Waxy points out that The O.C. (apparently it’s a tv show) had a character use the phrase “A9.com’d,” referring to the a9 search site.

A9 is doing an extremely cool thing with its views of city blocks, but the denial by A9’s CEO that the O.C. comment was a paid product placement rings hollow. I mean, does Donald Trump deny that Nescafe paid “The Apprentice” lots of money to get mentioned maybe 150 times the other night? Being as honest and ethical as The Donald sets the bar pretty low, A9! [Technorati tags: product placement a9]

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The snow has melted around the tree in front of our house, leaving about a four inch gap all the way around the trunk.

The snow has not melted around the wooden telephone pole a half block up from our house, on the same side of the street.

What other scientifical conclusions can we draw from this shocking evidence except that trees are our warm-blooded brethren and sistren? Quick! Call the Texas educational system and demand that our children’s textbooks be re-written!

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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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Dave is dreaming of what social tags could do for us. (I’m liking his site overall.)

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Doris “Granny D” Haddock, 95, is in a Lebanon, New Hampshire hospital today. She is in surgery at this moment to remove a tumor in her throat. The surgery is expected to cost her her normal voice, though she said before surgery that she will find ways to continue to communicate her political message of reform and democracy. “Sometimes you speak loudest just by standing there,” she said, remembering her several arrests in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda for standing up for the Bill of Rights and democratic reforms.

For friends wishing to send cards, her address for the next five days will be: Doris Haddock, Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, 1 Medical Center Drive, Lebanon NH 03756.

Granny D ran for Senate this year. She lost, but only in the technical sense.

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Ben Hyde looks at four popular bookmarks at del.icio.us and plots how many times each is tagged with the same word. E.g, BoingBoing is tagged as “blog” 200 times and as “news” 90 times. The curve is that of a classic power law: The most frequently used tags are used waaaay more frequently than lesser-used tags.

Ben stresses that four bookmarks don’t constitute a significant sample, but wouldn’t we expect a folksonomy to assume the shape of a power law distribution? [Technorati tags: tags taxonomy]

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Pito talks about the way the blog aggregator he’s building, BlogBridge, has some tagging and social software capabilities. (BlogBridge, even in its current state of development – alpha – has become my regular aggregator. Disclosure: I’m on its board of advisors.)

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The discussion I’m holding at the Berkman Center tonight is really a desperate plea for help. I’m working on a presentation I’m giving next week at a TTI Vanguard. The first part is based on my Library of Congress talk, but then I go into tags. And it all falls apart exactly where it needs to get interesting: Beyond making things easier to find, what are the likely/possible social effects of tags?

I’d love to have your help fixing the talk. 6-7:30 pm tonight, at the Baker House (map).

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ProgeSOFT is encouraging its users to tag content about its products (IntelliCAD, PRogeCAD) so they can learn from one another. It’s recommending three tags — intellicad, learnintellicad, and “learn software” — for use at del.icio.us, flickr and blog sites via technorati tags.

Great experiment, although I’m not convinced that those are the right tags, especially the “learn software” one. Is that so you can search for items tagged both as “intellicad” and “learn software”? It’ll be interesting to see how the folks develop their own folksonomy.

I don’t mean to carp. I think this is a truly interesting idea. My hat is off to ProfeSOFT.

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Bruce Taylor at ITWorld has published a long-ish interview with me. (I haven’t had the guts to read it, so I hereby preemptively renounce anything stupid I said.)

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