forms — make ‘em!
one no longer needs to know html to make a web form that anyone can fill in with data that you want to collect. details of how you can use this cool new feature of google documents are on their blog.
so many books
i love that our library has feeds showing all the newest titles that they’ve got in. but it can be overwhelming sometimes. here’s a few that i just won’t have time for now, but i’d like to keep on the list…
- Moving Mountains: How One Woman and Her Community Won Justice from Big Coal
- You Never Call! You Never Write!: A History of the Jewish Mother
- Cowboy Republic: Six Ways the Bush Gang Has Defied the Law
- Parenting Without Fear: Letting Go of Worry and Focusing on What Really Matters
yeah, those are all powell’s links. stop typing amazon!
everything is misc.
David Weinberger is a new hero of mine, not least cuz he’s a loopy presentation nerd (go watch his great google tech talk video it will make you laugh and go whah?? and wow!) but for the crazysmart way he thinks about information (and specifically categorization) and the history and science thereof.
his ideas (and the incisive if not totally elegant way he expresses them) really got me thinking about:
a) what the heck am i using this blog for? now that it’s been so long since i had a real audience (post-hiatus), who should i target and why?
b) when i tag, i’m doing it of course for myself but also for pals, clients, family, etc. do my tags and taxonomies make sense to them? need they?
and lastly and more importantly not about me:
c) democratizing a technology, and making the way it’s organized way more participatory, can yield unintended negative results (if you don’t have some sort of checks built in). case in point: google image labeler, for those of you not already completely sucked in, is this fantastically addictive tool/toy that let’s you (along with a random & anonymous other user) quickly define first-thing-comes-to-mind tags (like “blue” “sky” “couple” “beach” “dog”) for selected images from the google image library. you score points when you both come up with the same word to describe the image, and it feeds you another one. you have two minutes to tag as many images as you can, and google then uses the tags (as i understand it) to have better meta data associated with the images. pretty cool. except that some have started to see the point as racking up as many “points” as possible and thus stumbling upon other users who will, with you, use simple, short, yet totally inappropriate tags for each image. this person’s strategy, for example, has made it so that the tags “man” and “sky” get associated with images that have absolutely nothing to do with either a man or the sky. perhaps/hopefully google has or will have some sort of check in place to discard the outliers? if you know more, please comment.
