Is there any service or site that aggregates and compares just the categories used in blogs?

can be found here. Caution: the background pattern makes it a little hard to read on a PC…
[via Chad]

New(-to-me) blog on mind and idea stuff found via Seb’s Open Research, which I gravitated towards purely because of the nostalgia-value of the URL, but stayed for stuff like this:

“Modern preconceptions have it that simply by applying our brains and concentrating hard enough on a problem (e.g. a crossword clue), we should be able to see the solution. This is the “Hare brain” approach.

The book says that there are two types of solution moments. Yes, one is when we sit down and just think hard. But there is another solution moment which comes seemingly out of nowhere, when we’ve been staring out the window, or having a shower, going for a walk. This is the tortoise mind approach. This is a result of a) having done the hare brain thinking in the first place and b) just relaxing your frontal lobes, and letting the rest of your brain “background render” the solution.

» Monkeymagic: December 2003 Archives

Not an exotic sandwich, but tasty guru-on-guru commentary about the Smenatic Web [sic] and metadata:

“I find myself recommending that extensive investments in metadata be postponed, at least in the enterprise environment, in favor of less expensive and more feasible architectural approaches that won’t go down in flames and force my clients into bankruptcy.

Why am I so uneasy with large metadata-driven approaches? One problem: in many environments, those espousing metadata as “the answer” don’t recognize that there are really two types of metadata to wrangle with: structural (think attributes or fields) and semantic (descriptive values or controlled vocabularies that populate those attributes). Each of these can require an extensive investment to think through, develop, implement, and, perhaps most importantly, maintain. People’s information needs are moving targets, as is an organization’s content; the metadata that connect them naturally need to evolve as well.”

I’m thinking that while, like Lou, I’ve heard a lot of the same evangelising of metadata, (leading, almost inevitably to ‘boil the oceans’ type-projects); there is a lot of R.S.M.M. going on in the background of the current crop of personal and group web tools which means that for a set of problems and markets, that exciting ‘sematic-web’ like stuff will get built, and will prove useful to end-users and affordable to achieve for clients/companies.

Wow it’s comfortable on this fence.

» bLoug: Dec 02, 2003: Skip This Rant and Read Shirky

is the focus of an excellent, signal-rich blog by Brian Parkinson [found via Dan], who is a designer working for the NHS. My first job was as an architectural assistant working for the NHS in Wales about 10-11 years ago, in between my first degree and my post-graduate architetcure degree. Working in design in public service is sometimes frustrating but satisfying – I’ll be following Brian’s blog carefully.

My mate and old neighbour Paulpod has gone and got himself a brand-new bunker for a blog

William Drenttel, Jessica Helfand, Michael Beirut and Rick Poynor… together at LAST! This group of design heavyweights have started a blog Design Observer: looking at contempory issues in design, design education and design theory.

No RSS feed as yet – and I’m longing to read what those four think of RSS once they discover it…

was one of our mantras during the early stages of iCan. When we were talking with people from News and other involved divisions in the BBC, we used to use the power-law curve so beloved of the blogosphere to give an analogy of the connection between the 6/7 major national or global stories that feature on the 30-minute evening news programme and the 100s or 1000s of personal, local issues that people could feel empowered to act on.

3 or 4 times a year at least, one of those personal, local issues will propel itself up the power-law curve to become a national or even global story. For instance, the fuel protests in the UK of a few years ago. iCan was about trying to increase that number, by recognising and supporting the continuum that exists between the tail and the top.

Even if not every story, issue or aspiration for change makes it to the top, the community and resources of the tail will provide support, information and inspiration for each new inhabitant of the tail.

The Stephen-Gould-esque aspiration then is reach some kind of self-sustaining equilibrium of activism and achievement there, with plenty of punctuation into the wider public consciousness that the top of the power-law curve represents. Whilst upward-mobility of stories or campaigns until they get onto the ‘broadcast-radar’ is desirable for the BBC as a news-gathering aid, it’s not the primary purpose of the iCan service – which is to create positive outcomes for people in their local civic environment – in the tail.

As Kevin Marks* rightly points out – it’s about low barriers to entry, and as we said, it’s all about the tail.

…of finding out that someone you really like the thoughts of has a blog – which after all is just a way to know their thought and perhaps have a conversation around them at a difference.

John Harris has a blog called VirtualTravelog. John was/is an ex-mining engineer, ex-pat Yorkshireman who was a director of technology at Sapient in San Francisco when I worked for them. When I was in SF we’d go for a warm beer and have a really excellent wide-ranging talk about tech, society, ecology, engineering and whatever else the beer or surroundings inspired.

Look like his blog is going to be much the same. His latest post at time of writing is on “Economics and the Internet’s Large-Scale Topology” which seems to build on some of the work I was involved with in a very small way with him at Sapient.

Top stuff and one to subscribe to.

Graham Hicks of IDEO has started a blog… with a very tasteful, spare design; lifted by some lovey touches:

“As a way to embed a little more sense of time into the site the colors of links change with the time of day. They move through 24 shades, one for each hour of the day. The link color will become blue (midnight), green (morning), orange (afternoon), and red (evening), based on Pacific time.”

» http://www.grahamhicks.com/