i202 Fall 2009 School of Information, UC Berkeley

No commentary, just read: In the age of informavores, algorithms will replace journalists (via The Guardian)

...is the idea that one's writing style can be reduced to vectors, and that by having knowledge of how writeprinting works, we can better imitate the style of other authors. Not that I have a particularly notable writing style (aside from my excessive use of adverbs, a habit I am trying to break), but I find the notion that someone could understand my style vectors and imitate my writing to be dangerous. So yeah, criminal justice system aside, writeprinting kinda creeps me out.

Sarah Palin's Book, Going Rogue, came out last week but the blogosphere quickly noticed one missing element: an index. Not willing to give up a golden opportunity to carefully evaluate the content of Ms. Palin's, several blogs/pubs created their own indexes for Mrs. Palin's masterpiece, including Huffington Post, The New Republic, and Slate.

On Tuesday, San Francisco voters approved Proposition C, which repeals 2004's Proposition H, a measure that banned the city from selling the naming rights to Candlestick Park. Prop H made it so that Candlestick would stay Candlestick—no 3Com, Monster, etc. But Prop C undoes that. It's interesting that the city's attitude changed so drastically in 5 years. Why are San Franciscans willing to give up a name now that they fought for five years ago? The recession?

The Arizona Supreme Court ruled in Lake v. City of Phoenix that as law dictates for public records disclosure (as it does in Phoenix), when public records are requested, even if they are in an electronic format, they must be provided and must include the metadata. From the decision:

A thread on a discussion forum today was about tin foil. Tons of people say tin foil, yet it hasn't been made of tin since the middle of the 20th Century. But for some reason that made me think of "Saran Wrap" and how that's a more common term than "plastic wrap" even though it is a name brand.

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.

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.

I found this email in a Google Alert I have set up for another subject unrelated to anything in this class but I think it's relevant to 202 and worth posting.

As with just about everything for which one would create an ontology, the beer ontology could have been done a few different ways, but I actually think having fermentation style on the first level works well and seems logical (to me, anyway, as someone who has a few batches of homebrew under my belt). However, there are a few picky points of contention. "Bitter" doesn't really belong in its own alongside those styles because a bitter beer is usually a heavily hopped pale ale, and since you include pale ale as its own term, then bitter could spring from that.