Author: AKMA

Yesterday Bruce resolved the problems that our upgrade had caused Seabury’s Moveable Type infrastructure, so when you all fired up your browsers this morning and went to the Seabury website you saw our new design.

Oh, and I hereby tag this entry with the Techn.icio.ickr tag “SWTS”SWTS. I’m going to tag the Seabury flickr site’s photos with “SWTS” too. Seaburians — and I am given to understand that some of you read this page — tag Seabury-relevant images and posts with the “SWTS” tag, and the Web will find them and draw them together.

“Tagging — it makes David happy.” Isn’t that reason enough? (So now I have to tag this entry with “tags” and “taxonomy,” too.)

I really must grade papers furiously today, because class meets tomorrow and I want to hand back the papers that have come in — and Margaret will be home for the weekend, huzzah!, so I won’t be spending a lot of time thinking about stacks of unmarked assignments. (It looks as though France 2 TV actually will come to St. Luke’s on Sunday to interview me — but that’s another strange story in the making.)

But before I resume my regularly-scheduled academic obligations, I was intrigued to notice that (a) Microsoft bandies around the word “trademarked” as casually as this — after all, isn’t restrictive intellectual property profiteering part of their business plan?* — and that on a Microsoft typography page, someone misspelled “ellipsis” five days ago, and it hasn’t been corrected since.

*I love the spin-control correction banner on that page, reminding readers not to call it Palladium any more, but NGSCB. OK, right.

Happy Groundhog Day, Dave! And a blessed Feast of the Presentation of our Lord Jesus Christ to Christian theological readers. . . .

Seriously.

I realized that the next hefty post I write will turn out to be one of those frighteningly comprehensive tracts so typical of my neighbor to the west (only without X-rated illustrations), wherein it turns out that every topic that’s ever crossed his mind is related to every other topic, and they all converge on a vitally important, hard-to-articulate point.

But when you see a post entitled something like “Visual Hermeneutics, Podcasts, Ceremonies, the Semantic Web, Tags, and Truth,” get out your tinfoil headgear, your special X-ray shaded glasses, and either skip ahead without looking closely or fasten your seatbelts. Me, I plan to skip ahead. . . .

An idea had been lurking behind all the persiflage of the last couple of days, engendered by Dan’s post and gestating undeveloped in my own long-winded intrusions.

If I were engineering tags so that they’d really catch on, I’d want them to be reader-generated (as in del.icio.us and flickr), but also to involve some sort of affirmation-disapproval mechanism, so that if a couple dozen people think that David Weinberger should be tagged “genius,” but one Lenny Bruce impersonator thinks he should be tagged “schmuck,” the two tags don’t have equal weight. (I don’t know whether the heroes of the information revolution at Technorati (“Technorati: the tag-related site that actually begins with an upper-case letter!&#822!:), flickr, and del.icio.us are already on top of this — iot hasn’t looked that way, and the “MLK” brouhaha suggests that weighting tags hasn’t gotten that far).

The sense that my link-tag-vote counts in a cumulative way — “I should really tag David as a genius, lest the ‘schmuck’ votes defame him” as opposed to “now somebody’s tagged David as a genius, so I don’t have to” — that motivation might give this project legs.

I myself, of course, think that David Weinberger is a genius of unparalleled insight and profundity, as long as the monthly check clears.

Despite my positive remarks about tags in this and the previous post, I’m still reluctant about the whole enterprise. I suppose that thinking about the topic spurs me to pay closer attention to some of the positive prospects, while having actually to do something about it triggers my already-overloaded-ness. On the other hand, I’ve now begun going back through my del.icio.us bookmarks. . . and tagging them to make them more useful to me and others. It makes sense, durn it!

After Dave Winer cited my Friday post about tagging, I’ve been remonstrating with myself for saying only part of what I wanted to say. Yes, there’s a problem with the present state of tags (and the fact that Roland and Dan chimed in tends to reassure me that I wasn’t just being cranky). Yes, the overhead of effort presently imposes a high tariff on early adopters (Dan appositely cites the contrasting example of entering music information in an online database). Still, as I said before, I love the idea of tags, and I see plenty of reason to care about them.

Here’s a Shirky-an reason for my remaining hopeful about tags. In my biblical-interpretive line of work, and especially given my idiosyncratic interests, I spend a lot of time wrestling with the ways that the Library of Congress classification system parcels out the books I care about. Since I specialize in theological hermeneutics, I have to look for books (all intimately connected with one another in my imagination) shelved under specific New Testament books or authors, particular theological themes, philosophical hermeneutics, and comparative literature (to take only four disparate examples). These books reside in different parts of at least three different libraries at Northwestern. Top-down classification systems impede my work, and tend to reinforce a view of knowledge current at the moment the system was devised; if the organic semantic Web were a few degrees easier, more rewarding, to implement, with the prospect of durable return-on-time-invested, I’d be all over it.

And for ad hoc purposes, tags already have shown their usefulness. A week ago Saturday, I wrote on a chalkboard at Seabury, “flickr tag blogwalkchicago.” within minutes, flickr and Technorati showed a satisfying array of posts and photos. It also points to a weakness in the concept: if you look simply for “blogwalk,” you’ll find a fuller array of references, many of which don’t show up on the more specific search even though the more specific search term applies equally to them (and I’m not sure I tagged everything I posted with the simpler “blogwalk”).

So yes, if (as Dan points out) the rewards were not so thin relative to the effort, if (as Roland points out) software support more frictionlessly relieved tagging of its nuisance factor, if (as Shelley points out) we didn’t confront a multidimensional spam/bother/imprecision/then (as David points out) a ground-up, user-oriented tagsonomy would rock. Something like that still seems like the likeliest alternative to an metascheme for organizing all online knowledge (in which this blog would be destined to be relegated to the BS section, as are my books (BS 476.A32, BS 476 .H24, BS 2397 .A32, to pick three). But we haven’t turned up the device that’ll kick that engine into gear, not yet.

Jane Ellen sent me this cartoon, wondering if it explains why the constabulary gave me a hard time when I was using a laptop outside the Nantucket Atheneum this past summer. . . .

Last week, Micah pointed me to the cover story in The Prospect, which I (in turn) called to the attention of my Writing Workshop students. At one point the author, Richard Jenkyns, quotes the canonical essay on bad English, George Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language,” with devastating force:

Orwell found certain faults common to all of these passages – ugliness, staleness of imagery and lack of precision: “The writer either has a meaning and cannot express it, or he inadvertently says something else, or he is almost indifferent as to whether his words mean anything or not. This mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose, and especially of any kind of political writing.”

As I reflected on this point — so vividly (or, more to the point, so dully) reflected in daily discourse — I remembered the wounded disclaimers I’ve so often encountered from people who wrote or said clumsy things. Somewhere, somehow, many people have gotten the idea that it should be easy to communicate exactly what they want to communicate. That belief has attained the status of an axiom for these writers, so that the repeated evidence that communicating accurately is not that easy tends not to disconfirm the axiom, but rather to demonstrate that everyone else bears the fault.

So I must reckon not primarily with the problem of teaching such writers as these to communicate well, but more fundamentally with the challenge of persuading them that communicating precisely may require more effort than they want to think. If you express yourself so vaguely that I can only guess at what you mean; or if you express yourself so tediously that it’s hard to pay attention; or if you give me no clues from which to infer the point of your discourse; or if you say something foolish, or wrong, or self-contradictory, or injurious, it’s not your reader’s problem — but yours. And it’s up to you to do something about it.

When I read about Technorati tags, I was excited. In fact, I knew to be excited about it because Kevin messaged me, and first thing I read about them online was David Weinberger’s encomium, and when Kevin and David are excited about something, I know enough to realize that it’s good. And when it involves searching (Kevin’s area) and epistemological taxonomy (David’s area of concentration), somebody who respects those guys as much as I do simply must get excited. So I did.

But I should pause to say that I’m not a natural for “tags.” I’ve hardly ever used deli.cio.us tags. I didn’t begin tagging my pictures for flickr for ages; even now I’m liable to tag pretty cursorily (no, I don’t mean “with a computer pointing device”). I don’t use categories in my own Moveable Type posts, although the Seabury site that used to be (and may someday live again) integrated categories into its architectural rationale. And once I started thinking about tags, I felt chagrined; the folksonomized Web that David envisioned, that Kevin and Stewart and all had begun to implement, presents such a tremendous opportunity — but here I was, too lazy to tag. I had worked on my to care about valid mark-up, and I emphasized this aspect of the Seabury site. But I just wasn’t sure I had the determination to add Technorati tags to my posts. You’re too polite to complain, but I get long-winded — how would I tag my monologues without repeating most of the words? I was going to be a stick between the spokes of the organic semantic Web, when my friends were building and turning the wheels.

So I didn’t blog about tags at all. I thought they were a great idea, but I didn’t have the energy to implement them here, and I didn’t want to be a party pooper. Who knows? Maybe if the haphazard-HTML writer I once was can become a CSS ascetic, even lazy AKMA could become a tags-onomist.

But now Shelley has spoken up and even illustrated her wise words, and I think I have to agree with her (I didn’t implement “nofollow” either, so she’s my official Webby Oracle this week). It’s not so much the vulnerability to spam; it’s not so much the imprecision; it’s not so much the bother tagging; but the cumulative effect of a number of “it’s-not-the”s tarnishes the luster of this really great idea.

Brilliance still peeks out from beneath the tarnish. The idea excited me at first, and it still does in a murky way. I expect that the fantastic organic semantic webbiness of the idea will come to expression in more spam-resistant, more precise, less cumbersome ways, and I expect that I’ll get on board in a while (no doubt before it’s really easy and an obvious thing to do); that far, I share David’s ultimate confidence in a grassroots taxonomic web. For now, though, I remain unconvinced about this step toward the Web of tags.

Don’t let me near your database — okay?

Last fall, the database on the Disseminary site fell to bits when I tried to upgrade the Moveable Type installation without hand-holding; yesterday, the other MySQL database with which I’m closely associated (Seabury’s MT installation, which hosts my New Testament Resources pages and for which Micah and I just did the redesign I’ve been blathering about) opted to rearrange its bits and bytes during a system upgrade.

I thought for a while about switching to BlogSpot or some other remote hosted service, but then I realized that was selfish; just think of the havoc I’d cause when their database melted down, stranding thousands of innocent users . . . .

I appreciate Amy Welborn’s writing, I s’pose, and the Velveteen Rabbi is a colleague-in-ritual for me, but it strikes me as odd — and not, I hope, only from a self-interested point of view — that only Welborn and Evangelical Outpost are selected to represent Christian blogs in the interesting Deep Blogs “Spiritual Blogs” category. Selecting Welborn’s articulate Catholicism and an explicitly “evangelical” oage neglects a pretty broad and significant Christian readership (though it replicates the big-media tendency to recognize Chrtistians only when they’re Roman Catholic or evangelical). Chacun à son goût, of course, and Deep Blogs may simply be uninterested in a technological theologian’s random thoughts; but I could nominate others who would complement the selection at Deep Blogs (I would say they would “flesh out” the list, but I’m in the middle of lecturing through St. Paul this term).

I spent much of today combing through Seabury’s website, trying to make loose ends meet, to replicate arcane (sometimes bizarre) layout, to palliate outdated information and links. When I finally got the new version ready, and ran into vexing permissions problems.

So I can’t say that the new Seabury site is live, now. But it’s lying on the lab table, electrodes attached to its temples, with the Van de Graff generators* and Jacob’s-Ladders making dramatic sparks in the background. If Bruce can sort out the permissions tomorrow, it’ll be the cue for the townspeople to grab their torches because — it’s alive!

* Hat tip to Jane for reminding me what those doohickeys are called. . . . .