my talk, unc 3/21

Both talks went well today. One was in the morning to an undergraduate information science class. High point: mentioning something about gopher sites and realizing that the students in the class were 7 years old when gopher was popular. The afternoon talk was larger, maybe 50 people, and may be available in streaming video one of these days. You can read all the notes from my talk here.

I’ll say it again: folksonomy

Folksonomy, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Mess. An impressionistic transcript by Cory Doctorow.

It’s a deep philosophical issue: Ontology is a controversial subject. The idea that it’s possible to cleave nature at the joints is controversial. Yes, there are countries, Uzbekistan is a country, but ask a physicist or a biologist and the categories are very fraught.