Metametametadata

I Am A Big Fat Nerd

Check out my Librarian Trading Card. That's right, I've got special metadata related powers.

Thank you to flickr for letting me let the whole world know (as if there was any doubt) how much of a geek I really am.

NEASIST Spring Program Weblog

In the true spirit of metametadata, the producers present the following PSA:

The New England chapter of the American Society of Information Science and Technology (NEASIST) is preparing a spring forum on new social communicaiton tools.

Syndicate, Aggregate, Communicate:
New Web Tools in Real Applications for Libraries, Companies and Regular Folk
Tuesday, 3 May 2005, 9am-4pm
Providence College, Providence, RI

http://www.asis.org/Chapters/neasis/pc/programs/20050503.html

The NEASIST program committe has prepared an impressive line up of speakers to discuss all the latest cool toys (wikis, flickr, im, podcasting, weblogs). In support of the event the committee has also prepared forays into many of the tools including a flickr account and a weblog on this very domain! We will be podcasting all the presentations at the metametadata.net/neasist weblog!

Please go visit http://www.metametadata.net/neasist to learn more about the program and the tools.

For those of you scoring at home, this is a weblog entry about a weblog about a program about weblogs!

Conference Blogging

So I'm at another Information Science Conference, and guess what, I am making blogging.

Welcome to Metadata and Meaning: Creating the 21st Century Catalog brought to you all the way live for '05 by the New England Technical Services Librarians (NETSL). This is one of my favorite organizations, mostly becuase I like to pronounce their acronyms (thanks Walt!). Go ahead, try it ... NETSL.

Sharing a few notes with the world is the perfect way to fill the dead time between presentations while avoiding awkward conversations with your colleagues.

This is my second conference at which I'm blogging (the first was the '04 ASIST Annual Conference, #1, #2, #3, #4, #5).

I'm planning to volunteer to blog the upcoming Spring NEASIST program Syndicate, Aggregate, Communicate: New Web Tools in Real Applications for Libraries, Companies and Regular Folk. Conveniently this program will be on technologies like making blogging and the conference organizers are mad to apply as many of the technologies to the event itself.

What I'll be doing today.

1. Bringing you an important PSA

2. Updating a work blog (I can't link to it as it's on a testing server and not yet ready for primetime).

3. Keep running diaries of presentations I attend, recording anything interesting I hear.

folksonomies vs. controlled vocabularies

folksonomies + controlled vocabularies

At Many 2 Many, a group weblog on social software to which Clay Shirky contributes, Shirky and Lou Rosenfeld seem to enjoy a disagreement on the merits of folksonomies vs. controlled vocabularies for organizing I'm not entirely sure what. I have to admit I agree with Lou Rosenfield that we should be thinking about metadata ecologies and collaborative metadata creation between content creators and professional content organizers. But the proponents of folksonomies have been quicker to recognize the dynamic nature of metadata, to the deserved chagrin of professional catalogers who should well know that no catalog record or controlled vocabulary is ever "finished."

Shirky claims that hiring professional catalogers to maintain controlled vocabularies is "not extensible to the majority of cases where tagging is needed." I wish I knew what these cases were. I suspect he means cases in a domain in which Rosenfeld, Information Architects and Librarians would be wise to follow Shirky's lead, namely the World Wide Web.

It seems to me that a lot of information organization happens over networks and on web servers and has as its object 'born digital content', but yet isn't a part of the world wide web. My occupation is to find the born digital content that is the output of the fulfillment of a major educational institution's teaching and research missions and organize it to do five things:

Help visitors find their way through the digital collections

Organize complex and compound electronic objects into effective educational resources

Satifsy copyright interests and manage access to the collections

Preserve collections over time and across new technologies

Manage digital production workflows, interactions and responsibilities

It seems to me that no folksonomy could accomplish all this all by itself, but several controlled vocabularies do. I work with Learning Objects (whatever those are), lecture notes, problem sets, datasets, slides, movies, structured text documents, audio files, and more. This amounts to a not insignificant amount of material, some of which eventually might make it to the world wide web, some not.

I think that the world wide web is the point where Messrs. Shirky and Rosenfeld start talking past each other. Shirky is right, all the Vengeful Info-Ninjas in the world couldn't tackle the task of cataloging the web in a meaningful and cost effective way. But the world wide web isn't everything. Neither is the world wide web as big as we think. Mostly it's comprised of a lot of little things that aren't really related at all. Google has the right idea about searching the morass. The answer seems to me (and this is hard for a librarian to admit) to throw computational cycles at it. As long as the web remains basically hypertext with no inherent organization this is the probably the winning strategy. And the rise of search as the next great tech industry war seems to confirm Google's hunch. But even Google recognizes that there's a lot more to search than all the html in the world. In fact, html might not be the most important thing. I think that the creators at the bottom of the bottom up web have a lot of other kinds of information that is valuable to them and I think that the next great contest will be to see who can provide the tools to allow individuals and small confederations therof the ability to search their own collections of information. Much of this isn't stored on web servers and accessible via hypertext protocols. Most it is stored in closed repositories or even, heaven forbid, non-digital. A lot of it is in the hands of professional catalogers and other scholarly information vendors and there is a great amount of value to their aggregation and organization of these hidden (to the web, and for now Google) information sources. If there were no value to the dark web, if the web world weren't interested in vetted, scholarly material than why Google Scholar? Why Google print? Why all the hubub about Wikipedia?

I do not mean to discredit the great and meaningful information store that is the world wide web. And I admit controlled vocabularies are not the way to go to organize it. Proponents of folksonomies are correct to recognize that everyone is going to have to do their fair share. It means those with good information organization skills have to help those without. This is my message to fearful librarians who think Google will replace them. Our job was never to be the gateholders. We must be mindful of our mission to teach others to have a healthy, ongoing relationship with information.

I've been cataloging electronic teaching material via IEEE's Learning Object Metadata and IMS Content Packaging for five years now. If there's one thing I can say about non-Marc, non AACR2 metadata for digital objects, it's this: the metadata for any one object is never static, never DONE! No matter how many taxonomies you throw at it.

We've got a project to take a static web publication of every classroom teaching resource that can be digitized and package it in xml for delivery to an institutional repository and for migration back to the learning mangement system from whence it came. Once we've got IMS Content Packages we hope to be able to more easily ship the objects around to the multitude of Information warehouses on on campus that were formerly silos with little or no communication between them. We started with the idea that we might be able to identify learning objects and push them to our patrons. We ended up realizing that we couldn't decide for our patrons, in their ofttimes unique contexts, what is a learning object. Instead we're focusing on allowing the descriptive and structural metadata for each object to change and grow over time. We're working to discover how to enable whatever course content lifecycle our end-users can dream up. This means letting (and asking, which is so much harder) our end-users to provide the contextual metadata and capturing it an fashion aware of that context and its applicability, or lack thereof, in other contexts. If one system organizes courses by session, while another deposits all resources into buckets by kind, how can we deliver the content to a patron that allows him to choose one organization over the other or to start with one and smoothly move the data to another? These are the questions we seek to answer, knowing that some of the metadata we write will go away, some remain and new information will accrete on the content as it lives its life in our electronic teaching systems. This new lifecycle would not be available to these digital teaching resources were it not for the organizational effort of professionals, neither is it possible without the cooperation of one's intended user group.

On one of my projects I developed an information model to capture metadata the would satisfy copyright requirements, populate the search index, and provide information necessary for preservation. Many controlled vocabularies were used as well as good AACR2 principles wherever possible. The workflow that was put into place involves receipt of material from faculty, and handoff to a team of surrogate authors contracted in India who scrub the documents and provide an initial pass of metadata. The metadata team I lead then provides a professional review. As the project proceeds we have been able to push more and more of what is traditionally a professional librarian's responsibility to individuals who don't even have the benefit of familiarity with the material! And to compound the difficulty that authoring team adjusts its staffing levels to match publication cycles based on the institution's semester cycle. Every six months there are new faces to train. Naturally, the results have been outstanding. Collaborative metadata creation can work. And controlled vocabularies can be used to enable the sort of folksonomic information organization in "those cases where tagging is needed."

Rings of (Nerd) Power

Some poor soul was brave enough to post a LOTR related question to AskMetafilter and I just had to represent.

Meatballwiki and Blogdex

Okay, last ASIST Annual Meeting entry, and guess what it's about.

Blogs, and the blogging bloggers who blog them.

That's right its "Beyond the Sandbox: Wikis and Blogs that get work done"

And I'm spent, got no more Infotainment in me.

Go check out:

Blogdex

Meatball Wiki

<rant> <!-- Insert tirade on the self-referential, closed community of the so-called "world wide web" --> </rant>

Quick links and cool Infostuff

Okay, I realized I should at least give you the opportunity to go on to learn more about ASIST and its Annual Meeting.

And I have a really cool poster to share that I helped my colleague William Reilly prepare for the SPARC workshop he'll be attending later this week.

So there.

K-Blogs, Wirelessness and the Cult of Personality

Today's ASIST Annual Meeting entry should have appeared much earlier today. I attended the presentation "Blogs for Information Dissemination and Knowledge Management" happily prepared to do what Metametadata do in real time while experts discuss what it is metametadata do. I mean the metameta opportunities were OFF THE CHARTS!

But no reliable wireless connectivity in that particular conference room. ARE YOU FREAKIN' KIDDING ME! Everywhere else in the hotel but conference room Providence II?!!! The presenters couldn't even access the internet to show in real time their own blogging efforts. Without internet access, why even talk about internet technologies? It should be painfully obvious to everyone by now how fundamentally important the basic infrastructure of the internet is and how it should be a common trust supported and enjoyed by all. It shouldn't even be a question, it should just ... be ... there.

So now I have to talk about blogging for oneself vs. for others and for knowledge capture vs. infotainment without the benefit of a punditry soundtrack. I mean at least I'm attending "Diffusion of Knowledge in the Field of Digital Library Development: How is the Field Shaped by Visionaries, Engineers and Pragmatists?" In other words how to develop your own cult of personality, a topic of interest to all bloggers (including myself) who hope to reach a wider audience.

I want to be one of the few lucky ones who get read by everybody. I feel qualified to be an arbiter of "cool." And I'd love people to pay me to pontificate on the future of the information society. Basically, as all readers of this blog are again painfully aware, I'm totally ready for Guruhood. Now I just need to find some people to hang on my every word. I think I've already started to cultivate the appropriately eccentric personality traits. I've stockpiled my somethings to say and now I just need some people to listen to me.

Any takers? (If so, feel free to link to this website!)

WOW, did I use enough emphasis in this article, or what. Don't you just want to sign up for my new lecture series?

K-Blogs, Wirelessness and the Cult of Personality

Today's ASIST Annual Meeting entry should have appeared much earlier today. I attended the presentation "Blogs for Information Dissemination and Knowledge Management" happily prepared to do what Metametadata do in real time while experts discuss what it is metametadata do. I mean the metameta opportunities were OFF THE CHARTS!

But no reliable wireless connectivity in that particular conference room. ARE YOU FREAKIN' KIDDING ME! Everywhere else in the hotel but conference room Providence II?!!! The presenters couldn't even access the internet to show in real time their own blogging efforts. Without internet access, why even talk about internet technologies? It should be painfully obvious to everyone by now how fundamentally important the basic infrastructure of the internet is and how it should be a common trust supported and enjoyed by all. It shouldn't even be a question, it should just ... be ... there.

So now I have to talk about blogging for oneself vs. for others and for knowledge capture vs. infotainment without the benefit of a punditry soundtrack. I mean at least I'm attending "Diffusion of Knowledge in the Field of Digital Library Development: How is the Field Shaped by Visionaries, Engineers and Pragmatists?" In other words how to develop your own cult of personality, a topic of interest to all bloggers (including myself) who hope to reach a wider audience.

I want to be one of the few lucky ones who get read by everybody. I feel qualified to be an arbiter of "cool." And I'd love people to pay me to pontificate on the future of the information society. Basically, as all readers of this blog are again painfully aware, I'm totally ready for Guruhood. Now I just need to find some people to hang on my every word. I think I've already started to cultivate the appropriately eccentric personality traits. I've stockpiled my somethings to say and now I just need some people to listen to me.

Any takers? (If so, feel free to link to this website!)

WOW, did I use enough emphasis in this article, or what. Don't you just want to sign up for my new lecture series?

Meaning and Animal Compassion

Day 2 at the ASIST Annual Meeting is all about Meaning.

First, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the world wide web and director of the World Wide Web Consortium, or W3C (located in the Stata Center at MIT), promises us the real world through the magic of the "semantic web." Whereas the protocols that make up the world wide web, TCP/IP, HTTP, html and others represent syntatic agreement for creating and sharing hypertext, the semantic web represents a method for reaching semantic agreement about the content of our hypertextual communications.

The idea is that you define your terms within a specific domain. If you're creating learning objects in a courseware system and your using the Learning Object Metadata and IMS Content Packaging system you define what those schemas mean by a "Contributor" or "Manifest". That way, someone else in an institutional repository system which uses Dublin Core Metadata and the Metadta Encoding and Transmission Schema can programmatically and systematically map those to "Creator" and "StructMap".

This is accomplished without the creation of a grand unified Ontology (essentially one big set of definitions for everything that everybody uses). Instead everyone who adopts Semantic Web technologies warrants that they'll provide their domain specific definitions and then programs can interpret these definitions and find equivilancies.

The definition mechanism is the Uniform Resouce Identifier. A glorified url of the form http://... It is important to remember that uri's aren't the things they define, even in the virtual world. They're still nothing more than names. Just like menu entries aren't food and you can't eat them (I'm sure people have tried).

For example, I could define myself via a vCard or even just a plain old vanilla html where I've deposited my curriculum vitae or just some contact info. Then whenever I include myself in the metadata for any web content I create, I don't just write in my name, I point to the web page where I've defined myself. The mechanism for pointing is RDF, which is just a logical triple of the form Subject-Predicate-Object.

The idea is that you build your collection of information to share with the world from the viewpoint of in between really big scale operations and really small scale ones. You correlate the definitions provided under you and you make your definitions with an eye to their inclusion in larger correlations. The same definition activity goes on at all levels. The semantic web is a fractal web and it realizes the hermetic wisdom As Above, So Below.

You build your data system as a module of modules, incorporating data from different domains. You don't have to set definitions for each data store you tap into and you expose your data for even larger system via standards that allow the larger system to do likewise in aggregating you. No one is forced to one semantic standard, but each can understand each other with a minimum of human supervision.

I think there are two illusions in the RDF grand scheme.

The first is the Aristotelian Illusion that we can speak definitively that any one label, even a rdf triple, is the thing being captured. Despite explicit recognition that uri's are not the things they represent we still interact with triples as if they are. For example, is Gary Marchionini his entry in the NACO authority file maintained by OCLC or the similar record on Amazon? Obviously he's neither, and we should be pointing to some human being in space-time (assuming we share his inertial system). Who has the right to define him? Is it possible to dice up the entire universe into non-competitive domains? I can't imagine it for identity definitions, what about conceptual? I can't get past the dread that good old social conflict will subvert all our technological advances. I would really like to understand better how RDF plans to live happily with a myriad of definitions that don't quite match exactly.

The second illusion is that RDF encourages interoperability without gobbling up smaller standards. It attempts to let semantic standards alone, but it dictates a common syntax. The last time the W3C tried this was html, and how long did it take for the major browsers to implement three or four different flavors of html and the DOM? And how long did it take before the browsers started playing nice and made it easy for content providers to produce material that worked the same way across all systems. I would love to see the semantic web's game plan for avoiding the same sort of hijacking of the "standard."

The one thing that I do like is that Mr. Berners-Lee seems to be in concert with Ms. Hertz and a lot of others regarding the economies of scale on the internet. RDF and the semantic web proposes a solution to bad economies of scale regarding standardization and interoperability of data systems on the web. Departmentalizing the job of defining the content on the web lets everyone do their share and gives more responsibility to the content provider to produce good metadata at the time that they create their content. In a post-modern information society it's no longer good enough to dump your data on the world, you've gotta tell us what it means to you. Sounds kind of silly, but it goes a long way towards improving communication and understanding.

Secondly, Gary Marchionini (not Gerry) presents again, this time in Rhode Island in a presentation called, "Why can't Johnny file?" in which librarians lament the poor information organization behavior of the average user of the new information technologies. It is Gary's contention that we do not need to teach him to file. That there are better things for humans to be doing than organizing our inboxes and hard drives.

His main argument repeats the thesis of his earlier presentation in Cambridge. Let the machines do what the machines do, let the humans do what the humans do.

I agree with him to a point. And that point is this: It's less important to teach someone to file a file so they can find it later than it is to teach them to ask better questions about the information content of the file.

That said I have two caveats and hopefully some clarification.

First, Gary assumes future advances in technology. I am far more wary of making any bold predictive statements about the advance of automatic indexing of multimedia resources or facial recognition software. I wouldn't design instructional methods or encourage information behaviour that relies on a technology to present itself.

Second, Gary equates filing and other organization activities with discovery. In fact, there are three reasons to organize information by filing or classifying and the ability to find it again later is the least of the three. The second most important of the three is to be able to communicate something about the information to others. This information organizing activity is all-pervasive in our society and extends from sharing ipod playlists to writing surveys of the scholarly literature in a particular field.

The thing that we communicate when we share our organizations isn't some grand unified Ontology that we discover. We can all admit that there isn't one master organizing scheme that we can teach to. Rather by sharing our personal organizational efforts with others we share our relationship to information, our worldview, and creating this relationship is the most important thing we do when we file. We need to teach filing and classifying as one part of a larger program to teach people how to develop good relationships with information, how to evaluate it properly, how to find more and better information, how to put it to work for you, and how to relate it to existing personal information stores. We need to teach how to recognize how information affects our thinking, and how our thinking colors the information we encounter. In this respect all filing and classifying can be viewed as interpretation, and we should teach such basic skills as organizing things into simple buckets to see what happens. This is how we teach kids to invent/discover meaning in the world they encounter.

Near the end of the question and answer session following the presentation a fellow stood up and made the most salient point of the day. The session was titled wrong. We shouldn't teach filing, we should teach organizing. How stuff is stored in a server or hard drive or repository or database isn't what we need to know. But we shouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater. We do need to know how to intellectual and mentally store stuff away. I would offer that what the fellow meant was that we should teach people how to mark up content, to add metadata that describes for themselves and others the personal and social context in which they interact with information and which captures the relative meaning which they found in it.

Okay, Number 3

So the Omaha people would send their young persons at puberty on what white folks ended up calling vision quests. What they were really trying to do was gain the favor of Wakonda (think the Tao rather than Yahweh). The idea was that a sincere child who stood in place for four days with clay rubbed on their head would be more likely to influence Wakonda than a cynical adult. As might be expected, the kids starting recieving visitations from different mediums, animate and inanimate. These visitations turned what was originally an event of supplication on behalf of the tribe into a personal appeal to the most imporant force in the universe for help throughout life, undertaken when a child was "old enough to know sorrow," in other words to engage in tribal relations as an adult.

This is the prayer that all Omaha know, that they all sing as they stand Noⁿ'zhiⁿzhoⁿ, "as sleeping," for four days, trying to think the happiest thoughts they can for their future.

Wakoⁿda thethu wahpathiⁿ atoⁿhe

Wakoⁿda! here, needy, he stands, and I am he

When the kids come back they can't say anything about the animal for four days, then they can go talk to someone who also was visited by their same medium (and they can talk to no one else, and no one else asks). The elder helps them to understand what happened and what it might mean for their relationship to the tribe.

It is said of that the medium "has compassion on" the child, that this is its motive for impelling its particular form on the child for the rest of the child's life. It has decided to take an interest in the child's future because it pitys the child.

I like the idea of going out to gain the favor of some animal or the other. I especially like the no talking about it for four days rule. It seems to really drive the experience home and allow the child to come to terms with it, to properly prepare before talking about it. Once the child has talked it over with an elder the child then goes out and finds the physical expression of that medium and fashions a trophy. If a hawk visited the child, the child would journey until he crossed paths with a hawk, would kill it and preserve the bird as a visible sign of his visitation, the child's most prized possession.

Kids would even become junkies for the process, going through it over and over again until they settled down with a family (if they became holy persons, today called roadmen, they continued the process their whole lives). It was generally frowned upon once one became a respectable member of adult society.

I read all of this from the Omaha Indian book by Alice Fletcher and Joseph La Fleshe. The bible for all things Omaha. When I put on my white perspective, it seems funny that a whole tribe of Indians with active social and cultural traditions would pore over a government scholarly study for ideas on how to be more Indian. It seems a testament to the horror of any culture being systematically euthanized by another.

When I think Omaha about it, it seems just another story. There are two kinds of stories in the book. The stories of the elders that Alice and Joseph recorded, and Alice and Joseph's own stories.

I've heard most of the stories in the book from third party sources like my grandpa and grandma Charlie Stabler and Elizabeth Sansouci.

Going to pray to Wakonda was just one of the many rites that a child passed through towards becoming an adult and forming an appropriate relationship with the nation and the world. It, "required a voluntary effort by which, through the rite of fasting and prayer, the man came into direct and personal relations with the supernatural and realized within himself the forceful power of the union of the seen with the unseen," as Alice says.

Seems like the child is finding meaning in the universe and finding ways to share that meaning. Seems Alice and Joseph are also finding meaning and sharing it.

The totem is metadata and its shared, in fact, it's the only part of the experience that is shared with everybody. And it needs no one definition.

Whoever has the best library wins

Coming to you straight out of the American Society for Information Science and Technology Annual Meeting in lovely downtown Providence R.I. is every ones favorite semi-structure data source, Mr. metametadata himself, the Keeper!

Thank you, thank you. I'm very delighted to be here. I just have two things to say.

A very bright person, J. C. Hertz, who makes a living applying game design principles to information systems for major products, services and learning systems (she's principal of a company called Joystick Nation, Inc.) just made some statements I took issue with in her plenary session.

These statements are (paraphrased):

any system that requires people to add their own metadata is doomed to fail

My discomfort with this statement is merely linguistic or epistemelogical. She spoke of "accidental metadata" and provided the classic example of an image caption as accidental rather than I don't know, maybe intentional? I'm not sure I understand the "accidental" domain. Does she mean information that can be mined from the data object itself? Does she mean contextualizing information that people add as they position their data objects in some information space? Does she mean information that is the result of interaction with data objects? All of these are candidate activities for generating metadata byproducts. In fact the product of some of these activities really wants to be both primary data and metadata at the same time.

She most strongly made a distinction between people providing unasked for information as they positioned their data in an information space versus information provided as a result of the information space dropping a cataloging form in front of people and saying you have to fill this in before you can submit your data object. I think that in either case there is an expectation on the part of the owners/participators in an information space for a provider of a data object to also provide metadata. My response to Ms. Hertz is that there just isn't social momentum for making that expectation explicit. There still are strong unspoken social pressures in the information culture that keep most people from dumping a bunch of uncontextualized data into the pool. What metadata specialists do is find ways to work with data providers to take advantage of these pressures to formalize "accidental" metadata offerings to the providers' benefit.

For example, the Metadata Services Unit in the MIT Libraries provides metadata application services for MIT OpenCourseWare. The Unit creates Learning Object Metadata records for OCW resources. MIT OCW is in many respects an electronic publication. Like other publications they provide image captions. These captions contextualize the image and provide copyright information. There is no official publisher's rule that says you have to caption your images, but most people do. The caption is metadata that just plain makes the image more effective as an information resource. It's in the interest of MIT OCW to provide this caption and they've mandated it's existence in their style guide. They are, like most data providers moving to electronic information delivery, unfamiliar with xml, semistructured data and metadata records. It is natural for them to write a caption into a web page right where they embed the image. This provides a benefit to viewers of the web page and also means there's some text about the image that gets indexed for the search engine. The caption in the html makes the image more easily discovered. It is the role of the Metadata Services Unit to find this metadata OCW has provided and get it into a Learning Object Metadata record. Why duplicate the existence of this information in data and metadata? Because now, when you search for images and get a list of them back, you get the caption included in the list. It is much easier to capture the caption in a metadata record field and then display that field on the search results page. If you doubt that this is easier than grabbing the caption straight of the html page go try to make sense of the keyword in context part of a google results list. The two metadata record fields presented in a search results page are General.Title and General.Description. Because the Unit put the caption in the description field patrons have access to that information as they're making a decision whether or not to actually view the item. Once again, metadata (same info, different wrapper) aids information retrieval.

What this seems to point out to me is that there has always been a fuzzy line between data and metadata, and that the information explosion precipitated by hypertext and networking technologies has brought this confusion into high relief. The more stuff that gets into the information space the faster we seem to need to produce even more. This means that we start demanding more for our metadata buck, it must do more for less effort. When folks start drawing clear lines where none existed before it's often because they're drawing in the wagons and abandoning any effort that doesn't seem to realize a return. In this kind of environment there really should not be any metadata "accidents". It's the responsibility of information science professionals to make data providers aware of this and help them form a stronger, more cost-effective relationship with metadata rather than attempt to abandon it all together.

libraries represent a well-organized, well-funded, well-mandated effort that doesn't scale well

This rounds out the arguments against human analysis and metadata production for the mass of data on the internet. Basically, data providers are lazy and data organizers can't afford to send enough librarians at the task. I think that both are misunderstandings of the current information economy. We've seen that data providers do provide metadata intentionally and there are methods to formalize this relationship, cementing the social motivation to provide metadata and realizing an economy.

We can also find the funds to catalog the internet, we've just been looking in the wrong place. Before networking and hypertext it was expensive to get a bunch of data into the world. For ease of distribution a bunch of ideas would aggregate (think gravity) into a book, an easy way to share a lot of information in one package.

It's no longer so expensive to send a bunch of ideas out there so they tend to avoid aggregation (think dark energy pushing infobits apart). The semantic density of the ASIST conference proceedings book seems galactic in scale next to this humble weblog post.

Now this same semantic density scale correlates with the scale of effort on the part of the author. It takes a book author much longer than the 30 minutes or so I've spent throwing of this ephemera. And the scale of reward is similar for the author. But this scale of effort does not hold for the librarian who might catalog either on their way to a library of digital repository. It takes the same 15 to 20 minutes to catalog a book as it does one weblog entry.

This is what Ms. Hertz means. There's enough information in books and serials to justify an international collaborative effort amongst governments, institutions of higher learning and information professionals to provide a sophisticated level of information organization.

The information space that is the internet is screaming for this same level of organization, but the justification for a similar effort on the part of librarians seems absurd. However, if you look at the scale of effort and reward on the part of data providers, it seems apparent that the creators and aggregators of this content could and should shoulder this burden, even if it means hiring the librarians away from Universities and Public Libraries. Librarians need to focus on marketing their service offerings to the data providers wherever they are. This is our entry point, how we get to catalog the world wide web. It's likely to happen piecemeal at first. Especially considering the pluralization of data providers in the current information economy. Don't shy away from any project, no matter how small. We also need to find the right social leverage points to encourage good information organization behavior on the part of those who are producing the mass of content, again no matter how small.

Okay, things to say number 2.

Search Wars, Killer Apps and Why Librarians WILL Eventually Rule the World from the ASIST Special Interest Group: Information Architecture listserv (Thanks Boniface Lau)

It seems that the theme of this post is the old adage from Brown and Duguid (The Social Life of Information), "Social change must precede technological change".

I think that librarians get this and are working very hard to improve their ability to effect the needed social change. I think that the computer and internet technology communities are lagging behind. Their response to the need to improve the quality of metadata that accompanies electronic resources is not to leverage the social pressures that will prompt folks to provide this information, but to find some algorithmic, programmatic solution to pull it out of whatever a human sees fit to deposit. If you expect people to be lazy they will. If you expect more, they'll surprise you.

I don't think that you can process the amounts of data were now seeing through human effort alone, neither can you do it by machine alone. Even google employs an army of librarians to tweek the algorithms and improve the results of programmatic analysis. I just heard a great presentation at MIT by Gerry Marchionini from UNC Libraries about automatic generation of metadata. He thinks that we should be educating a whole generation of young people to be more savvy at information retrieval and interaction, including algorithm maintenance and development. He thinks that we can very easily develop more sophisticated information resource users with higher expectations for information systems and he promotes something he calls Human Computer Information Retrieval, the collaboration between man and machine to solve the problem of interaction with growing amounts of data.

Did you notice that the article reference is from a listserv sponsored by the group throwing the conference I'm attending?

And, yes I noticed that I'm blogging about information technologies like blogging from a conference about information technologies like blogging (I'm also blogging about the conference itself, from the conference itself) and that this is some sort of metametageekiness. As you should have realized long before now, I'm very comfortable with metameta events and environs, and geekiness.

There Will Be No Shafting Anywhere Near My Mac

Thanks to Boing Boing for Social Software can't afford to shaft the Mac, apparently titled by Beavis & Butthead. I wondered what they were up to lately.

Guess what, I'm a blogger, and guess what, I'm in St. Louis at a geek conference (Library and Information Technology Association), and guess what else, I build new gadgets with cultural value (OpenCourseWare), and guess what else, I have a Mac 15" Aluminium Powerbook, in fact I'm using it make all this blogging right now (via some random wireless connection named "tsunami" in the lobby of the conference hotel (thanks, tsunami!))! So he's talking about me!? Does that make me a maven? Does mavenhood explain metametametadata? Does it excuse all of its self-referential posts? Are you sick of them yet? Is this clever? Can I ask anymore questions? Um, no.

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.

I'm in baby!

After exhausting myself whining about my exclusion from metafilter, I finally just asked the owner/founder of the site for an account and sent him a donation for some new servers. I feel good about contributing to a worthy cause and he's happy to include people who want to make such a positive contribution. So now Metametadata will be racing to answer all the questions on ask.metafilter.com.

And while I was at it, I finally decided to go ahead and take advantage of a gmail invitation. So now, I'm one of the cool kids. Everyone wants to know me. The new handle is the "domain name of this site" at gmail dot com. Go nuts. Don't spam me. Marlon please stop using the keeper address. Use Gmail, I'm forwarding everything there. I mean, a freaking gig of storage!

It's like a huge day for me. I feel like the prettiest girl in the whole trailer park, except I'm not a girl and I don't live in a trailer park.

Grayson

I'm back, and with a doozy to get things rolling again. Whatever you do, download the trailer for this (try the mirror site).

Man, people can take fanfic too far, and too seriously. I often times find myself yelling at the Metafilter people to calm the f*** down, already. If only they'd start accepting new members. I mean, am I not made for that place? Especially, ask metafilter. I could spend my entire life just answering all those stupid questions and die a happy man knowing that I didn't get through to anyone.

The Metafilter entry

The Mirror Site (trailer's here)

Ask Metafilter

chhavisachdev.com/blog/

I've spent this early evening helping Chhavi Sachdev get her own weblog up and running. Check her out at http://www.chhavisachdev.com/blog/.

So far we've downloaded Wordpress and installed it on her server. We've just finished editing her stylesheet and templates.

At some point I'll fix the links in her flash files to fit her preferred site architecture.

She's got an awesome airport hub in her house so she, I and her roomate (my colleague from MIT Libraries) are all working wirelessly on our laptops.

Why You Should Fall to Your Knees and Worship a Librarian

I just created a blogroll (check the menu bar on the right). FYI, a blogroll is a list and links to other blogs that I currently read through my RSS aggregator (bloglines).

While constructing the roll I came across this site, so I added it and thought I give it its own post. Enjoy.

The Librarian Avengers (via The Shifted Librarian)

Addendum: I've used Wikipedia to provide encyclopedia references for unfamiliar terms in this entry and am going to try to continue this practice in future entries. Wikipedia is cool (you can find out about it at its entry about itself). Especially check out its self-healing systems.

The MRML

Just in case you aren't as afraid of The Info-ninja as Michael Moore, an advance release of what we've currently got in development. You know, they've got four more detectives working on the case. They got us working in shifts.

--------------------------

A Guide to MRML

The Mind Reading Markup Language (MRML /mur'mul/) is a proprietary
extension of the HyperText Markup Language. This document, all MRML
tags, and any ideas you come up with while reading this information are
the exclusive property of the authors. This is an open specification
that
will be expanded as mind control technology is refined.

MRML tags can be embedded into any regular HTML document. They are
completely invisible to all browsers. No one will ever know you are
using them.

NOTE: MRML is not case sensitive. <fraud> is equivalent to <Fraud> or
<frAUD>.

Basic Markup Tags

The following MRML tags are used to read the client's mind for certain
kinds of thoughts and emotions about the contained text.

<BRAINSCAN>
Brainscan performs a light scan of the client's thoughts which may
include perceptions of their current environment. The Brainscan tag is
an
invaluable tool for establishing a user's identity as it is much more
reliable than checking REMOTE_HOST or USER_ID variables.

<THOUGHTSUCK>
Thoughtsuck performs of deeper scan of the client's thoughts which may
included details of significant events within the past 24 hours.

<DEEPFEARS>subject</DEEPFEARS>
Probes the client's mind for their fears about the contained subject.

<DEEPERFEARS>subject</DEEPERFEARS>
Probes the client's mind for their deeper, more repressed fears about
the
contained subject.

<DEEPESTFEARS>subject</DEEPESTFEARS>
Probes the client's mind for their deepest, most repressed fears about
the
contained subject. WARNING: This tag cannot be exported outside the US
borders.

<SEXTHOUGHTS>subject</SEXTHOUGHTS>
Probes the client's mind for sexual thoughts about the contained
subject. Use of the Sexthoughts tag will likely be deprecated with the
release of the Freud and Jung specifications.

Freud and Jung Tags

Specifications for Freudian id, ego, and superego tags and Jungian
symbolic tags are not currently available.

The HYPNOTIZE Tag

Current technology enables very primitive mind control using MRML tags.
The so-called Brainwashing tags are delimited by the special
<!--HYPNOTIZE><HYPNOTIZE--> pair. Suggestions within the Hypnotize area
are completely invisible to all clients, but it is extremely important
that the tags are placed correctly. You are liable for any mental
damages
inflicted by improperly placed tags.

HYPNOTIZE Area Tags

Within the <!--HYPNOTIZE></HYPNOTIZE--> area the following tags may be
used:

<SUGGEST>text</SUGGEST>
Used for mild, easily acceptable suggestions. For stronger suggestions
use
PROGRAM and BELIEVE. Some examples:
It is warm for this time of year.
You need to upgrade your computer.
Republican policies aren't all that bad.

<MEME>text</MEME>
Information that you want the client to pass on to friends and
correspondents.
Some popular memes:
Chain letters
Urban legends
Cool ascii graphics

<FORGET>text</FORGET>
Things you want the client to forget. It may be desirable to have the
client forget the URL of your MRML documents.

<PROGRAM>text</PROGRAM>
Programs the client with a strong post-hypnotic suggestion. There are a
few optional arguments. <PROGRAM TIMES=3 INTERVAL="1 hour" DELAY="2
days">
will trigger the suggestions three times at a one hour interval two
days
hence. <PROGRAM INTERVAL="after every meal" FOREVER> could trigger the
suggestion brush your teeth for an indefinite time.

Within the <PROGRAM></PROGRAM> area the following tags may be used:
<BELIEVE>text</BELIEVE>
Explicit thoughts to be planted in the client's mind. Beware of
contradictory programming! Try to remove previous conceptions before
reprogramming.

To reprogram someone that thinks that Pepsi is better than Coke:
1.<BELIEVE>You have no opinions about the relationship between
Coke and Pepsi.</BELIEVE>
2.<BELIEVE>Coke is better than Pepsi.</BELIEVE>
3.<BELIEVE>You are thirsty.</BELIEVE>

<BUY HREF=url>
Encourages the client to buy products on the World Wide Web. The
optional ITEM=item argument may be used.

<PASSWORD=keyword or phrase>
A convenient way to access the client's mind for future programming
sessions. Should only be used with a secure client-server connection.

Clarification: The BLINK Tag

The <BLINK> tag used in many popular browsers is not a MRML specified
tag.

Running Your Own MRML Server

The software needed to run a MRML-oriented server is freely available to
all persons and institutions. To obtain a copy of the server software a
representative for you or your company must attend a special 3-day
training session where they will be given the MRML software package.
These
training sessions are currently being held twice a month at an
undisclosed
location; requests for private training sessions will be considered.

Obligatory blog about blogging

I'm off to the NYC this weekend to check up on the long lost daddydress. I even might be able to convince his inimitableness to submit a guest entry. I know he's got quite a few in him.

Here's an article about blogging and Amazon to chew on.

The boisterous world of online literary commentary is many things. But is it criticism? (via Arts & Letters Daily)

Metadata Rules! (And so do nerds!)

Just a little model of my favorite metadata scheme, the IEEE Standard for Learning Object Metadata, or 1484.12.1 (Click on picture)

Check out its majesty.

Man, so cool.

From the Uber-nerd files: Metacrap

Just call me The Vengeful Info-Ninja.

I'm sorry, you're just gonna have to read the article to find out why.

The article is Metacrap, by Cory Doctorow, co-administrator of boingboing

Yes, I understand that I'm devoting an entire entry to people and articles that don't share my belief in the value of what I do. Our conflict lies at the junction of the public web (very shallow) with the "deep web" (huge silos of data, datasets, journal articles, learning objects). These articles discuss the application of metadata to the public web, where Google has correctly chosen to leverage the semantic connections (link choices) of its users because the lowest common denominator rules. If porn comes up highest on a search its because that's accurately a reflection of what the majority of people are searching for with that search string. I'd be willing to bet that Google has to significantly change its approach as it gains access to academic and similar repositories of content resulting from intellectual inquiry.

Other sites of interest:

Rawbrick on the Semantic Web (One) (Two)

Caveat Lector on the Semantic Web (One) (Two) (Three)

Clay Shirky on The Semantic Web

Finally, The Semantic Web

More BAZZLE DAZZLE on "The Web"

If Basilia keeps insisting on making appearances on "Metametametadata" we're just going to have to give him his own "Web Log" (heheh, I said "Log").

Go check out his new "Website" to see examples of his artwork. Very cool, Basil.

And thanks, for the link to my site.

Here's the link to Baz's site,

http://www.terracottawarriors.xbuild.com/

Damn it feels good to be an uber-nerd (1)

This is just what librarians do, for fun I guess. I mean, not me. I do way stupider stuff.

Peeps in the Library

Update!

I've been having trouble staying afloat of all the good stuff I want share with you. So I've decided that I need to spend some time talking about that trouble.

So I have no idea why I'm having so much trouble. True to form, I just decided to throw some organization at it.

There are three major messages that I'd like to share with you.

1. Damn it feels good to be an uber nerd. A sort of brain dump in which I compare my information dissemination project with other knowledege organization programmes and provide a window into my ridiculously over-organized mind.


2. Let's all wear blank badges. In which I try to convince everyone to join a routing list of my complete collection of Invisibles comics. Seriously, many of the major brain dump factoids originated as counter-cultural references in this comic.


3. Giving you your very own Personal Digital Library. In which I detail my efforts through the website, implementation of cocoon and savvy use of xml and xslt to develop a personal digital asset manager. Wouldn't you all like a quick and easy way to electronically manage your music, movie and book collections?

Okay, so maybe the trouble is that these major themes are quite personal and important to me, and the required effort per syllable to publish them properly is discouraging. You know me, "if it's not worth doing right (read perfectly) its not worth doing." So to counteract this inertia, I've tried to break the info down into its absolutely discrete units, then I'm just going to throw them up and let you sort through them yourself. The only categorical organization to this sub-publication of metametametadata will be through the titles of the entries. Otherwise the existing categories will be applied, but I'm not making categories for the three major themes.

Ok. Let's get started.

Here's the link to that discrete organization I was talking about. Bet you didn't even know the log was having so much difficulty as to warrant the organizational effort.

So how many times can I say so in a blog entry, it's kind of like how it's really, really annoying when public speakers say "um" all the time, but we totally need them to say it, so that we can catch up with their ideas, and they totally need to say it, to allow time for their brain to send coherent linguistic organizations of those ideas to their mouths. We really, really need it in coversation, but when you listen to a public speaker, or worse a radio dj, go um, um, um it drives you mad. Anyway it's so annoying. And what's up with the two different spellings of Oh-Kay? Something's wrong with my brain today. I need to like, defragment.

LOOOOLA, LO-LO-LO-LO-LOOOOLA

It's LOLA!

And, Learning Objects at Wesleyan.

Sorry, but my professional life is creeping into the log with this entry. The above image is a link to the best presentation of what I do professionally. I support programs like the Learning Activities/Learning Objects Repository at Wesleyan University. LOLA is an attempt to create a "refertory" of digital teaching resources. Refertory means that the project does not store the objects on its own servers. Rather, LOLA is just a catalog of metadata records with links to the actual objects at individual instructor or institutional websites. It's a clearing house where professors can find teaching material, share the way they make particular use of objects, and evaluate the object's effectiveness in the classroom.

For LOLA I provided an implementation of IEEE Learning Object Metadata (LOM). This meant picking a set of elements that completely and accurately describe an "Object," and another set that describes an "Assignment." Through conceptual models, data models, xml bindings and definition of best practices for metadata creation, I defined all possible relationships between "Objects" and "Assignments," and designed user interactions for creating a LOLA object (entering metadata), searching the catalog of LOLA objects, and providing feedback on LOLA objects in the form of assignments. Here's a picture of the Data model I provided to give you a better idea.

In the data model, the two big circles define the two types of metadata records, objects and assignments. The gray sausage looking things are individual metadata elements or fields in those records, and the green squares represent user interaction screens (webpages) where visitors enter catalog information or view that same information. So a LOLA object to the user is a collection of five webpages (including assignment) that provide useful information about the digital resource. The metadata elements in the System interaction screens are provided programmatically by the LOLA system behind-the-scenes; the user never sees them.

The cool thing (to me, anyway) about LOLA is that an object in the "refertory" is neither a physical thing, nor even a digital thing. It's just an instance of metadata (including a URL) that points to a thing!

Kinda explains why I call this weblog metametametadata.

Handgame and Gourd Dance

So whilst you alls wuz gittin ya ski on, and ya bored on, Kenj and I were making a very important, spiritual journey back to my homeland <!-- cue after-school special music -->.

We attended the 50th anniversary doings for my Uncle Lorenzo and Aunt Eva Stabler. We played handgame, I broke my mourning for my mothers death and we gourd danced. We also talked to my Dad's family about coming out for the wedding.

And we've got video! So enjoy. Home video watching being the favorite pasttime of the Fu Crew, at some point we'll bring the whole tape to Marlon's and you'll all have to sit through it.

Booklists!

As I expressed here I am jonesin' to get my booklists up on the site and browsable (searchable?) by you, the interested public.

As the author of the dijalog lifestyle article at xml.com so eloquently pointed out, our books and media collections are neither entirely digital nor entirely analog. Appropriately, neither are the various and sundry lists of these collections entirely one or the other.

I present to you the first of my many lists. This is my circulation report from the MIT SFS Library. It's a dijalog list. Originally analog, presented to you in convenient digital form. You can find it in the identifier section of my website. Note the repeated borrowings of a few select books. This pattern represents my attempts to get The Kenj to read these books. I think she only actually finished The Once and Future King.

Well, I'm all geeked out for the day.

The Geek Wedding

An excerpt from an email communication between bride and groom concerning choice of wedding cakes and font-face for invitation:

No comparison, really. Except, of course, in cost ($56)...

Kendra

At 03:25 PM 2/27/2004 -0500, you wrote:
This is what I'm gonna, what I've been looking for for awhile.

Rob

Oh yeah, we're book people.

Do You Live the Dijalog Lifestyle?

By now it should come as no surprise to all 12 of you that regularly read these pages that I pay attention to what goes on at xml.com.

And now it seems xml.com is paying attention to what goes on at metametadata.net (with a little help)

Kendall Clark has begun a new column in which he seems to have drawn a perfect picture of me and wants to discuss it in depth.

I was even moved to comment on the column and steer folks back here to share in the metametameta craziness.

Reading the column I'm reminded of Yellow River's obsession with his ipod and the stacks and stacks of cds he's got all around his desk.

Making with the funny stuff

A couple of quick amusements that wandered across my desk via the email.

First, courtesy of Dragonfly, thank you very much.

     Check these out:

     http://www.kersbergen.com/temp/worstalbumcovers.html

Second, via The Underground Libraries.

     Very cute, non-allergenic, and very low maintenance...

     http://home.wanadoo.nl/annekebroenink/maukie2.swf

And now a message from your keeper.

     I'm still working on the personal part of this website, metametadata. I'd like to add some of you folks who comment and post weblogs to the contributor page. Please go there and look at the metadata on the right. You need to write your own funny description, such as "This date misrepresents the last time <Your Name Here> pleasured him/herself." Of course your descriptions will actually be funny, right?

Updates!

Here it is: version 1.0, although it's debatable whether the site is actually ready for prime time.

The feature list:

• A new stylesheet, ooh, isn't it pretty?
• A new set of archives, organizing the entries by category.
• Links to these category archives at the bottom of each post, e.g. "more on Metametadata"
• Navigation menu available from every page, including single-entry pages, and date- and category-based archives.
• New double-secret Members Only link. For more information just ask, I guess.
• Added lily as an author. Welcome lily, we look forward to your first post.
• I updated the rest of the site as well, go check out metametadata.net

So I haven't been slacking this long weekend. And there will be more posts from me soon. I hope we'll all see posts from the other authors as well. If you're interested in becoming an author, please submit a comment of no more than 25 words explaining why you would be the greatest blog author of all time and our best friend forever and ever.

As for the new categories. They're kind of cool. Now anyone who only wants to see the funny stuff and couldn't care less about the metadata or the fantasy stuff can just ignore the boring parts and go straight to the raunchy bits.

Moveable Type allows you to provide one primary category and as many secondary categories as you want. When creating an archive for each category, it will include any post that has the category as either a primary or secondary. So posts will end up in more than one list. The category list is exactly what you see on the menu. Any author can create a new category. I would ask authors to remember that the link at the bottom of the entry reads "more on ...", so use the plural where appropriate ("more on feet", not, "more on foot", etc.). Authors, please also try to pick the one primary category that the entry belongs to more than any other. I'll periodically check the entries and add secondary categories where appropriate.

I hope everyone is enjoying the site and that you're all loking forward to becoming active members of the little community we're getting going here.

Your friendly Keeper.

The Website

Two posts in one day! It's like a record.

Okay so I totally redesigned the website. I know, you're all like there's a website? Isn't this it?

No ladies and gentleman this very much is not it. This is just a part of it.

Metametadata is my website about things in my life. The weblog is quickly (and enjoyably) becoming a collaborative effort.

Since metametadata captures information about the record capturing information about the object, and I am that record, I think that this log should from now on be called metametametadata, to recognize that it is capturing information about the capture of information about the record about the object, follow? Knew you did.

This way the log can be our thing and still a part of my thing.

So that's its name.

At the website check out all four sections. At the contribute page notice that kenj and I are listed. If you too would like to be listed as a contributor to the site (and anyone who has made the least comment is already a contributor), then you need to think up a cool description for the date. For example: This date represents the last time x bathed.

You'll all get to be validators.

Cool, eh?

The only links on the site that shouldn't work are the booklists on the identifier page. Those are next up to bat and will be blogged about, then its a note about making a derive, then a note about the metametadataschema (once I fill in that section).

Okay kids, knock yourself out. And while your at it check out the website I built for work.

My First Post

He (guess who) is making me do this. To demonstrate that I know what I am doing, and can do it again later when I have something interesting to say. Hard to be interesting when he is standing over my shoulder. No doubt he will have something to say about this, but he will have to post his own comment later. This is my post. Mine.

J Commander Salute

All Hail Commander J!

Welcome, Commander, to our humble vessel. I'm sure that you will provide a steady hand at the helm and will mainain a full log.

I am posting your comment re the Information Architecture entry so as to incorporate the html elements.

This site--which hasn't changed a <tr> or <td> in, like, 8 years--is kind of a primitive, human-filtered version of an aggregator that also incorporates a compelling link/topic heavy design: www.aldaily.com (I know some of your are already aware of it). Now you must be willing to accept their article choices, but I swear by it for lunch breaks and Saturday morning cereal. So does Edward Tufte, I hear. So there.

Commander J, thank you very much for your comments. We all look forward to your future contributions.

A Public Service Announcement

From the "I really don't have enough ways to waste my time" newsdesk.

--Some websites/blogs that I follow and an introduction to RSS.

RSS (Real Simple Syndication) is metadata scheme that defines a standard way to format the contents of a website or weblog (using xml) so that any number of different programs can access and understand this content. When RSS is universally adopted by the publishers of websites and weblogs, a program that can read RSS will be able to find the content of any site/log, get that content and republish it however it wants.

Programs that read RSS (called syndicators or aggregators) come in the usual two flavors. They are either web-based and client-based. The difference is just in the display medium. Web-based programs transform the xml into html. Client programs have their own graphical-user-interface(GUI), into which they plug the xml content.

Most well-run blogs (including this one) offer an RSS version of their content. To see this blog's RSS, just click on the link "Syndicate this Site (XML)". If you look at the rdf for this weblog, the rest of my website will start to make more sense. I'm applying xml to format the display of information, in addition to its intended use to format the organization of information. You can make your own decision as to how successful I am.

Once you install a syndicator, or sign up online for a web-based aggregator, then all you have to do is travel once to all the blogs you want to follow (including this one) and gather the http addresses for the RSS xml (you can cut and paste this from the address line). Then whenever you run the syndicator it will read these files (which are automatically updated by each blog's content management system) and prepare a list of the current entries/articles.

In the future when we all have mulitple personality disorder and our own reality tv show, everyone will be able to speak the Advanced Really-simple Syndicated Expression language (ARSE). Implants will enhance our ability to code our thoughts in ARSE, allowing us to publish our unvarnished (or varnished) mental states (with video!) straight to the infernet where we will all use our ability to speak ARSE to aggregate each others thoughts by sorting through the noise on the radiation band specifically designated for mass telepathic communications.

We're talking everyone knowing what everyone else knows in real-time, the collective subconscious, learning through osmosis.

Were all gonna be syndicated, baby.

In the meantime, here are some aggregators that will have to do. I like Amphetadesk.

--In the newly established Metametadata tradition, the following are not links to the actual aggregators, but links to lists of links to the aggregators (you know, for context). Some of the links are other blogs that you may want to aggregate. Isn't aggregating fun!

• http://www.hebig.org/blogs/archives/main/000877.php
• http://blogspace.com/rss/readers
• http://www.ourpla.net/cgi-bin/pikie.cgi?RssReaders
• http://rss.lockergnome.com/resources/

• http://www.wired.com/news/infostructure/0,1377,60053,00.html
• http://www.onlinemag.net/nov02/OnTheNet.htm

• Gothamist -- http://www.gothamist.com/index.rdf
• Itunes 10 New Releases -- http://ax.phobos.apple.com.edgesuite.net/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wpa/MRSS/newreleases/limit=10/rss.xml
• Lockergnome's Technology News -- http://www.lockergnome.com/lockergnome.xml
• Montague Institute Review -- http://www.montaguelab.com/digest.xml
• Broog: Alien Film Critic -- Despite (because of?) his vast alien intelligence Broog does not syndicate his criticisms, you must travel to his webpage to be brainwashed (and eaten?)

• Rawbrick -- http://www.rawbrick.net/remaindered.xml
• Bookslut -- http://www.bookslut.com/blog/index.rdf
• The Shifted Librarian -- http://www.theshiftedlibrarian.com/rss.xml

And you absolutely have to go to this site, bookmark it, learn it, live it, love it, you know.

The Jargon Dictionary

Finally!

So its been a long time since my last post...

If you were wondering whether this log was going to be a one a done, its not, I promise. I just haven't been able to justify making time to work on the website and write to the log. I have been forming a list of posts that I hope will come on fast and furious in a few days. The list includes:

Notes from a musical concert of Boston subway performers, including musings on creating a soundtrack of these performers than writing a movie about Harvard Square for the music.

Continuing with the music to movie theme, some ideas for awesome Kung Fu battle scenes.

My reading lists and a series of notes on recent books read. First up, Mutual Aid by Peter Kropotkin.

and more cool stuff!

I have managed to get the booklists started at the website. Go here to see what I'm currently reading.

And Kenj now has authoring privileges, so please, badger her with requests to write. She's found the site to "austere" so now she's gonna help me lighten it up. I'm still working on the animated puppies.

Ladiez in da Haus!

Once there was this lady, she lived there too.

Oh, look at me, I'm making blog! Ooh la la, la la, la la, la la!

Metametadata.net (cont.)

Okay, so the site is created using a big table, which isn't ideal. Ideally instead of faking the xml, each bit of content would just be an xml file, or better yet rdf. Then I'd just use an xslt to render the page in xhtml, but that's in phase two.

But that's enough about the site. If you want to see how a proper personal weblog/website is done by a professional librarian, check out rawbrick.

Metametadata.net

So I've redone the site, here's the link. It's still a work in progress, but already it's gimmicky, geeky and it breaks every rule of good user-oriented design (well maybe not every rule).

I hope at least, that you all have a chuckle at the use of xml tags as a display mechanism.

First entry

To state the painfully obvious, this is the first entry of this journal and a test of its functionality.

It is still very much a work in progress

My goal in writing here is to record, admittedly for myself, interesting bits of data that I encounter. By interesting I mean those bits that seem to want to cohere into things called information. I intend for this space to supplement and organize the notes I keep in a Moleskine.

I call this log metametadata because I am a digital librarian and a metadata specialist. I provide data about data every waking minute of my life. Hence, the Moleskine, then www.metametadata.net. It seems appropriate to me that I at least attempt to make use of the latest telecommunications technology in my lifelong pursuit of that most elusive of objects, knowledge.

In other words I am trying to find out what the hell is really going on.

I hope that librarians get the joke in this log's title. There is a widely used metadata scheme for educational materials, appropriately called the Learning Object Metadata (LOM) Standard (IEEE standard 1484.12.1). This scheme consists of metadata elements in nine categories, the third of which is "Metametadata" and has the following explanation in the standard:

This category describes this metadata record itself (rather than the learning object that this record describes).
This category describes how the metadata instance can be identified, who created this metadata instance, how, when, and with what references.
NOTE:--This is not the information that describes the learning object itself.