i202 Fall 2010 School of Information, UC Berkeley

Along the lines of my previous post about tagging usage in del.icio.us, you might want to take a look at TagWiz. Hyunwoo Park, Satish Polisetti, and Dhawal Mujumbar created this tool to visualize the tags of an individual user in delicious. It provides tag frequency distribution visualization and a metric of how important the long tail effect is.

Several weeks ago, the Oxford University Press conceded that because of the internet, there probably won't be a physical print version of the next edition of the Oxford English Dictionary: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/booknews/7970391/Oxford-English-Dictionary-will-not-be-printed-again.html

The methodical creation -- and subsequent illustration  -- of taxonomies can provide critical insight and analysis into both organizational and evolutionary qualities of a data set. Rap names lend themselves particularly well to taxonomical examination. Influenced by both strong community bonds (The Wu Tang Clan being the most prominent example) as well as fervent competition among peers, naming conventions in rap have further beneffitted from decades of rapid artistic evolution and cultural influence.

http://chronicle.com/article/Googles-Book-Search-A/48245/

I dug up this almost year old op-ed published in The Chronicle of higher education because it highlights some of the most challenging problems associated with metadata, classification and describing collections.

There is a need to classify the huge amount of data that is available on the internet. The efforts to store it are just useless if we don't count with a good organizing system. What metrics can be valid in this classification process? According to this article in the New York Times, using social media information might be the answer. Recommendations on products or services by people we know or trust seems to be a good metric.

I came across the following article: "Ev Williams: Twitter Will Actually Help Information Overload" 

http://gigaom.com/2010/09/02/ev-williams-twitter-will-actually-help-information-overload/

GMO salmon is under review for FDA approval.  This news has given rise to the classic debates over food labeling and the system for governing it.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/09/google-health-update.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/16/fashion/16meme.html?_r=1&ref=fashion

 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/19/technology/19digg.html

Strategic Content Management - Jonathan Kahn

Taking us back to the old ways of gathering information, web search companies are now tapping the power of immediate social circles instead of social networks to suggest answers to any question we might have. With virtually endless information available to us on the internet, companies have been trying to hone in on how best to present us with information that interests us, and how to make money from it.

I remember the old days in school when finding online articles or electronic books was not as easy as today. There was neither easy internet access nor enough content available. If a person could manage to access to the internet, the resources s/he was able to find were limited and very often unorganized.