a plane for 2 hours and want to be distracted, And The Word Was is the perfect book for you.