Archive for January, 2005

To Tag or not to Tag

Monday, January 24th, 2005

I’ve been fascinated by the emergence of tagging as a means of collectively organizing content. Bopuc/Weblog is ranting about its shortcomings, and makes some good constructive points: bopuc/weblog: Tags… no! Semantics! No! Ontologies!

Unreal estate

Monday, January 24th, 2005

My wife and I moving back to the City from Napa and have been shocked by the real estate prices. Actually, it’s not the prices so much (we could see them in the listings) it’s what you get for the money and the fact that an $850k house will go for around $1MM! Those of [...]

Sea Party

Monday, January 24th, 2005

Sea Party, originally uploaded by jurvetson.
Hmmmm. We’re so used to thinking of humans as the most “perfected” of the mammals when it comes to general cerebral function it’s nice to be reminded that we may be throwbacks in certain areas. Perhaps if we, like the dolphins, had a paralimbic lobe we could avoid such nasty [...]

Picking on cartoon characters

Sunday, January 23rd, 2005

First the teletubbies, now this: SpongeBob Squarepants accused of promoting homosexuality.

Somebody wake me.

Mapping everything

Sunday, January 23rd, 2005

Driving home from the City today, I sketched out a concept for a flash app that would tap the Flickr API to infer location from Flickr tags. A quick glance on the FlickrIdeas discussion board pointed me at this site: Mappr!, which does exactly what I had in mind. It’s just gone live, so it’s [...]

What’s the matter?

Friday, January 21st, 2005

As many have asserted over the years, men DO have more gray matter. But wait, before you start dismantling your Gloria Steinem shrine, it turns out that women have more “white matter”. SO says a new scientific study from UCIrvine/Univ. New Mexico. Is this the start of a new gender war over brainpower? Likely not, [...]

Folksonomies - Meme alert

Thursday, January 13th, 2005

2005 may be remembered for the rise of collective tagging–what are now being called “Folksonomies”. It’s relatively early, but this is likely to spread like wildfire. Here’s an academic paper that tries to widdle the phenomenon down to its fundamentals. But the point is…it just intuitively makes sense. There are a lot of leaps happening [...]

In defense of irrational exuberance