Britt Blaser pulls together threads to explain why the network assembling around the Dean campaign is more important than it might seem.

Be the first to comment »

Click on this preview to see the Richmond, Virginia absentee ballot in all its glory.

2 Comments »

Akma has been made a full professor! Woohoo!

Mazel tov, Your Fullness!

1 Comment »

Prove that you are a better googler than me (not that that’s much of an accomplishment) by finding the famous photo of W in his flight suit walking across the aircraft carrier. Durned if I can find a copy of it anywhere on the Web…

19 Comments »

I spent the day at the Dean HQ in Burlington, which is always an energizing experience. There is so much going on there, and there are so few barriers between idea and execution.

TVs are strewn about, usually turned to “real” news channels. But at 6pm, guess what at least the Web folks are tuned to, at least last night? The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.

Any campaign that likes Jon Stewart can’t be all bad.

1 Comment »

Jay “Misspells His Own Last Name” Fienberg has trenchant comments on my article about metadata.

A big part of our difference may have to do with the loose (= wrong) way I define metadata. Part of it may have to do with where we’re looking at metadata issues. E.g., Jay thinks there’s no essential difference between arguments over FOAF and over the format by which we express date data; I’m instead thinking about the argument over what categories of info we need to exchange information about our friends. The argument over how to express that info is, I agree, important but not relevant to my interest in metadata.

We also disagree at least a little about what’s driving the need for metadata. Jay thinks it’s “the desire for increasing abstraction, rather than need for metadata itself.” My point was that the drive for metadata and the particular schema we come up with, are rooted in desire itself, not in a desire for metadata or even a desire for abstraction. And while I agree that we have willingly moved further up the abstractness tree — the cowardice of irony, for example, is a sign of this — I do think the need for more metadata to manage the new volumes of information has the unintended consequence of making our experience more abstract than before.

I find his comments right on the point and very helpful. Thanks, Jay.

4 Comments »