Dave has a rich piece on the problem with closed social networks. He concludes:

Eventually, soon I think, we’ll see an explosive unbundling of the services that make up social networks. What was centralized in the form of Facebook, Linked-in, even YouTube, is going to blow up and reconstitute itself.

In my terms, he’s talking about social information going miscellaneous: Lots of it, detached from any particular app, a seedbed of emergence. There have been attempts to make this happen before — FOAF springs to mind — but they attempted to get us to write things down about ourselves independent of any application. FaceBook et al. make writing things down worth our while. So, the data is there. We just have to (a) get it everywhere, (b) provide strong user control over it. (A is likely to happen before B does. But you never know. At least I never know.)

Dave also wants more-better metadata, especially with regards to the types of relationships these sites capture. Jeez, do I agree. For most of my friends at Facebook, the available categories are inadequate. A folksonomic approach would turn up far more interesting relationships. As it stands, FaceBook requires us to reduce this richest of social information. [Tags: social_networks dave_winer facebook identity everything_is_miscellaneous]

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The other day, “All Things Considered” ran a commentary of mine on the value of digital messiness. [Tags: npr everything_is_miscellaneous taxonomy folksonomy]

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I’ll be talking with librarians online today at 2pm EDT. I think it’s open to anyone (it’s being held by OPAL), but first you have to download some conferencing software. [Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous libraries ]

Ok, now that it’s over, you can listen here.

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John McGrath has launched TagsAhoy.com, a site that “lets you search your personal tags across a number of tagging sites (del.icio.us, Flickr, Gmail, LibraryThing, Squirl and Connotea.” He says he’s got’s plan for adding lots more, including more services and more doodads, such as tagclouds.

But being able to get all your tagged resources in one spot? Sweet! [Tags: tags tagsahoy john_mcgrath everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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Moira Gunn interviewed me for TechNation about Everything is Miscellaneous. We talk about the three orders of order, “meta-business,” Wikipedia as a guide to what humans are interested in, and the Internet and politics. Here’s the excerpt. [Tags: moira_gunn wikipedia politics business everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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Over at the ongoing conversation about Everything is Miscellaneous at The Well, Jamais Cascio defines “fauxsonomies” as folksonomies gamed by “metadata added with the conscious intent to confuse or obfuscate,” or to weight them for spammish reasons. Great term. Very clever, Jamais!

Since nothing has ever been said on the Net just once, I googled “fauxonomy” and got 53 hits, plus eight with Jamais’ spelling, including one by Tom Coates at PlasticBag.org. In fact, Tom has a fauxonomy tag at del.icio.us. (Google revealed that I’d blogged Tom’s post about it in April 2005. Ah, the pleasures of having a poor memory.)

Nevertheless, I was delighted to get reacquainted with the term, this time with a definition attached. [Tags: folksonomy tagging ]

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My book is the subject of a discussion at the Well, with me as the interviewee.

Here’s the RSS feed. The site is here, but only has the first nine posts up.

You can read it for free. Only subscribers can comment. [Tags: the_well everything_is_miscellaneous taxonomy folksonomy tagging ]

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Tom Hopkins at Usable Interfaces deepens the discussion from categorization to truth. Isn’t truth what’s really at stake, he asks.

Certainly, traditionally the two are tied, since truth was taken to apply to propositions, and the canonical form of a proposition is X is Y. The Y, one way or another, is likely to be or imply a categorization. We’ve always been happy to say both that Socrates is a human and Socrates is hungry, without thinking there’s a contradiction between those two, because Socrates can have more than attribute (i.e., belong in more than one category). Classically, though, we’ve wanted to be able to assign one category as fundamental, or “essential”…

More at Everything Is Miscellaneous…

[Tags: truth categories philosophy everything_is_miscellaneous taxonmy episteomology]

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My brother and I bought a used boat this winter — fifteen feet of leaky fiberglass, with a 90 horsepower motor that assumes that 15 of the horses in harness are dead and being dragged by the others — so I went downtown to register it with the authorities. If you have assembled the right set of treasure hunt collectibles, including a hand-rubbing of the vehicle identification plate, it all goes smoothly. But…

One of the checkboxes on the registration form asks if I’m “retarded.” I thought we were done lumping the various ways our intelligences fail us into that particular bucket, but I also wondered whether the state had minimum intelligence requirements for boat ownership. No, said the state employee on the other side of the counter. They also provide hunting licenses at the boat registration offices, and to get a permit that lets you carry a gun, the state does want to know if you’re “retarded.” They only have the one form, so they have collect the information for boat owners as well.

Inevitably, we read backwards from the metadata that’s asked of us. Had the form asked for prior felony convictions, known allergies or political party affiliation, we would have tried to make sense of the intentions behind the form. Requests for metadata are expressive. Which is one good reason you should bother to print up separate damn forms for boat owners and hunters.

What do the two have in common anyway, except that they both show up jutting their manly jaws forward in outdoor-wear catalogs? [Tags: metadata everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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It’s Linnaeus’ 300th birthday today, and Wired.com is celebrating with a terrific article by Kristen Philipkoski.

The article also has a sidebar I wrote about Linnaeus, as well as 4-5 pages about Linnaeus from my book [Tags: linnaeus taxonomy wired everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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