I was talking with Sophia Liu at Defrag, and disagreed with her a bit about one thing she said as she was describing the dissertation she’s working on. I said that relevancy ranking and curation are different things. But then I thought about it for a moment and realized that given what my book (“Too Big to Know”) says, and what I had said that very morning in my talk at Defrag, they are not different at all, and Sophia was right.

Traditional filters filter out. You don’t see what fails to pass through them: You don’t see the books the library decided not to buy or the articles the newspaper decided not to publish. Filtering on the Web is different: When I blog my list of top ten movie reviews, all the other movie reviews are still available to you. Web filters filter forward, not out. Thus, curation on the Web consists of filtering forward, which is indistinguishable from relevancy ranking (although the relevancy is to my own sense of what’s important.)

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Doc Searls has a brief post about wandering his way around the world and across the decades thanks to librarians, archivists, and the good folks of New Zealand.

Btw, be sure to click on the link to what Doc calls his “favorite family photo of all time.” OMG, he looks exactly the same.

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The Twitter hashtag #FailShare is accumulating instances of failed library projects, so that we can learn from them, and also, I imagine, to take the sting out of failure (on the grounds that sting-y failure makes for stingy ideas).

And, a brand new wiki page has gone up on the same topic.

(BTW, while on the topic of bad/good puns Frank Nugent once dismissed a disappointing play by the American playwright Clifford Odets with the line, “Odets, where is thy sting?”)

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