Karen Schneider, the Freerange Librarian, has an article in the Library Journal on the ethics of librarian blogs that begins promisingly: “Blogging is turning information into a conversation…” And, it continues just as well, explaining the ethics and ethos of blogging in what she calls the “biblioblogosphere.” She recommends transparency, linking to sites with which you disagree, being accurate — even postponing pressing the Publish button until you’re sure, a pretty drastic step for some of us — and admitting your mistakes.

The BBC reports that the World Multiconference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics (WMSCI) to be held in July in Orlando accepted a paper that was in fact machine-generated gibberish. Well, what do you expect from a conference that calls itself “the World Multiconference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics”?

You can generate your very own gibberish science paper here. [Technorati tags: librarians blogs]

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Fill in the blanks with answers within an order of magnitude and win the satisfaction of having guessed right:

One in ___ people who hit a moose are killed, compared with one in ___ who hit a deer…”

USAToday, April 15, 2005, “Moose brake for no one…” by Trudy Tynan

Select between the X’s to see the answer:
X     Deer: 1 in 75 …. Moose: 1 in 5,000     X [NOTE: Be sure to reverse the answers once you’ve revealed them because I, um, totally screwed this up. Sorry.]

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Matt McAlister explains that the Infoworld.com upgrade isn’t merely cosmetic: On the articles pages they’ve moved from a fixed taxonomy that took them a lot of time to develop to a structured tagging system:

What I like most in this new architecture is that the related links are now driven by del.icio.us. Our edit team is tagging content in del.icio.us. The engineers are pulling down the del.icio.us RSS feeds. And then we create matching logic based on the common tags. We also link back out to del.icio.us pages via the tags for the article on display.

This is a first step with several more ideas for leveraging tags coming soon. We need a more densely tagged data set behind us before some of the other plans can become real. The accuracy of the related links will also be a little shady, I’m sure, until we get more sophisticated with our tagging. But we’re all excited about the possibilities for the site now that we have these tags. New ideas seem to crop up daily.

Fascinating. Matt also talks about the intersection of tagging and marketing.

So, see Ephraim Schwarz’s article on Oracle and Sybase offering RFID integration. To the right is a “See Also” box that lists the article’s tags: Ephraim_Schwartz Oracle_RFID Sybase_RFID. (You can also click on “Complete List of Tags,” which takes you to Infoworld’s del.icio.us page.) The Oracle_RFID link takes you to the del.icio.us list of pages Infoworld has tagged as “oracle_RFID.” It being de.licio.us, that page also shows all the articles every other del.icio.us user has tagged that way. (The fact that zero non-Infoworlders have used that tag to me means that it’s a tad overly specific. Why not tag the article “oracle” and “rfid” instead?)

Meanwhile, the first mention of a company or technology in an Infoworld article is followed by three little links, one of which is “articles.” It takes you to a list of articles about that company. That list is not coming from del.icio.us and seems (seems!) unrelated to the tagging scheme. I don’t know if they’re planning to switch over at some point.

I’m also not sure what it means that Infoworld is applying matching logic to del.icio.us feeds. Does that mean they’re looking at tags from non-Infoworlders?

In any case, this is exciting because a high-traffic site that lives and dies by content is trusting the looser bonds of tagging to help us explore what’s related. And if Infoworld is using del.icio.us to include related links outside of their site — even if they don’t, because Infoworld is using del.icio.us we can do that for ourselves — then we have a great example of the social power of links: They owners of the information no longer are the sole proprietors of the organization of that information. [Technorati tags: tags infoworld folksonomy]

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In this podcast, Kevin Werbach and I are interviewed by Richard Giles about Open Spectrum, i.e., getting the government out of the business of controlling frequencies. I haven’t heard it, but I remember Kevin being very interesting. [Technorati tags: werbach spectrum]

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I’m at the Scottsdale Plaza Resort (trip #2 of my 3 trips to Phoenix over the course of 8 days). The hotel is lovely but their broadband offerings consist of two parts: You can get broadband via a wire in your bedroom for $10 for 24 hours, or you can take advantage of the wifi in the hotel lobby for $10 per use.

Yes, per use. Cheaper hotels offer wifi for free. More expensive hotels sometimes, in my experience, make you pay for a wired hookup in your bedroom but provide free wifi in the lobby. Leave it to the pace-setting Scottsdale Plaza Resort to move to the per-session wifi model made popular by pay phones and hookers.

I have left the hotel a strongly worded note. Of course, the fact that I just spent 5.5 hours in the middle seat on a packed, overheated plane where dinner consisted of 12 peanuts has had no effect on my mood. None whatsofucking ever.

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“Rupert Murdoch urged newspaper editors Wednesday to embrace the Internet,” says the story on Fox News:

“The challenge for each of us in this room is to create an Internet presence that is compelling enough that users make it their home page. Just as people traditionally started their day with coffee and a newspaper, in the future I hope that the way they start their day online will be with coffee and our Web site.”

Isn’t this the headline that every freaking media company ran in the fall of 1996? [Technorati tag: fox]

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Over at many2many I’ve posted comments about Meetup’s decision to start charging groups $19/month. What will this do to the social dynamics that have made Meetup so important to many of us? Will Craigslist will be the new Meetup? [Technorati tag: meetup]

Scott Heiferman of Meetup responds. A factual correction: Scott says Meetup isn’t having financial problems; they just want to make sure that it stays financially viable.

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John D. Erickson points to Halfway Down the Danube, a group blog by a German-American couple living in Romania with lots of comments from expat Americans and Europeans… [Technorati tags: BridgeBlog GlobalVoices]

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This is what I wrote out, intending to jarvis it on MSNBC this afternoon. I’m not sure what I actually said.

There’s been a fair bit of discussion about the fact that tech conferences, for all their good intentions, haven’t been able to attract enough women onto panels or into the audience. So a group of women bloggers have started a conference, called Blogher, July 30 in Santa Clara. One of the contributors to the Blogher blog, Surfette, or Lisa Stone, says that the conference is being organized as a do-ocracy – you want a topic on the schedule, then do it! She writes “”How do you subvert the dominant hierarchy? You give up control.”

There’s also been discussion of clampdowns on blogging. China has shut off access to a blog by Isaac Mao a popular blogger, In fact, tomorrow, the OpenNet Initiative, a consortium of 3 universities, is going to issue their latest report on which sites countries are blocking access to. Tomorrow’s report is on China.

Hoder, the Iranian blogger Hossein Derakhshan, reports an Iranian correspondent has been banned from the Iranian parliament building, supposedly for being rude and intrusive,— Hoder suspects it was really her reporting on corruption — so now she’s started a Persian weblog to get her story out.

Then there a couple of sites making creative use of the satellite images of the earth Google’s providing. They’re collecting interesting shots: Fenway park from above the Grand Canyon, Bill Gates’ house. Lotta fun. And that’s a little of what’s going on in the blogosphere

You know what distinguishes professionals from amateurs in this line of work? The professionals can look into the image of themselves projected in front of the camera and not be thrown off by their own image or by the three second delay… [Technorati tags: msnbc blogher hoder berkman]

Ian Schwartz has posted a video of the segment. Thanks, Ian!

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I’m doing the 90-second “What’s new in blogs” segment on MSNBC this afternoon. Now if I can only lose 50 pounds, get the moles sanded off, and have the hair transpants take, all before sometime around 5:15pm EDT. Unfortunately, that won’t leave me time to come up with something to say.

Ah, vanity, thy name is David.

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