L12

4 Ways One Database Would Help Music Fans, Industry

You'd think, after finishing the final and the course, adding to the 202 blog would be the last thing on anyone's mind. But I saw this article and reflexively fired up the "Create Content" form, because this is essential 202, in my mind. It helped me realize why I've never been comfortable with music subscription services (I have a curated library that I don't want to get stuck behind a pay wall) and how musicians and industry would be better off if they could all agree to agree, for once.

Searching Congress

Can't believe I didn't know about this site before: http://metavid.org/wiki/

It allows you to search video of members' speeches before Congress with some interesting features. In addition to searching by keyword (I think through transcripts, which are provided by Congress), date, speaker, category (setting off 202 alarms), bill name/number, there are also some featured semantic queries.

Tyler Cowen: “Smart people are doing wonderful things.”

In the essay "Three Tweets for the Web" for the Wilson Center's Wilson Quarterly, Tyler Cowen considers how the web has truncated our cultural output and our attention spans. One example he gives is how the LP has become the iTunes single. He argues that the way we pull together our personal information streams from the vast array of resources, both online and offline, is a unique expression of who we are.

Author and Editor as Information Designer

Ann Rockley's article for L12, "Managing Enterprise Content: A Unified Content Strategy" includes a section at the very end called "Redefining Roles in the Organization" that bugs me. Author, editor, and information designer roles are listed as completely separate roles that seems to imply mutual exclusivity—i.e., authors should just write, editors should just edit, and the design of information and content management systems should be left to a seaprate class of information deisgners.

October 7 is 202 Day

Today, October 7, could be re-christened "202 day" - it's hard to find someone or something that was born this day that doesn't merit a mention on this blog.

Let's take a look:

Thesaurus Protocol for XML

During the discussion on content management, namely the section on word level granularity, I was trying to picture what the XML would look like for a document that was very word level intensive, such as a thesaurus. If anyone else is curious, this link shows XML examples of how you could encode a thesaurus document. 

http://www.alexandria.ucsb.edu/thesaurus/specification.html

This one's for George

In reference to a pre-class discussion George, Jess, and I had: there was an annoucement by a bicycle headset manufacturer that they're going to create an online headset fit database to help people who were in George's position. The "step-by-step" process doesn't look like it will need to be very deep, but could be faceted... we'll see.

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