Nat Torkington posted a short movie last week that combines bad language and adorable kids.

Yeah, it’s scandalous. A little. But I take it as teaching your kids that the power of these words is in the intention and use. In my family, if we’re talking about a curse word, I try to use the word without hesitation or embarrassment to make the same point: Kids can tell the difference between the “fuck” that’s the sound the possessor of a stubbed a toe makes and the “fuck” in a dinner-time conversation about words that haven’t evolved since they were invented. [Technorati tags: NatTorkington]

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Here’s a post from August 2004 where the always-one-step-ahead Jerry Michalski proposes that PR start thinking in terms of public relationships, a term I’ve been bandying about for the past few months, often stating that I don’t know where it came from.

Maybe now I do… [Technorati tags: PR JerryMichalski]

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Mark Federman, whose most excellent comments on this blog often come from his McLuhan-steeped perspective, has moved his blog here: whatisthemessage.blogspot.com. [Technorati tags: MarkFederman McLuhan]

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This butt-ugly site (and I say this as someone who apparently thinks there can’t be too much orange on a web page) publishes each of Shakespeare’s sonnets along with a first level of “what this line says” commentary and a whole bunch of further analysis. The home page is hard to parse, but it gets better when you hit the sonnets themselves. (Note: I am not a Shakespeare expert and can’t vouch for the scholarship.) The site is generous in ways into the sonnets, allowing text searches, giving an index of first lines, etc.

There’s also a companion site for Pushkin’s poetry, which has translations of his work but no commentary.

Thanks to OxQuarry for providing all this. Generous indeed. [Technorati tag: shakespeare]

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Thanks to RageBoy’s Chief Blogging Officer gig, I’ve known about HighBeam, but it’s only as I buckle down to some serious writing — I’m working on Chapter 2 — that I’ve discovered just how great resource it is. I’ve been looking into how libraries organized books before Dewey decimalized classification and HighBeam is turning up lots of great stuff from its collection 34 million articles. I’m impressed. You can even turn your queries into RSS feeds.

Plus, they make it easy to blog an article and point to its full text. For example, suppose I want to quote this from an article I found there:

What if however, a major focus upon classification as a research goal leads not to a rigorous and robust body of knowledge in presidential studies as Glad predicts but rather to a version of the emperor’s encyclopedia described by Jorge Luis Borges…?

By clicking the “Blog this article” link, HighBeam generates the html-ized citation info:

from: Borges’s encyclopedia and classification in presidential studies. by Abbott, Philip
source: Presidential Studies Quarterly, December 1, 2004.
via: HighBeam™ Research
COPYRIGHT 2004 Center for the Study of the Presidency

I will be using HighBeam a whole heck of a lot. It’s $100/year or $20/month. (One missing feature: I’d like to have a button that will create a bibliographic citation for me, in text, html or rtf.) [Technorati tags: highbeam rageboy]

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On Wednesday, about 75 people crowded into a seminar room at Harvard Law to talk about H20 playlists, a Berkman project in beta that lets people build and share “lists” of online and offline resources. It grows out of projects started in 1998, including a structured forum (“Rotisserie”) for mutliple classes to discuss shared readings. (“H20” originally stood for “Harvard 2.0.” Hence, the 0 is a zero, not the letter O. [Later: Erica George in the comments says that it’s now H_2_Letter-0, like water. Sorry!]

Jonathan Zittrain says H20 mashes together iTunes (categorization, shared playlists), Amazon.com (reviews, recommendations…and “canonical links” to books, which Zittrain thinks would be better offered by a non-commercial entity), and Wikipedia.

Syllabi are the natural content for H20 playlists. The professor lists the books in her course, and now the playlist is available publicly. Molly Krause, a Berkperson who works on H20, says that the idea is to allow people to mix and remix knowledge, not necessarily attached to a course. For example, if you search for “free tools,” you’ll find a playlist someone created of sites with free tools. With a click, any item on her list can be added to yours. You can see all playlists with any particular item. You can see playlists derived from other playlists.

H20 is Web 2.0 compliant: Everything is tagged. All playlists are CreativeCommons licensed. It exports into RSS, with RDF and OPML on the way. An open API is under development. It’s open source. Just about every cut through the site is available as an RSS feed, so you could get a feed of a particular playlist, a tag, a person, etc. (At the moment, the feed runs a search and puts the highest-ranked — not the latest — items at the top, which IMO should be changed.)

There’s a reputation system built in, in part to diminish the visibility of spam.

On the plate for the next release: Collaborative playlists.

Here’s a link to a search for “anthropology”, just as an example.

Lots of interesting discussion which I have not attempted to capture.

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My site was down for aboyut 19 hours, starting at 5pm (-5GMT) yesterday. Sorry. And if you sent me any email during the time, you might want to resend.

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I didn’t know Dick Sabot, but thanks to posts by Ethanz, the Velveteen Rabbi and the obituary in the Berkshire Eagle I miss him. [Technorati tags: DickSabot]

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Rocketboom today features a snippet of Steve Garfield‘s interview with Molly Krause about H20, a really interesting Berkman software project that I’ll be blogging more about today. The full interview is here.

By the way this is a very funny Rocketboom. [Technorati tags: rocketboom h20 berkman SteveGarfield MollyKrause]

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I end up with dozens of tabs open, and while several Firefox extensions provide a popup list for easier navigation, I’d really like a sidebar listing all the open tabs so I can close them easily. Anyone know of an extension that does this? Anyone want to write one? (I’d do it if I knew how.)

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