As I crawl through the jungle of black vines under my desk, I’m led to wonder: If you were able to create a standard—no folksonomies here!—for color coding the cables going into and out of a computer, what sort of scheme would you come up with? [Tags: doep puzzle taxonomy everything_is_miscellaneous]

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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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Rebecca Bollwitt writes entertainingly about the sub-slicing of greeting card categories. Here’s a place where the complexity of the taxonomy has direct and positive economic benefits, i.e., if you create a “Loss of Cat” category (one of Hallmarks’), you’ll sell cards to friends of people who have lost cats. [Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous taxonomy rebecca_bollwitt hallmark]

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Hemai Parthasarathy who’s the managing editor of PLoS Biology, is leading a discussion at the Berkman Center. She was an editor at Nature for five years. PLoS was started to put scientific papers into the public domain. It started with genomics three years ago. It’s a peer-reviewed open access journal. They hired editors from established journals.It wants to be “inclusive of top-tier papers”: Instead of trying to determing the top .001% of papers, it aims at publishing maybe the top 1%.

PLoS has an “intrinsic tension” she says because most of the people who started the journal don’t believe in elite publishing. “We think it’s wrong for tenure committees to pass the buck” to the editors of the top-tier journals. That’s why they’ve started PLoS One. It launches in November. “The idea is to take the editorializing out of the peer review process.” It asks whether a paper is sound enough to be published, but not how important the paper is. “Publish everything worth publishing” that’s submitted, and then put a layer of open peer review conversation about it. “When I was at Nature, I’d reject ten papers a week in neuroscience alone because they weren’t important enough.” Then the papers would be passed on to the next five journals, and you’d lose all the information generated in the reviewing of that paper. “It’s incredibly inefficient.” “Peer review is overwhelming scientists. Scientists are getting asked to review twenty papers a week.”

PLoS’ “impact factor” is high — the average number of times papers in that journal are cited. But the measure is flawed, Hemai says. E.g., reviews and notes don’t get counted as articles but do draw citations, so the citations / articles number goes up; that’s why more journals are running more reviews, etc.

PLoS, she says, is “the thinking man’s open access journal.” It takes about 1% because it wants to keep quality high. Also, it raises the impact factor which helps them recruit high quality papers.

PLoS will have some type of quantifiable ranking system based on the open peer review system. “We’ll also do some topdown filtering. Some editorial board members will pick some articles from PLoS One to write about in PLoS Biology.” They haven’t decided whether to allow pseudonyms. Hemai seems to favor requiring real names, but she says the other side is that a post doc may be relucant to criticize a Nobel Laureate.

PLoS One will have a giant editorial board. Currently they have 180+ editors. Editors’ will append their name to the articles they approve.

Charlie Nesson points out this is a fascinating example of Internet governnance. “How can we help?” he asks. Hemai responds: “Make some of the subscription pool available to open access publications. And top down say that if you publish your papers in a way that other people can access them, that will be rewarded.” MIT, she says, has been working with Science Commons to make a copyright agreement and negotiate with the journals to allow articles to be open access. E.g., Harvard could require its scientists to deposit their articles in an open acccess archive, and could negotiate with the non-open journals to permit that.

PLoS raises money through advertising and through publication charges. Generally it’s the funding agencies — research institutions, universities — who pay these charges for the scientists. At PNAS (a journal), they can charge thousands of dollars to publish a color diagram. She says that Elsevier’s distributor, Sell Press (Cell? sp?), charges $5,000 to authors to make their articles available for free. “If you sponsor research, you want to sponsor its dissemination as well.”

There’s discussion about what Harvard can do and how publishing in open access journals can be rewarded. I say that it comes down to generating a reputation system that becomes a reliable guide so that someone going up for tenure can say not only that she was published at PLoS but that it got a something score of whatever (or some other metric).

There’s discussion of what university libraries can do. E.g., they can negotiate copyright permissions so that professors don’t get prevented — as they are now — from using their own materials in a class.

PLoS One is thinking about allowing revisions of papers to be published afterwards and associated with it. “The least publishable unit has been getting smaller and smaller as time goes by.”

PLoS will be built on open source software. “Long term, anyone can start their own journal.” (And maybe someday the journals are assembled on demand based on metadata because…wait for it…everything is miscellaneous.) [Tags: berkman plos science publishing everything_is_miscellaneous open_science]

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Everything Is Miscellaneous is in some ways — but not ways that we’ll talk about publicly because we want to sell some copies — about the thorough death of Essentialism, the ancient (and continuing) idea that some special (and possibly eternal) property of a thing defines it. Essentialism has the advantage that it enables taxonomies: If the essence of a screw is that it’s threaded with a slot at the top (but the exact width of the threads is not essential), then it’s clear what property you’re going to use to place screws in your Taxonomy of Things. Essentialism captures something important about how we understand our world, since we want to call a mouth a mouth even if it has no teeth but don’t really want to call it a mouth if it has no opening. But, there are ways to account for that without having to say that there is a natural Essence of Mouth. Our world is more miscellaneous than classical Essentialism admits.

But, Michael Ruhlman makes a good point in The Soul of a Chef. While rhapsodizing about Thomas Keller, the chef at The French Laundry, Ruhlman says that when you eat his food, you have the sense that for the first time you know what the ingredients taste like: His carrot soup shows you what carrots taste like. It shows you the essence of carrots.

Taste is one of the places where we naturally (?) fall into talk about essences. In fact, we even create concentrated versions of some foods and call them the “essence of ____.” We don’t need a full-blown Platonic theory of essences to accommodate this proclivity. Eleanor Rosch’s prototype theory works just fine: The sweet, tart and juicy taste of this apple is a prototype of what an apple should taste like. But we’ll still use talk of an essence to pare down the flavors and hues that are not prototypical. That’s not what an essentialist has in mind, but it is a “natural” and perhaps inevitable use of essences. [Tags: essentialism everything_is_miscellaneous prototypes cooking taxonomy]

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Early this morning — so early, that you had to ask people if they were on their way up or down the path to Lethe — I had a chance to catch up with Ulla-Maaria Mutanen, who blogs about design tech, and is the founder of Thinglink.org (I’ve written about Thinglink before.) It’s a fascinating idea.

Web pages have unique URLS, but how can people who make physical unique stuff refer to their things uniquely? Go to Thinglink (it’s open source) and get a 6-character random code, which is expressed as THING:123ABC. Simple idea. Some big consequences could accrue.

For example, Ulla says that in April, the University of Art and Design in Helsinki issued a Thinglink ID for each item in its exhibit of work by graduating masters students. This starts a history of the object so its appearances on the Web can be tracked. And it means that conversations about those objects can occur anywhere on the Web, not just on the exhibit’s site. The ability to distribute conversation, confident that they can be pulled together on demand, changes the power balance. All hail unique ID’s! (<hobbyhorse>For things! Things, dammit! Selves are not things. Selves become things by being uniquely and transparently identified.Selves are diminished — nay, betrayed — by becoming things. </hobbyhorse>)

And who does all this aggregating? Does Thinglink.org become the center of the world of things, a despotic tyrrant authorizing and tracking all its subjects? Nah. You obviously haven’t met Ulla :) ThingLink maintains a database of information supplied by the person who creates the ID, but the aggregation is done by search engines. Of course, that means you have to stick the Thinglink ID into your post about the lovely, handmade Ukranian sweater you just saw, or into the description of the photo of the sweater you lust for. But, if you do that, your post (or page or photo or video or hit Indie MP3 “I Want to Love You as Much as My Ukranian Sweater”) now becomes part of the worldwide swirl of creativity inspired by the thing. IDs aggregate value because they aggregate meaning.

The standard Thinglink ID consists of three letters followed by three numbers, enabling 17M numbers. But it is extensible, including 3-letter “partner code” prefixes.It’s short so it’s human readable, and (to my mind) more important, human type-able. If it catches on,Thinglink is going to need a bigger space in which to play. [Tags: foocamp06 thinglink ids Ulla-Maaria_Mutanen ]

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Tabblo looks like an easy and attractive way to group photos into mini online albums. Ned Batchelder, who works there (and who I’ve known for a while), has an example of a format that tells a little story. And here’s an example of another format, although this one could use some annotation — what the heck is Ned doing at the White House? You can tag and comment. You can buy prints.

Tidepool provides a different way of stringing together photos. It’s more tag-based, with lots of options for how you want to sort and organize. (Flash demo here.) [Tags: tabblo tidepool ned_batchelder photos tagging everything_is_miscellaneous taxonomy]

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The audio (ogg) of my keynote at the Wikimania conference has been posted. It picks up after my little (and loving) parody of Larry Lessig — actually, it’s more self-mocking than Lessig-mocking. Fortunately, Josheph Bancroft videoed the last half of the opening. [Tags: wikimania2006 wikipedia lawrence_lessig]

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Tim Spalding has taken discussion forums a big step forward over at LibraryThing. The concept is simple but could make a real difference because it allows forum msgs to be aggregated in multiple ways. When you’re entering a msg at a forum, you can put a title or author in brackets and LibraryThing will take a stab at identifying what you have in mind. Think of it as in-line tagging. You can thus easily find all the posts about a book. And all the references to a book or author will be lilsted on that book or author’s page.

Because LibraryThing knows which books you own (because you’ve told it), it can feed you msgs about any of them. And, as Tim points out, this unhiding of msgs will change the temporality of posts: Rather than msgs fading into obscurity a few days or weeks after they’re posted, they’ll be easily findable and reply-able.

Very cool. [Tags: librarything tagging everything_is_miscellaneous taxonomy forums folksonomy tim_spalding ]

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Jon Udell blogs about Lorcan Dempsey’s blogging of the OCLC’s fuzzy matching service that searches the Library of Congress Name Authority File, finding misspelled authors’ names, etc. Jon discovered that his own name was misspelled in the Authority File, and he explains the process for getting it corrected. And, Jon says, we should be making provenance and ways to correct provenance more explicit. [Tags: jon_udell john_udell jon_edull john_youdell libary_of_congress lorcan_dempsey taxonomy everything_is_miscellaneous libraries]

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