Writing in a Digital Age

Final Post

2009-05-07T14:09:00.001-04:00

The semester is almost over, and the reading assignments are all complete, so this blog will no longer be active. I invite my classmates to find me on Facebook if they are so inclined.

Reading Post: Everything is Miscellaneous Ch9-10

2009-04-25T15:14:00.004-04:00

As the end of the semester draws closer, we finally wrap up with Weinberger's Everything is Miscellaneous. I know this book wasn't particularly popular with my classmates, but on the whole I rather enjoyed it.

Examples are difficult to come by for what amounts to a lot of concept and with very little practice, but I really enjoyed chapter nine, "Messiness as a Virtue". I agree with the notion that the Semantic Web - something I've been hearing about off and on for some time now - isn't going to be the protocol that ushers in the new era. It's not a bad idea, but that doesn't mean it's a good one, either - it seems like it would have been a wonderful notion to introduce ten years ago, but now it's way too late. The chaotic nature of the internet today is resistant to any attempt to introduce the kind of order that relies on authority, such as the proposed relationships of the Semantic Web. As Weinberger says on page 192, it uses "includes and describes but not owes money to or hates the smell of." What he doesn't really get in to is how well standard HTML works for that purpose, in the grand scheme. He notes in the next chapter that the system as it stands allows anyone to link to any page with any comment they please, but he doesn't mention that Google reads all these links when it indexes, and that's how it defines search terms. It's what gives us the ability to make Google bombs, and it's what makes Google so powerful - they don't return the results that they handpicked, they return the results that we the people defined for them.

One side note: On page 186, Weinberger talks about averaging the outlines of chairs and furniture, but I don't think he does a very good job explaining that this is something we can actually do. The example that stands out in my mind is the averaging of Playboy centerfolds by decade. (As you might guess, that link contains vaguely iconic representations of naked female forms; whether or not that's safe for work is up to you. I would not describe the images as at all explicit.)

As to chapter ten, "The Work of Knowledge", I just don't have a lot to say. I think he's completely correct in that we've redefined knowledge. Information on a topic is no longer limited by how important the topic is, but by how passionate people are about it (and about informing others about it). I think it is a great thing, and it is one of the reasons that makes the third order of order work. But it also has a tendency to undermine the credibility of some collaborative projects - consider the oft-mocked Wikipedia entry on Darth Vader, in all its absurdly lengthy glory, for an excellent example.

Still, I think it's an important aspect of the future of our cultural knowledge, and much like Weinberger himself, I am extremely excited to see where such things as Wikipedia and photo tagging will take us in ten years.

Reading Post: Banks

2009-04-18T10:58:00.005-04:00

This week's reading was "Oakland, the Word, and the Divide: How We All Missed the Moment", from the book Race, Rhetoric, and Technology: Searching for Higher Ground, by Adam J. Banks.

Since this is going out to the internet, let me preface my statements by issuing a disclaimer that by all rights should be obvious (but we all know how internet people can be): As an upper-middle-class white male taking a higher education class called "Writing in a Digital Age", I have zero credibility when it comes to making statements on this topic. While reading the following, please keep in mind that I am aware of that - were this not a required post for the aforementioned class, I would probably just keep my mouth shut.

That said, my primary reaction to this article is that considering the Digital Divide as an issue of race is best described as treating a symptom. This is not to say that the Divide does not fall along racial lines, as clearly it does. But the core of the issue is not which races don't have access, it's that underprivileged, i.e. poor, children don't have access. And right now, in this country, we can draw the line between 'poor' and 'not poor' squarely along racial divides, and we all know it. Sure, there's crossover in either direction - and God knows the current recession is working hard to make paupers of everybody but the really really rich - but throughout the technological revolution we are experiencing, schools with a primarily Black population have had less money than schools with a primarily White population. This, to me, seems to be the core of the issue.

Now, 'treating a symptom' is not entirely appropriate here, because I think treating this particular symptom might well have a mitigating effect on the root cause. To wit - consider what the country would look like if every school had equal technology. New computers, internet connectivity, adequately trained teachers churning out adequately trained students, I think we'd start to see that line in the sand move. I'm not foolish enough to think we would obliterate it - I can't see how a capitalist system could avoid having poor people - but if we could blur it, and/or shift it, maybe we could obliterate the correlation of 'poor' and 'disenfranchised'.

But then, I'm an idealist. And as time goes on, I'm beginning to think I'm just a damned Socialist. I'll go ahead and quote West Wing here: "[E]ducation is the silver bullet. Education is everything. We don't need little changes, we need gigantic, monumental changes. Schools should be palaces. The competition for the best teachers should be fierce. They should be making six-figure salaries. Schools should be incredibly expensive for government and absolutely free of charge to its citizens, just like national defense. That's my position. I just haven't figured out how to do it yet."

But again, this is an etic perspective, and I get that Banks considers the repositioning of the Digital Divide as a class issue rather than a race issue to be obfuscation. So maybe I'm just missing the point.

I will note one thing that took a while to sink in. At the top of page 30, he references "Erasing @race: Going White in the (Inter)face" by Beth Kolko, an essay which posits that the supposed racelessness of the MOO/MUD interface created "a definitively White user". My first reaction was denial. I was there, you see - I spent years huddled in front of my computer with MOOs, MUDs, MUSHes, even the occasional MUCK. I lived for that sort of thing, back when, and I still have a sort of loyalist knee-jerk reaction to people criticizing it. But it's true - not only were most of us White, the mental picture of other users inevitably defaulted to White unless they specifically made a point of telling us. Once the WWW became more popular (and less 1400-baud), we started assembling pictures of ourselves yearbook-style, and you'll note that with a handful of exceptions that is indeed a pasty group. I have to add that this phenomenon hasn't really stopped since we left text-based VR behind for the greener pastures of multimedia. I'm reminded of a LiveJournal under the username 'blackperson', and the story of how that came about.

To recap, because I feel like I went about this argument backwards, the Digital Divide is real, and it does fall along race lines, but it looks to me like it really is a class issue - race is involved because you can't separate class and race at this point in America. But as noted above, I might be very wrong.

Regardless, I'm in favor of doing whatever it takes to put technology in everybody's hands - if we're throwing away billions on paying "retention bonuses" to AIG employees who aren't being retained, let's spend a few billion on computers (and computer teachers) for our students - all our students.

Reading Reponse: Everything is Miscellaneous Ch 7&8

2009-04-13T10:45:00.003-04:00

This week's reading consisted of information about social and implicit knowledge. I was pleased to see these addressed - Weinberger has been talking about tagging all along, but he hadn't yet gotten to the aspects of it that really make it a big deal - the inherent limitations, and how we're going to get around them.

In essence, sites like Flickr and del.icio.us are all about crowdsourcing. That's a buzzword making the rounds these days that means you're taking a task and throwing it out to the world to work on, a little bit at a time. It's especially functional when you're set up with tags - each user is going to bring their own particular perspective to any given item, and the words they use to reference it will reflect that. Once a few million people have tagged a few million items, a computer starts to dig through the cloud, and comes up with some interesting ideas about how to put things together. I can't escape the notion that this is what a reference library is going to look like in 20 years.

Of course, there's still a few bugs in the system. Take the Markov chainer. I don't pretend to understand Markov's laws, but this implementation is fascinating - you feed it a text, and it analyzes each pair of words in order, learning how to link things together. I've done some experimentation with these over the years, and I've seen some grow so big they can carry on conversations in perfect English. The only problem is the words only have relative context, so these sentences, despite being grammatically sound, are complete gibberish. The biggest challenge in turning a mountain of tags into an index is going to be making the results useful.

Fortunately, if we find a way around that, I think we'll reach a point where we don't have to worry about implied knowledge. Certainly picking up a jar of strawberry jam gives us more information than looking at a picture of it, but there's a certain question of how much of that knowledge is actually useful to us. It is possible that as this experiment proceeds, we'll learn that we work better when our minds aren't filled with useless trivia. On the other hand, it's equally possible that between our previously posited millions, we'll manage to capture every relevant bit of information, and it will all be presented contextually when we reference the aforementioned jar. Time will tell.

Speaking of useless trivia, during the chapter about implicit knowledge, did anyone else flash on the episode of Scrubs when Dr. Cox is carefully explaining each character's comedic role to Carla? That's always been one of my favorite bits of meta-commentary.

Reading Response: Understanding Comics (ahem: chapter six)

2009-04-04T17:11:00.005-04:00

Earlier this semester, when asked what I thought of McCloud, I ranted for a while that he seemed entirely overrated to me. "He shows up at all these conventions and talks about comics like he's the grand master, but what has he done?" Well, the answer is this, apparently, and several other works like it. So I retract that misinformed bit of punditry with apologies. (I maintain what I said about Spiegelman, though.)

As you may have guessed by now, I liked this book. I liked this book enough that when I thought I had to read the whole thing (oops), I bought it. I like this book enough that now realizing I only needed to read chapter six, I don't feel like the purchase of the book or the subsequent reading were in any way a waste. For anyone interested in comics (or maybe a little obsessive about them) this book is an excellent guide to a deeper understanding.

Chapter six is one that specifically resonated with me, because I've put a lot of thought in to the mechanics of thought over the years, and I'm the kind of person who thinks in all manner of formats interchangeably. I have long suspected that this might be why I enjoy comics so much. The interplay between the words and the pictures is one of my favorite parts to analyze, and when used effectively they make for some of the best comics. It's a large part of what I enjoyed the most about The Sandman - the artist changed regularly, sometimes every few pages, and the art styles would vary wildly between them, which works really well for Gaiman's writing style.

I should probably cite a few linkable examples, so let me see what I can come up with. For strips dominated almost entirely by words, we should take a look at Dinosaur Comics, a dailyish six panel strip that uses the same artwork in every strip, or Partially Clips, a three panel strip with the same piece of clip art in each of the three panels. A slightly more experimental take on that would be Fugue, 'drawn' by a man who freely admits he can't draw - it's basically more of a short story with abstract illustrations to drive home the words. (Fugue was a miniseries that ran for a few months and then ended; it's also adult content, though the visuals don't reflect that.)

For art-focused strips, we can take a look a Dresden Codak, specifically these two strips, or Copper (see here and here), which are two of the most visually stunning strips I've ever encountered. (Sadly they're also two of the least-often updated, which is probably due to the complexity of putting out that sort of content on a regular basis.) There's also the Owly books, which aren't online, but if you follow that link you'll see some mini strips in the right column that capture the essence very well.

What I like about webcomics, though, is how often the visuals and the text work together, often in new and unusual ways. A Softer World is an excellent example - sometimes the photos fit the text perfectly, sometimes it just provides a weird background for a brilliant thought. Digger, on the other hand, seems to have used every single one of the combinations that McCloud talked about, all to good effect. And of course there's always xkcd, which usually manages to convey more complexity with stick figures and a few speech bubbles than some teams of genius artists and genius authors could ever hope to achieve.

'In conclusion, webcomics are a land of many contrasts.' Seriously, though, McCloud hits on some excellent points that are very relevant to this class - in a medium where we can put images (or video, or schematics, or interactive flash games, or etc etc) in the midst of our text, it's important to consider how that's going to work, and it doesn't always just have to be 'this picture illustrates my point'. This is important to consider as we finish our website design.

a note on the upcoming reading

2009-03-20T21:47:00.004-04:00

Update 3/31: Yeah, okay, I'm an idiot. We only need to read chapter six.

A word of warning to my classmates: I know we pushed McCloud back a week, but I took a peek at it in the library today anyway, and it's not what I'd call a quick read. You should budget at least an hour for it, probably more like two. (I don't know what the policy on renewing reserves is, so that latter option could be problematic.)

On the other hand, I've ordered a copy from Amazon which I should have (and have finished) when we come back from break - so in theory I could loan it to two people, one from Tuesday to Thursday, then someone else Thursday through Tuesday. (Although anyone who borrows it should note that, like any proper nerd, I'm rather obsessive about the condition of my graphic novels.)

FYI. :)

Reading Response: Everything is Miscellaneous Ch 5&6

2009-03-20T13:16:00.005-04:00

Okay, let's see. We're back to Weinberger, and this week's reading focuses mostly on how important tagging is. I found it amusing when he was going on about the Getty Thesaurus, because I love tagging so much I can't help but think how neat it would be if you could use the designators created by the system to tag each aspect of a work of art - using the leaf metaphor, I was picturing someone gluing leaves, painted with numbers, to a canvas as some sort of collage item ... which I think is something that was only funny in my head. However! I suspect that this is the wave of the future of institutionalized categorization systems like the thesaurus - instead of putting each item somewhere on a branch, we define a set of tags, and categorize the tags, and then allow any given item to have as many tags as appropriate. I realize that the power of public tagging is that we can put as many words as we want on something, but as Weinberger pointed out, 'SF' and 'San Francisco' may not always result in the same searches. So while I want to continue to tag my del.icio.us bookmarks as I see fit, I don't hate the idea of libraries putting secondary Dewey Decimal numbers on books to aid in searching, even if the primary number still determines where the item will be placed on the shelves.

I particularly liked his point about how metadata is really just 'the data you remember' these days. Case in point is my last entry - I could not remember where that Google article was. I thought I might have gotten it from Digg, but I can't say for certain, because I couldn't find it when I searched Digg for 'Google'. What I wound up doing was searching for was '"i feel lucky" people like google', which turns up that article as the second item. (I think it might have been the first item when I searched last week, but that's not really the point.) So I find it very convenient that any given part of an item is now part of its metadata.

It seems like the moral of the sixth chapter is that we need to come up with some better ways to categorize things like books, and we're going to need to do that soon. I know there's always someone trying to rant about how change is both imminent and inevitable, but we're doing things we never used to do, even with something like books. Consider Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. If you aren't familiar, someone has taken Jane Austen's novel, which is public domain due to its age, and inserted some nice gory zombie moments. (Yes, really. And yes, there's already a movie in the works.) How would you categorize that? I mean, sure, fiction, that's easy, but beyond that, how do you talk about it? It doesn't belong on any given shelf. If you put it in horror, Jane Austen fans might never find it. If you put it with the Jane Austen, horror fans might never know about it. In both cases lovers of satire might remain ignorant - but if you try to shelve it next to Dave Barry, you miss out on the first two audiences. This is the kind of thing that can only be properly categorized in multiple places, and I think we're going to see a lot more of that in the coming years.

CSS Tutorial

2009-03-17T14:45:00.003-04:00

Per request, here is the link to the CSS tutorial that I used to design my website:

http://www.subcide.com/tutorials/csslayout/

Reading Post: Don't Make Me Think, ch7+

2009-03-16T17:36:00.003-04:00

The second half of Krug's book isn't quite as funny as the first, although I did find a few of his testing anecdotes amusing. It was, however, much more useful to me personally.

A lot of the first half of the book talks about structure and in-depth navigation. This is useful in an abstract way, and if I ever design a large site I'll definitely pull this off the shelf. But for my purposes right now, it's a little overboard - the site I'm designing for class is two tiers, counting the home page as one. Not exactly complex.

Which is exactly why the chapter about designing home pages is awesome right now, because it put a lot of things in perspective. I actually threw the site as it stands right now together the day before I read the second half of the book, then went back and made a few changes in light of what Krug had to say. Interestingly, I feel I got more from the thirty seconds of navigation coverage in the home page chapter than I did in the section about navigation, mostly because the comparison of home page navigation to deep site navigation really made for a clear picture of how things work.

The chapter about user testing was fairly affirming as well, because I've forced a few people to sit down in front of both versions of the site to tell me if it's functional. Apparently Krug would qualify this as valid, if minimal, user testing. Go me.

I could cite a few examples of sites with home pages that I like, but someone else in class will no doubt hate each one of them, that's just the nature of the beast. But really I was thinking about Google, which is of course a hugely successful site that flies in the face of all the home page conventions. So I dug up a neat article with some interesting Google facts that I think I found on Digg a while back, that has some interesting bits about the home page. Since (statistically speaking) most of you won't click that link, here's the relevant bits:

1. The prime reason the Google home page is so bare is due to the fact that the founders didn't know HTML and just wanted a quick interface. Infact it was noted that the submit button was a long time coming and hitting the RETURN key was the only way to burst Google into life.

2. Due to the sparseness of the homepage, in early user tests they noted people just sitting looking at the screen. After a minute of nothingness, the tester intervened and asked 'Whats up?' to which they replied "We are waiting for the rest of it". To solve that particular problem the Google Copyright message was inserted to act as a crude end of page marker.

...

4. The infamous "I feel lucky" is nearly never used. However, in trials it was found that removing it would somehow reduce the Google experience. Users wanted it kept. It was a comfort button.

I just thought that was kind of cool - I guess your mileage may vary.

Reading Post: Don't Make Me Think, ch1-6

2009-03-08T09:12:00.005-04:00

Our latest reading assignment is Steve Krug's Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability. In the style of Williams, it's a slender volume with a straightforward approach and lots of visual examples. Unlike The Non-Designer's Design Book, however, the rules here are explained in some detail, letting you know why it's important to do each of the things he recommends, which I find extremely useful.

The style of writing is different, as well - Krug composes his narrative in a witty, conversational tone that sits very well with me. He notes that laughter is an occasional side effect of reading his work, and he isn't kidding - I chuckled a few times on my way through, but somewhere around page 46 in the section "Happy Talk Must Die" I lost it.

We all know happy talk when we see it: It's the introductory text that's supposed to welcome us to the site and tell us how great it is, or to tell us what we're about to see in the section we've just entered.

If you're not sure whether something is happy talk, there's one sure-fire test: if you listen very closely while you're reading it, you can actually hear a tiny voice in the back of your head saying, "Blah blah blah blah blah ..."

Well, let's just say I've been there.

I don't see much point in citing a specific example for each of his rules, because the book is rife with sites that work well and suggestions to improve ones that don't, but one thing came to mind over and over during this reading: library websites.

The primary problem, in my experience, is search boxes. We've already spoken about ineffective searches, of course, but what about situations where the search works just fine as long as you find the right combination of settings? Both the Monroe County Library System and the Potsdam Public Library are guilty of this - searching in either catalog is a frustrating experience, because I never know if I've put in the wrong terms, selected the wrong categories from the drop-down, or if they really don't have any mention of the book I'm looking for. This is especially irritating when I'm searching for a recently released by widely circulated book - they should have a copy of it somewhere, but since libraries are notoriously underfunded, there's no real way of knowing if it's still on a wait list somewhere, or just tucked away in some obscure section of the database and needs to be coaxed out with great patience.

Even if one chooses to forgo the search and simply attempt to browse categories, one is in for a frustrating experience. Considering the careful organization of a physical library, I find it hugely frustrating that so many of them translate so poorly to digital. Navigation of the stacks - such a simple procedure when being performed literally - becomes a lengthy procedure when done online, one that results in getting lost multiple times, requires frequent restarts, and rarely finds me the book I want. It irks me that the very thing Weinberger cites as exemplifying physical organization has so much trouble translating to the next order of order.

Finally, a note on instructions: In general, I agree that unnecessary instructions are irritating, and should be done away with. However, some sites desperately need some guidelines. I submit for your consideration the Monroe County Visual Catalog. If you can figure out how to use that in any effective way, please let me know what you've done - despite years of banging my head against it, I always wound up going back to the old-style outdated and similarly frustrating text catalog, because at least the latter could be made to work eventually.

tip: blogger/firefox

2009-02-26T15:13:00.002-05:00

For my classmates who have been having trouble with Blogger not wanting to work with them on leaving comments, I have finally found a workaround. Apparently you need to go to Options, click the Privacy tab, click the Exception buttons next to the "accept cookies from sites" option, then list www.blogger.com and blogger.com as 'Allow'. I think this is probably because the browser thinks it's a third party cookie since blogger.com is trying to give/use stuff via a blogspot.com address, but that's neither here nor there.

Side note: do not put 'blogspot.com' as a trusted site, because that will autotrust every Blogger blog, which is bad.

Reading Response: Wysocki

2009-02-25T20:43:00.004-05:00

Our latest reading assignment is Anne Wysocki's "The Sticky Embrace of Beauty", from Writing New Media.

Let me start by saying that with all due respect to Dr. Wysocki's doctorate and status as a published author (compared to my associate's degree and ... I guess that's it), this article reads like stereo instructions. I found the structure well nigh unassailable, and the varying text effects and seemingly random illustrations only compounded the problem. On the other hand, I see in her writing a sentence structure much like mine, only much more complex, which gives me hope for my own future.

In truth I don't really know what to say here. The article is a lengthy analysis of how we perceive certain elements of design, all sparked by the author's apparently strong reaction to an advertisement that barely registers with me as interesting, let alone important. Her discussion of aesthetics relies heavily on Immanuel Kant, who, with due respect to Mr. Kant's status as a timeless philosopher versus my status as an unsuccessful blogger, I disagree with entirely. I find the idea of beauty as a universal to be gibberish. Seriously - I wanted to use a more diplomatic word, but that's how it comes across to me. The cliche 'beauty is in the eye of the beholder' isn't a cliche for nothing. I didn't find much of the article resonating with me.

To prevent this from being an entirely negative reaction, I would like to note one aspect of the article I agreed with. At the risk of completely missing the point, of course, it was comforting to have someone - someone who teaches design, no less - point out that while Williams' rules are very useful to teach students the basics of design, The Non-Designer's Design Book lacks any explanation of the why of the rules. While the size of the volume prevents much in the way of depth, the rules are presented in a vacuum, which limits their usefulness considerably.

We're supposed to come up with examples illustrating the text we've just read in these posts, but a critique of this nature doesn't lend itself to examples beyond the ones used in the text, so I'm not entirely certain how to work with that aspect of the assignment. About the best I can do is to relate that in the course of this reading, I frequently found myself flashing on the notion of Quality as presented in Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. The book is a lengthy narrative devoted largely to a means of dissecting concepts as balances of form and function, and I would highly recommend it to anyone interested in such things.

Finally, since the internet is after all the size of a grape, I would like to apologize to Dr. Wysocki, should she find herself reading this - I assure you my position is nothing personal. As supporting evidence I offer the fact that I don't know you or anything about you, other than your title, which I had to find via Google. For what it's worth, my belief of beauty being in the eye of the beholder means I'm quite certain someone else will - indeed, has - found your analysis quite profound.

(If Immanuel Kant is reading this, however, I would say only this: Aah! Zombie! Run!)

Reading Response: The Non-Designer's Design Book, pp11-120

2009-02-11T21:13:00.008-05:00

Our reading assignment for the week comes from The Non-Designer's Design Book, by Robin Williams (no relation). I've seen this book recommended more than once in my years online, so I was pleased to find it on the required reading list this semester, and I'm glad to say it does seem to live up to expectation.

The first half of the book is devoted to some basic design principles, which fall into the acronym C.R.A.P.: contrast, repetition, alignment, and proximity. Her hope is that once her readers learn these rules, we'll see them wherever we look, and so far it would seem that she is correct - I have seen her various rules in action since I put the book down.

Contrast is actually a tricky one to show - not because the rule is hard to visualize, but because it seems entirely under-utilized in current site design. I freely admit to being somewhat blind to the more subtle nuances of typefaces, but as Ms. Williams says, if you're going for contrast, go all the way. As such, the best example I can find is Project Wonderful, an advertising company that is gaining popularity in the webcomic community. Though they are not entirely consistent in applying this, their use of red text to draw the reader's eye to the subheaders is very effective, and contrasts nicely with the black headlines and the blue link text.

Alignment is perhaps the most easy to see, and is the first that really leapt out at me. Logging in to Blogger to make this post, I noted that the dashboard page is excellently organized, due in no small part to the strong left flush.

Repetition is also easy to see, and I can't think of a better example than everybody's current favorite site to hate, Facebook. In profile displays (and in the aggregate display of your friends' updates) repetition is a key factor to understanding the information presented - once you're used to the site, your mind sorts the data by icon, by the appearance of the update, by the number of links in it and where they're positioned, all in a matter of seconds.

The best example I can find for proximity is actually something so basic, most of us see it a hundred times a day - a Google search results page. Notice how each result sits by itself: title, then summary, then URL and extraneous data, then white space separating it from the next link. In a situation where only a few links are presented before another search term is suggested, a thin rule separates the sections, and then the data starts all over again - instantly accessible and organized.

Reading these rules, and seeing them in action, has given me some useful thoughts on the design of my class website, which I look forward to working with.

Reading Response: Everything is Miscellaneous Ch 3&4

2009-02-01T14:06:00.007-05:00

The essence of today's reading assignment is the flaws in physical organization - primarily the problem of only being able to put a book in one place - and the strengths of digital organization, in which there are as many ways to find an item as there are users.

Netflix seems the best example. In addition to being an excellent service, the site itself is very well assembled. Movies can of course be browsed by category, but listings appear in multiple places, making it easier to find a movie you'll enjoy. The Rocky Horror Picture Show, for example, is listed under 'Classics', 'Cult Comedies', 'Contemporary Movie Musicals', 'Spoofs and Satire', 'Gay & Lesbian Comedies', 'Must-See Musicals', and 'Musicals'. Additionally it can be found in a variety of user-created lists, or stumbled upon while surfing by actor, or - perhaps most importantly - by recommendation. The Netflix recommendation system is one of the more complex that I have seen, and useful to a degree that sometimes seems creepy. Having rated over 1,700 movies, I find that the system accurately predicts how I will rate something 95% of the time, and the exception is inevitably something that surprises me as well. It's also appealing in a Web 2.0 sort of way as well, because Netflix has offered large cash incentives to people who can come up with useful improvements to the system, and opened an API, allowing Netflix users to manipulate their data in new ways. (I recommend FeedFlix.)

On the whole, I consider Netflix a slightly purer example of a new organization structure - Amazon's goal is, at the core, to sell you a book. With Netflix, if you're using their system, you're already a member - their concern is simply finding you as many good movies as possible, thus keeping you a member.

Reading Post: Everything is Miscellaneous Ch 1&2

2009-01-23T17:28:00.004-05:00

The first chapter of David Weinberger's Everything is Miscellaneous introduces us to 'the orders of order'. The first is the sorting of items themselves, such as dishes. The second is the use of physical items to reference certain aspects of physical items, such as a traditional card catalog. The third order, to which the book seems dedicated, is the new digital capability of organizing data in an ever-changing way.

Of course Flickr is probably the best example of this, allowing photographs to be tagged by anyone who views them. Since this site was referenced in the book, I'll instead put forward one of my own favorites, Delicious, a social bookmarking site. Eschewing the traditional sorting of bookmarks into a tree-style folder system, Delicious allows users to add as many tags as they can conceive to any given entry. This is remarkably useful when attempting to find a site visited some months ago with only a few spotty memories about the content. Although the tagging is hardly as fully-featured as Flickr's - each user tags their own entries, and one URL will have as many tag sets as it has people saving it - the site is still an excellent step towards the ideal dynamic organization Weinberger seems to advocate.

Delicious serves as an example for the book's second chapter as well. Though posts are presented in list form, and therefore must be sorted in some fashion - in this case only allowing alphabetical or most recent - one can still use the tags on each entry to find other sites of related content, in essence representing the "joints of reality" Weinberger references. In essence, this allows us perhaps for the first time to navigate the contents of reality entirely by the whims of its participants.

On Ugly

2009-01-22T15:08:00.005-05:00

The topics covered in this class thus far remind me of an episode of The Show with ZeFrank about the new era of authorship. Please note the presence of PG-13 profanity in the video clip below - you can just read the transcript if you're at work or otherwise in the presence of children.