Tim Spalding of LibraryThing posts the intro to a talk he gave at the ALA in which he takes on Michael Gorman’s trashing of Knowledge 2.0. Tim challenges Gorman’s starting point. Herewith that starting point:

“Human beings learn, essentially, in only two ways. They learn from experience—the oldest and earliest type of learning—and they learn from people who know more than they do.”

No, says Tim, we also learn by conversation…

Tim in a footnote takes me to task for not acknowledging in Everything Is Miscellaneous that, while digitization has “kicked things up a notch,” the lessons are old ones. In general, I think that’s right. I do tend to believe that the Web touches us so deeply because it more clearly expresses what we’ve known all along. That was the point of Small Pieces Loosely Joined . [Tags: librarything tim_spalding michael_gorman ala knowledge everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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Mark Gibbs recounts yet another experience in which the presence of DRM would have deterred any normal, sane person from buying digital content. (Fortunately, Mark is either not normal or not sane, so he persevered.) [Tags: mark_gibbs drm cmopyright copyleft ]

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Jesse Lange totally schools Bill O’Reilly. I have to say it’s sort of fun watching O’Reilly dismiss Jesse as a “pinhead” as his only response to Jesse’s reading of the transcript O’Reilly was misquoting. But it’s more fun watching this articulate, put-together kid stand up to a bully.

(Thanks to Radar for the link.) [Tags: bill_oreilly jesse_lange ]

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Thomas Mann (no, not that one) has a fascinating and important article about why tagging, folksonomies, and the rest of the hip Web 2.0 stuff is inadequate to meet the needs of scholars looking for information. It is, at least informally, a response to the Calhoun Report.

His example of trying to find information about “tribute payments in the Peloponnesian War” is classic and utterly convincing: Finding what the scholar needs requires smart human guides and the smart guides that humans have created for scholars.

But, of course that doesn’t scale…

More at Everything Is Miscellaneous…

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At some point we noticed a crack in the windshield of our car. It’s a single line, about 8 inches long, not the spider web fracture typical of a pebble or assassination attempt. We don’t know exactly when it happened or how.

Our insurance covers it. But when I went to file the claim through SafeLight, the person on the phone insisted that I give a reason why the glass broke. The fact is that I don’t know. But that is not an acceptable answer. Rain? Hail? Pebble? Collision? Branch? Vandalism? Collision? I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. So I said it was vandalism.

I wonder how many of our national statistics are skewed by a failure to provide an “I don’t know” or “Other” box… [Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous statistics ]

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Kathleen Gilroy has posted a podcast interview with me on the topic of Web 2.0 and – guess what! – everything perhaps being in some sense miscellaneous. [Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous web2.0 kathleen_gilroy]

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Samuel Wantman, who works on Wikipedia‘s category strategy, has suggested that every hyperlinked word in every Wikipedia article be treated as a tag.

What a cool idea! It’d frequently give you so many articles that it wouldn’t be worth it, but especially if we were able to do intersections of the hyperlinked words, there are times when it’d be worth its weight in bits.

Apparently, however, this would require so much processing power that the lights on the Eastern seaboard would dim every time someone used it. So, perhaps it’s a project that a third party could undertake? Or refine? [Tags: wikipedia samuel_wantman tagging folksonomy everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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Sfphil has posted photos of the old Berkman Center house being picked up and moved. (We’ve been in a newer building this entire academic year.) [Tags: berkman]

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I have been getting this error for a few weeks. The error shows up in the XP Event Viewer, which you can get to by choosing Run off the Start menu, entering “cmd” and then typing “%SystemRoot%\system32\eventvwr.msc /s” into the Command Prompt box (omitting the quotation marks). Choose “System” to see the errors. I was getting the error message about every 40 seconds.

Harddisk 4 is in my case an external, USB hard drive. The problem turned out not to be the hard drive. Check your USB cable. Mine was ok, so I got a new enclosure for the drive — the macally PHR 100AC — and hooked it up to a firewire port. So far, it seems to be working perfectly. And the case is a solid piece of work. [Tags: errors]

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The eighth and last in my series of Miscellaneous interviews, sponsored by the Berkman Center and Wired, is up. I talk with Richard Sambrook, head of the BBC World Service and blogger. We talk not so much about citizens as journalists as about citizens as those who exercise editorial judgment. How will the BBC compete in a world where we’re busily telling one another what we ought to read…especially as content gets pulled out of the sites themselves? [Tags: richard_sambrook bbc news journalism citizen_journalism everything_is_miscellaneous berkman wired]

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