#11 Mash

This area of flickr mash-ups is a good example of the wide range of web 2.0 new emergences, from 'fun but pointless' to 'handy and productive', and a bunch of squidgy middle bits. The geographic tools, such as mapr, are awesome, and a great way to contextualise images. The random image cycling tool and flickr's favourite colour, are more in the former than the latter. And the colour searcher... well, it could have had an advanced search (ie: searching for more than one colour in an image), and the retrieval set could have been larger (admittedly, they would've decided to avoid the cluttery side of things). The image editing tools are a nice way to avoid photoshop, though, and could serve well when you're running out of avatars.

#10 Flick'n

A few days ago, I had an idle moment and wondered whether anyone had done a lolcat site for Cthulhu.

Um...

Someone had.


'lolcthulhu' doesn't really yield results, nor does 'lolthulhu' (the name of the site devoted to such cutesy insanity).

Although, scroll through enough pages tagged with cthulhu, and you'll find plenty of stuff like this:

It doesn't work quite as well as with cats, but considering chibi cthulhu merch has been around a while, it makes a bit more sense. This next image has been done better, but this was the only one I could find quickly:

Terrible, terrible pun.

Anywho, I'm sure lolthulhu will slip into the vernacular before too many terrabytes have passed.



Hmmmn... passing a terrabyte. Nasty.

PS: Did the optional thing too - this was a picture Ken Fraser forwarded on to me in my first month here.

#9 Tech...

My opinion on tagging is definitely changing, although the flaws within the principles of tagging, folsonomies, etc still simmer away. Technorati was definitely impressive, although I can't help but feel that peer pressure definitely holds more sway over what may be a more correctly named subject category. You can see this in more professional areas, such as the numerous different entries in Libraries Australia for the same items, many of which are only slightly different. But it seems that tagging culture, as I've mentioned earlier, tends to overcome this by something of a lemming tendency... whether or not it's jagged rocks or warm fluffy marshmallowy candy at the bottom of that arbitrary cliff.

The lack of uniformity in Library Thing annoyed me as well, although I saw that multiple representations of names did get grouped together, and the tag clouds were handy when trying to decide what the general consensus was on the scope of the book. I guess I'm still a bit clingy regarding the strong community aspect of it. Wow... that sounded terrible. I'll remember that one day when I need to lose some self-esteem.

It is interesting to look at the reshaping and opening up of the term 'peer-reviewed', considering that so many on-line communitites, despite interpersonal hierarchies and elitist mentalities, operate on more-or-less an even plane. It takes the guts out of a lot of academia when it comes to tracking down relevent information. And the raising profile of blogs into the professional and academic arenas themselves has had an impact - people genuinely want this medium to become more reputable, and it shows. The negative stigma is declining, and the diversity of information, ever-growing and re-creating itself, is a great thorn in the side of mainstream media sources.

#8 Folky

For some reason, it took me a while to get my head around folksonomies last year in library school. Taxa's, controlled vocabs, etc etc, made heaps of sense, as they were enmeshed in rules and structure. Maybe the inner control freak I have trouble silencing (mentioned a few posts back) was screaming so much it generated enough white noise to cancel out any chances of understanding folksonomies. Now that I understand it's just tagging, I'm, well, yeah... that makes sense. That's the problem with jargonism - that is, applying new words to a more understandable colloquial tongue - it will inevitably have a significant buffer period before people realise what it's synonymous with.

I'm a bit skeptical of tagging in many respects, though that often falls back on how arbitrarily I tend to tag things (see: this blog). But cataloging's an intrinsically subjective art, and as much as we have LCSH, MARC, AACR2, etc to keep us in line, there will still be plenty of times when subject headings have to be created to accomodate for a certain location, new field, etc, and dewey is constantly being rejigged, so a few different points of entry to any one subject area is pretty much a given. And, as a couple of the articles pointed out, once you find someone's personal taxa and vocab that alligns with yours - bonus. Less time spent trying to guess how the cataloguer (or LC) would approach it. You're constantly breaking rules with any controlled vocab anyway. As a colourfully disgusting example, an australian tourism guide controlled vocab from an annoyingly recent (still over 10 or so years, but still...) period of time listed 'homosexuality.. see: sexual perversion'.

#7 Feeding time

Since my last post, titled 'Junk', I've since gone back on my own words. Not that I'm really seeing RSS feeds as being bereft of time-wasting attributes, but, well... I kinda predicted what would happen without really applying it to me. Short of jumping in the widget deep-end, I've somehow managed to cram a whole bunch of side-line stuff into my blog. Starting off with the all-important 'bunny', I then slowly head on to the serious by way of The Onion, then end up somewhere more news-y. See, now, yeah... hmmmn. I should probably add that heavy metal librarian blog feed too. Maybe.

#6 Junk

I think I'll have to concur with what 2-Toed Sloth had to say regarding RSS feeds, especially considering the way that you view them through Google Reader. To me, it seems like a bit of a silly excuse for having a second e-mail account for all your e-mail lists to get re-directed to, and then to have the added annoyance of having to be taken out of that portal to view the articles they're teasing you with. Though I can see how such things would be handy if funneled through a widget in a uniform portal - perhaps that's how this stuff is destined to be useful. I mean, well, if you can get all these handy, time-wasting things in the one place where you're meant to be being productive, I GUESS... hmmmn... actually, maybe it won't. Ah.

Ultimately, the time-wasting will win over, and any facade of productivity will crumble under the weight of all the solitaire successors. Yep, that's my prediction. Madness.

Though, as with 2-Toed Sloth, I do agree about The Onion... and maybe the Dewey Blog.

A worthy site

Mostly blogs by librarians like myself who talk shop too much outside of work, but the list is long and I've only really scratched the surface.

Ah-huh... oh dear.