Laughing Meme

And what a long, strange 10 years it’s been.

Learned a new word tonight from MattB, SimonB, and Yoz.

A hashbot is a robot that hangs out on an IRC channel (hence the #) and provides a conversational interface to a resource.

hashbots are the ancestors of Social Software for Robots, and the idea of Twitter/YubNub as Web CLI.

“If a fish market in the right Manhattan neighborhood today could get hold of “wild native oysters” and market then as such, because this is how New York operates, it would probably be able to charge outstanding prices and have New York Times readers, after the article on wild oysters came out, gladly paying the price. [...] And for all that, they would taste like cultivated ones.” - Mark Kurlansky, The Big Oyster

Andy reminded me that I just missed my 5 year anniversary of publishing this blog. In many ways those first few posts are still my favorites.

Some books are just better read together (or serially if you don’t do the book rotation thing.) Ecology of Fear and Decoding Gender in Science Fiction is a favorite of mine, two totally different projects that happen to feature the same authors.

Picked up another Mike Davis at the Anarchist Bookfair this weekend, the Late Victorian Holocaust (for $3!!!), and while its still early, I’m finding it to be an interesting foil to Omnivore’s Dilemma, focusing as they do on the beginning and the nadir of the global industrial food system.

Wondering if its something in particular about Mike Davis?

Do you have favorite pairings?

TurboTax, as part of filing a California state tax return, just asked me if I was qualified for Ottoman Turkish Empire Settlement Payments? Umm, what are the odds that anyone who was re-settled from the Ottoman empire is still paying taxes in California? Is there a story here?

A break-neck, intellectual joy ride very much in the spirit of Guns, Germs, and Steel (and significantly more fun then Collapse), I found it enthralling, and a page turner.

To his credit Mann manages to represent multiple confliciting views (even wrong ones alas!) in a balanced nuanced manner (guarenteed to drive experts crazy), delicate and fraught given how political charged the study of history in the Americas is.

These grand generalist histories, with millenial sweep fill the void of “just so” stories for the 21st century, explaing the big bad world in an engaging, entertaining way. Pure candy if you’re into that kind of thing.

K: What was that thing we used to talk about before “tagging”?

A: Um… keywords?

K: No, fancier

A: Topic maps?

… searching ensues …

K: Faceted classification!

Leonard’s recent post, More than a Stopgap got me thinking about my original goals for re-launching this site. Similarly I was wanting to experiment with ways to expose, and explore the 4 years and 3319 entries that compose this site.

4 Years

4 years ago Monday, we had just moved out of our apartment in SF having moved to the city at the worst possible time to try to find jobs, Jasmine was back East lining up a design job in Boston, and I had just gotten back from a walk on one of my beloved Santa Cruz beaches, and decided that writing about it would make a good first blog entry.)

Plans

Some of the work on adding tags (and tag combos), and related entries (see middle-right column when viewing an entry) was an initial attempt, as was the Zeitgeist-esque archives page. But I never really was able to take it as far as I wanted. Why?

1. Insufficient time to implement grandiose schemes
2. Changes I made were invisible to aggregators, and therefore most people have never seem them
3. No one else is as interested in my old content as I am

But I still thinks it’s an interesting an unsolved problem. Google is not always the best entry point to the world’s knowledge, chronologically new-new-new is perhaps not the best way to tell our personal stories.

From the Archives

Just found a post calling for a repository of community patterns from April 2002 similar to Clay’s Moderation Strategies.