Metametametadata

I Pledge allegiance to the Sports Guy, and the Boston sports for which he stands.

I'm not supposed to be posting to this weblog.

Someone has started spamming my open comments, sending stuff like:

"That's interesting, did you try levitra? Here's the website ... "

So I went into emergency action. I installed wordpress on my hosting server and migrated the data (entries and comments -- minus spam) to the new wordpress database tables. You can check it out at weblog (dot) metametadata (dot) net. I need to fix the wrodpress presentation template and shut this blog down. By that I mean redirect all addresses and stop people from sending comments.

It's not like I care about the off topic comments as spam per se. I think they're funny. But, they're going to very quickly exhaust my server space. Some of the entries had hundreds of comments. So, until I get all this done, no more entries.

Except this one. I can't resist the Sports Guy. From his most recent article:

Of every development this season, the connection between Schilling and the Fenway fans has been the happiest. He's one of us. There's no other way to say it. If he wasn't a professional athlete, you can imagine him posting on message boards, calling radio stations and gulping down flat beer at games. For that reason, he resonates with the locals in a "Bird and Neely" kind of way.

(Quick story: When WEEI's Butch Stearns fanned the flames of a possible Pedro-Schilling feud last week -- just another Boston media guy trying to create something from nothing -- someone named "Curt from the Car" called in and gave him the Ralphie Treatment. It was Schilling. He had been driving around, stumbled across the show and felt obligated to defend himself. Many have called it the greatest WEEI moment since Pitino's "Larry Bird isn't walking through that door" tirade -- Schilling just savaging Stearns and his co-hosts, then hanging up on them like an angry girlfriend. Now this was a guy meant to play in Boston.)

Please, go read the rest of the article at http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=simmons/040929

3 good reasons to ask metafilter

Reason #1: How do scammers who send email claiming to be from my bank and needing my account info know which banks I use? [More Inside]

Reason #2 Trip Hop (or downtempo or whatever): I love Tricky, Massive Attack, Hooverphonic, Portishead, Laika, Lamb, Sneaker Pimps, Martina, etc. What other, new acts have a similar sort of dark, humid and metallic aftertaste?

Reason #3 Why were people in olden days so smart about some things, but so dense about others? (more inside)

"And the use of that word (lie) to describe the concept of a scientific model is so much an obfuscating act of meaningless reductionism that it makes your statement essentially a lie."

Heheheh

Sin City

I just received this link from my friend spidey:

http://www.movie-list.com/s/sin-city.html

My response was:

Is this for real? It seems somehow twice removed from nature, like what would happen if a movie character, subject to the relaxed laws of movie physics, decided to make a movie and relaxed the laws even more. It has that constant nagging doubt, like The Thirteenth Floor, that all you're seeing is really a put on. I mean any chance of knowing whether or not you're dreaming is right out the window. In fact, I'm no longer sure whether or not I'm a character in this movie. I suppose this is what happens when you read too many comic books. They start coming true.

Intern of the Week

So, The Sports Guy, my all time favorite sports announcer and personal hero, has somehow conned the ESPN guys into giving him his own page and intern on ESPN.com. I've earlier recorded his ascent to the pinnacle of the working world, so I hope you all know who I'm talking about. If not, go here and here. This is a guy who sits on his ass and watches tv for a living. He's a hero for us all.

And he's sharing the wealth. He's given his intern a freakin' column on his page. And the intern is totally copping the Sports Guy's "literary" style. If they weren't both local boys I'd have to pull some sort of crazed and jealous fan routine just for the sheer injustice of these two getting to put out the drivel I'd love to be paid to produce.

In any case, I thought I'd share some of the intern's favorite links this week.

1. I'm lifiting the whole entry from the intern's page for this one. I post it, because I know the Fu Crew will not let itself get punked like this. All the bus routes in San Francisco in one weekend. Please, the Crew's got your muni right here.

"SF Gate (9/7) -- A group of Bay Area kids decided to spend their Labor Day weekend riding San Francisco's buses ... all of them. If I didn't know of some Wake Forest kids that spent Spring Break picking up a bucket of sand at Myrtle Beach, driving it to the West Coast and dumping it out, this would be the stupidest, funniest quest I've ever heard of."

And the link to the article, http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2004/09/07/MNGGC8KQNQ1.DTL

2. A little something I found while perusing one of the "links". I'm sure the censors removed this from the intern's list, so in the interest of the public something or other. http://badgas.co.uk/lynndie/.

WARNING! Not Safe for Work (NFSW) No Offense Meant (NOM?)

Check out the rest of the links, especially the spinkstech.com link and the Boston Globe articles about the curse of the Bambino.

Oh Lord, the Helmet's on Fire

Two funnies today.

1. Seniors Rule

And accompanying metafilter commentary, Senior photos gone tacky

2. The Hall of Douchebags (via Rock and Roll Confidential)

Metadata, It's The New Black

Okay, start with this post from metafilter about how moblogs
are beating traditional news sources to the story.

Now go read this article about the Flickr service that features prominently in the metafilter story. Be sure to notice the sweet use of metadata (keywords, essentially) to organize and discover photos. Tufte would be so proud of the visual display of the 150 most popular keywords. Classification from the ground up! And people are actually participating! And the keyword list isn't degenerating into an unwieldy mess because people are availing themselves of the opportunity at the point of applying each keyword to verify its conformance to the collectively developed vocabulary! All of you friends of mine out there posting your photos to various other services need to immediately switch to Flickr. Go! Do it Now!

Now check out the Metametadata flickr photo, with keywords.

Now read Rawbrick's take on collaborative metadata use and possible models for incorporating library training. Notice how the confirmation service Flickr has cooked into its metadata production process seems to try to programmatically occupy the middle ground Rawbrick defines. This is the stuff that gets me excited. I share Rawbrick's desire to see this space occupied by folks like us and love to see projects recognize the necessity. I think that this sort of thing is the true future of librarianship. Just a bunch of total geeks who can't get enough of information organization monitoring the infernet, making sure everyone is having a good time. Of course metafilter, flicker and other internet community services are totally beating librarians to the punch.

Your reward for making it this far. The early chronicles of a young keeper. (thanks OK/Cancel)

Yep, Librarians will one day rule the world. And the business community is starting to catch on (via Catalogablog). Of course they're making it overly complicated. I'm not sure an ur-element set is even feasible, much less warranted. This is almost sacrilege coming from a professionally trained librarian. We librarians love our standards and our master lists, but I don't think that this is the road to interoperability. I think that rdf and the semantic web will wind up not trying to make a master list of element definitions to which each individually developed metadata set will have to map. Rather semantic agreement will happen at a much lower level of communication.

They're starting to believe

That the internet and intellectual property can be free and the world won't come to an end. In fact, the internet wants to be free or I wouldn't be keeping this here weblog.

Including at the Public Library (via Shifted Librarian and Boing Boing)

Free Municipal WiFi in Jerusalem (via Boing Boing)

So when is this gonna make it to Cambridge?

We've got a good start going with these.

Too bad they're nearly all pay-to-play.

Go here to set up an account and look for the free ones.

With MIT completely wireless and Harvard due to get there any day now I naturally feel as if I should be able to connect anywhere, anytime without ever having to plug in.

More reading material on the subject.