Why "Tagging" Matters

By Jemima Kiss, PaidContent.org

Matt Locke, head of innovation for BBC New Media, focused on the complexities of folksonomies. He picked out six motivations behind tagging: future retrieval; contribution and sharing; attracting attention; play and competition; self presentation; and opinion and expression, which he expects to become a bigger part of tagging. That’s a move away from pure organization to a more tailored way of distributing and finding personally relevant content.
He said this kind of classification, which is essentially what tagging is, is not useful in areas where hard transactions need to be done but that “there are huge areas where we can categorize using folksonomies and those gigantic spaces are generally in social media”.
– He said the challenge for the BBC is to work out how people really feel about TV, what kind of things they want to say about it and how they want to link with it. There’s an API out for the new-ish BBC programme catalog and they are waiting to see how people want to use that information, expecting the most successful service in this area to be playful, content agnostic uses.

NOTE: if you don't know what "tagging" is check this out.

Great Ad

This full-page ad ran in the last issue of The Hollywood Reporter.
Brilliant.

Special Forces Wings

Yeah, but can you take them through a Wendy's "Drive Thru"?

Link to DailyMail UK.

Symmetry Thesis

"You can't chop down a symmetry"
-- Jane Siberry

...but more to the point, here's a great post on the subject of Symmetry Theory on the MarginalRevolution blog.

A Colbert Commencement

Delivered at Knox College, June 3, 2006:

"And when you enter the workforce, you will find competition from those crossing our all-too-poorest borders. Now I know you’re all going to say, “Stephen, Stephen, immigrants built America.” Yes, but here’s the thing—it’s built now. I think it was finished in the mid-70s sometime. At this point it’s a touch-up and repair job. But thankfully Congress is acting and soon English will be the official language of America. Because if we surrender the national anthem to Spansih, the next thing you know, they’ll be translating the Bible. God wrote it in English for a reason! So it could be taught in our public schools.

So we must build walls. A wall obviously across the entire southern border. That’s the answer. That may not be enough—maybe a moat in front of it, or a fire-pit. Maybe a flaming moat, filled with fire-proof crocodiles. And we should probably wall off the northern border as well. Keep those Canadians with their socialized medicine and their skunky beer out. And because immigrants can swim, we’ll probably want to wall off the coasts as well. And while we’re at it, we need to put up a dome, in case they have catapults. And we’ll punch some holes in it so we can breathe. Breathe free. It’s time for illegal immigrants to go—right after they finish building those walls. Yes, yes, I agree with me.

There are so many challenges facing this next generation, and as they said earlier, you are up for these challenges. And I agree, except that I don’t think you are. I don’t know if you’re tough enough to handle this. You are the most cuddled generation in history. I belong to the last generation that did not have to be in a car seat. You had to be in car seats. I did not have to wear a helmet when I rode my bike. You do. You have to wear helmets when you go swimming, right? In case you bump your head against the side of the pool. Oh, by the way, I should have said, my speech today may contain some peanut products..."

Link to ful text via OfByAndFor.org

Fuzzy Zoeller's Hole in One

This is truly amazing.

CBC Podcasts

It's about time.

The Boss hooks up with AOL Music

by Staci Kramer (www.paidContent.org)

"Maybe it’s just the longtime Bruce fan in me but this actually broke through a growing fatigue with announcements of broadband “firsts” … AOL Music is posting a new exclusive video the morning after each concert in Bruce Springsteen’s just-started five-week North American tour with the Seeger Sessions Band.
Video from the first four concerts is up now; the package — “18 Nights Of Bruce” — includes pix, set lists, commentary from fan site Backstreets.com, IM and email links, and, of course, a link to AOL Tickets.
This may be the only way I get to experience the Seeger Sessions tour as it happens (it isn’t coming to St. Louis) so I hope the balkiness I experienced loading the video in Firefox and two versions of IE was a momentary glitch.
– AOL’s effort has scale but it isn’t the first video broadband venue for the new album. The inaugural concert performance for Springsteen and the band streamed live on MSN Video as part of its New Orleans Jazz Fest coverage and is still up, along with the other video from the event."

I just watched "Oh, Mary don't you weep" from the Seger sessions tour. It's like "folk on steroids". Pretty cool.

Stolen Election?

What those dope smoking, VW van driving, bearded, beatnik hippies at Rolling Stone Magazine (in this case Robert F. Kennedy Jr.) are just figuring out now is... it's not the voting that matters... it's the counting.

Link to Rolling Stone article via MeFi.

DRM and the Consumer

This post got me to thinking that as Big Media conglomerates scramble to lock down "their" content with new formats and distribution methodologies / technologies, and they make it harder or more difficult for us to consume it, there's a huge opportunity for "not so hot", crappy or even God-awful consumer generated content to be "seen", "consumed" and enjoyed by "we the people"... this does not bode well for them.

From DigitalMediaThoughts:
"Having grown tired of one war, we're on the eve of another, complete with alliances, secret codes, and laser beams. No, not Iran -- it's the fight over the next generation of DVD devices. The real battle isn't between Sony (SNE) and Microsoft (MSFT) and their chosen formats, it's between the manufacturers and us -- the consumers, the ones who ultimately pay for it all. And the battle is over Digital Rights Management (DRM), because in addition to increased storage, these new disks are packed full of copy-protection functions, some of which impair our ability to use the content we pay for, the way we like and are legally entitled to."

Link to Business Week article via DigitalMediaThoughts blog... and this is kinda what I'm talkin' about.

"Howdy Pardner"

OK, this thing ranks right up there with Pizza in the morning, Maxxum Magazine and Sports... you know, stuff women love...

Link to Gizmodo.

"Solid Potato Salad"

Summertime is here and so are the Ross sisters.
You gotta watch this right to the end... amazing!


Solid Potato Salad - The Ross Sisters - video powered by Metacafe

Visualizing Stock Market Data

Here's a pretty cool site with an innovative way of compressing hard-to-read information of the morning papers stock section into a simple snapshot.

Link via Edward Tufte's blog.

What Celebrity Do I Look Like?

I'm not sure which is a bigger time waster... reading People magazine cover to cover or spending a bit of time at this site.

I expect my results would fall somewhere between George Clooney and Gollum.

Link via Gizmodo.

Skype is on a roll...

Skype has announced free Skypeout calls within North America to Canadian and U.S. landlines and cell phones. Amazing.

Link to Paul Kedrosky's Infectious Greed.

Karl Rove indicted?

Things are finally heating up for Karl.

For those of you that have the time (and the bandwidth) there's a great PBS Frontline episode on the man here.

Personal Submarines

One of these rigs would be nice to have for sneaking up on your friends... but with the kind of friends I have I'd definitely want it outfitted with both long and short range Polaris nuclear missles.

Link to Gizmodo.

"The Friendly Skies" indeed.

Here's an amazing animation of a day in the life of Air Traffic density over the United States of America (with a caveat on scale... the skies really aren't this "crowded" but visualization of the density patterns and temporal flow is way cool).

Link to animation file via Edward Tufte's blog (note: it may take a minute or two for the file to load in your browser).

Dark Side of the Moon turns "1500"

1500 weeks on the Billboard Charts that is... which makes "Dark Side of the Moon" the longest selling album of all time.

I'm eternally grateful to a young Becky Beggs for giving me a copy of the 12" vinyl when I as in Grade 10 :-)

Link to Billboard via digg.

Apple vs. Apple

Cupertino emerges victorious over McCartney, Starr, Ono and the estate of Harrison as a British judge rules in favor of Apple Computer.

Link to Reuter's via Engadget