After my talk at KMWorld + Taxonomy BootCamp yesterday, a young man asked me for career advice. Jeez, you ever want to feel your age, have that happen to you!

Anyway, he’s thinking of going to grad school in library science and wanted to know what I thought of that as a career move. After taking the opportunity to pass along several nuggest of wisdom — You never understand a man until you’ve danced backwards in his high heels, 95% of life is showing up in your pajamas, etc. — I noted that I’m not up on what the library sci grad schools are teaching, but that there will be a big demand for people who can help us find, understand and reuse information (or, as I like to think of it, create an infrastructure of meaning). We’re going to need lots of help thinking through systems that will enable multiple orders to emerge from the behaviors of distributed groups. Something like that.

As soon as I left, I D’oh’ed myself for not pointing him to library bloggers like Karen Schneider, Jessamyn West, the Shifted Librarian, LibrarianInBlack, Liz Lawley, plus everyone I’m forgetting because I freeze when making lists. [Tags: libraries everything_is_miscellaneous information_architecture erkman]

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The FCC has ruled that landlords can’t keep tenants from using the wireless devices and services they want. Harold Feld and Susan Crawford have excellent posts explaining it. (I’m sure others do, too, but I’m in a hotel restaurant leeching wifi…) [Tags: wifi fcc harold_feld susan_crawford -berkman]

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I’ve been using a quote from Umberto Eco about there being many ways to carve a cow, but you won’t find many cuts that have the snout and tail attached. This is a direct reference to Plato saying that a wise person knows how to carve nature at its joints. But I’m keynoting the combined KMWorld and Taxonomy Bootcamp conferences this morning and realized that I’m not very happy with what I’ve been saying. Eco is right that not every way of carving the cow works, but there are so many ways of carving it that the old structures of knowledge and authority—once required because of the limitations on how we preserved, communicated and presented knowledge—lose their right to be the sole hands guiding the knife. Nature is just about all joints. How we carve depends on our interests, intentions and culture.

It doesn’t depend entirely on us – Eco talks about nature having a “grain,” which I don’t find a very helpful metaphor – but the fact that there are ways we can go wrong does not mean that there’s only one way we can go right.[Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous umberto_eco plato taxonomy kmworld]

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From a Publishers Weekly:

Safari Books Online, a California-based company that provides business and technology reference resources [O’Reilly media + Pearson Technology Group- dw], has launched Short Cuts, a series of brief works about emerging technologies not yet worthy of book-length treatment. The service, which complements the company’s Rough Cuts program allowing readers to offer feedback on manuscripts not yet completed (PW Daily, Mar. 13 ), will be included in the subscription to Safari’s online reference service. That service grants access to more than 4,000 titles by leading technology and business publishers. According to Safari’s v-p of marketing, Debra Woods, the Short Cuts program is part of a larger move by the company to bring more of its content online. “The introduction of Short Cuts builds on an emerging trend here at Safari Books Online to move our service beyond books…. [We are] embracing new formats like Short Cuts and Rough Cuts-products custom designed for the online medium.”

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John Kerry botches a joke that was supposed to make fun of Bush. Instead, Kerry insulted our soldiers. (In fact, I suspect that our soldiers will walk away with a lower opinion of Kerry, not of themselves.)

So, let’s put it in the balance.

The Republican party has become a distraction engine.

And yes, by blogging about this, I am falling into the Republican trap. [Tags: kerry bush republicans iraq]

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Global Voices has a feature on left-wing Iranian bloggers writing about Hugo Chavez, and Madonna in Swahili blogs. The Swahili roundup also covers issues more trivial than the Madonna adoption controversy—and, really, isn’t everything trivial when compared with Madonna?—such as corruption in Tanzania and the fact that Tanzania is down to providing electricity only at night.

Where else than in Global Voices? [Tags: gv globalvoices venezuela iran ]

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