I’m in San Francisco for a TTI Vanguard conference. I’m doing the first presentation, and if you look at this list of Vanguard “digerati” in the room (not to mention the other 150 attendees) you’ll see why I’m a tad nervous. So, of course, I spent three wee hours this morning rewriting the presentation I’d rewritten on the plane, that I’d rewritten…

I’m talking about taxonomies and tagging, and at the moment I’m planning on ending with three conclusions about the potential significance of tagging:

1. Rather than knowledge ending where the miscellaneous begins, now it’s beginning with the miscellaneous. (In your face, Aristotle!)

2. In the continuing battle between the forces of neatness and messiness, tagging advances the cause of messiness. (I think that’s a good thing, but you’re talking to a guy who last night was given the employees discount at a food stand at the airport because the cashier just assumed I worked there.)

3. We are owning not just our information but the organization of information. This is part of the project of re-meaning the world – make meaning ours – in which we’ve been engaged for decades.

Too late to tell me that those are ill-thought and I’m about to make a fool of myself. I have to give over my slides now, the moment of commitment. Oh, how I hate it.

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The series of photos returned by Google Images if you search on “leaf pile” provides overwhelming evidence that piles of leaves spontaneously generate children.

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If you were so wrapped up failing to build a MythTV that you missed the Superbowl, you can see the ads here. [Technorati tag: superbowl]

Hmm. I just watched a bunch. You have a year to come up with a commercial and that’s the best you can come up with? Pretty lame overall, I thought. Plus, apparently rampant misogyny is acceptable now. Oh goody.

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[Note: Since this damn fool entry is showing up pretty high in Google for some searches, I thought I should preface it with at least a taste of accurate information. If you want MythTv to get output from your cable box, you get yourself an IR Blaster from here. It runs from your serial port to your cable box and emits the same signals that your remote control emits. Then you follow the step by step instructions here. (It didn’t work for me until I went into the BIOS and assigned serial port 1 – my only port – the address and IRQ of serial port 2 (i.e., com1 and com2).) Now onto the stuff I wrote when I knew absolutely nothing, as opposed to now when I have advanced to knowing relatively nothing. – July 20, 2006]

I believe my nephew Greg and I hit the wall last night trying to build a MythTV. MythTV is open source software that turns your PC into Tivo++.

KnoppMyth — MythTV that can run from a CD — didn’t run because it didn’t recognize the Linksys card in the computer. So then we spent the usual comical four hours trying to get to it to recognize the spare hard drive I’d installed. Ironically, the HD came out of our Tivo when I’d upgraded it. There’s something funky about how Tivo formats its drives, though. Plus it helps if you notice in the KnoppMyth documentation where it says that the HD has to be the first drive in the system.

We (by which I mean Greg) then got the MythTV installed on the HD and booted the machine. We got a lovely graphical UI, but no TV. That’s ok. We expected to have to spend another few hours poking around; the problem seems to be that mySQL isn’t starting up properly.

But then I had an enormous D’oh Moment.

MythTV requires you to put a card into your machine that handles the video in and out. I installed a standard Hauppauge 250, so that shouldn’t be a problem. (“Shouldn’t be a problem” in linux-talk means that it requires only one Linux Day to get up and running, where a Linux Day equals 8 hours of hacking by someone who knows linux inside out (Greg), 12 hours of “helpful suggestions” from a Windows user, and two pizzas.) No, the D’oh Moment came when I realized that MythTV is TiVo for the bottom 125 channels that come through your cable and only if all those channels are unencoded. Our cable TV provider, RCN, starts the premimum channels at 165, and they’re all encoded.

TiVo gets around this in a kludgy way by having you stick some IR-emitting plastic thingies in front of the IR receiver in your cable box. So, when TV wants to record the new episode of The O.C., it changes channels on the cable box by flashing the same IR signals you would have sent manually with the remote. MythTV takes the signal before it goes into your cable box because it has no way of changing channels on your cable box.

So, if we were able to get our MythTV working, we would still need our TiVo to record premium programs, such as The Sopranos and the commercial-free version of Police Academy VI.

Damn! MythTV is such a cool idea! Especially in light of the FCC’s Broadcast Flag requirement. (Support the EFF!) [Technorati tags: mythtv tivo broadcast flag eff]

Refer to the comments to this post to see how wrong I am.

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Adina addresses issues Chris Allen raises about the flatness of online social networks. Snippet:

I think part of the problem is being a post-freudian modern; intimacy is the ultimate goal of relationship and a source of secular transcendence. We need to go back to a more 18th century concept of public identity to describe the pleasures and rewards of broad acquaintance.

Lots more good stuff.

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SJ, a wikipedian of note, takes on JD Lasica. It’s a death match over whether “Wikipedia” takes a definite article…

SJ also wins the Bogus Contest in the latest issue of my newsletter that asked for favorite, oddball pages at [the] Wikipedia. SJ points us to the Wikipedia page about oddball Wikipedia pages.

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Marco Montemagno has a show on Sk TG 24 (Sky’s all news channel) about the Internet blogging. He writes that it’s the first time in Italy that a news channel has:

Run a blog

Made videos of the show freely available (via Coral CDN p2p and blogtorrent)

Made the audio available via podcasting (Feedburner enclosure)

“Asked users to send material, participating in the news creation, so that we’ll try to realize a sort of “Gillmor grassroots jornalism” principle.”

Sounds very cool. Good luck, Marco!

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It’s interesting to me that The Guardian’s article article about the soldier kidnapped in Iraq – the one who turns out to be a GI Joe action figure – refers readers to its blog for the details of the correction.

Why the blog? Perhaps because the blog lets the Guardian talk in a less guarded, more human voice. If the correction were noted in the usual way, could the Guardian have written “Sick as they are, such hoaxes have happened before…,” for example?

It makes sense to me: Fallibility is the mark of humanity, and, oddly, it’s one of the reasons people trust blogs.

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RageBoy does a post with my name on it. It’s all part of the spelunking he’s been doing for months, finding the passages that connect the echoing caverns of AI, cognitive psych, marketing, New Age-ism and the Boy Scouts. He’s charting one hell of a map.

Why is this entry for me? I sent Chris a 2005 “Who Moved My Cheese” calendar and he apparently made the mistake of reading all 365 entries in one sitting, the pharmaceutical equivalent of downing six tabs of windowpane. [Technorati tag: rageboy]

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In case you were wondering, this is how Philipp’s autolinker autolinks my post about his autolinker:

Philipp Lenssen’s Google Blogoscoped shows the results of a tool that checks Google for the longest occurrences of strings from a text on the web, and then turns it into a link. I. e. , if you run your page through it, it finds any phrases that have a significant number of hits in Google, and links each phrase to its top return. (I think. ) Cool idea. Alas, Philipp writes that the tool is too slow to be made public, although he offers to run it by hand if you send him email, which I hope for his sake vast numbers of people don’t. [Thanks, Hanan, for the link.]

[Technorati tag: google]

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