Accept no substitutes

Day: July 18, 2006

Jane G (and others at M$ conf) say Goodbye Keywords

Metadata Maven Jane Greenberg reports from Seattle:

greetings and hello from Seattle (here at MS faculty summit)

among the a.m. highlights is “A Farewell to Keywords: The reigning obsession with search technology has elicited new ways of using images to track down information on the Web” by Gary Stix in the July 2006 Scientific American. [not freely available despite being listed as a “Free preview.” the preview is the first two brief paragraphs- pj]

“A picture may be worth a kilo of words, but typing into Google Image the single word “rosebud” returns about 60,000 pictures. [actually 58,500 at Google; MSN Search only gives you 20,224– pj]

The power of an individual keyword is both good and bad. It can find a virtual stack of Web pages. But it is unable to differentiate between the flower in bloom and legendary film director Orson Welles’s scowl. Ideally, an Internet user should be able to use the likeness of a rose to tell a search engine to find others like it….”

see:
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa006&colID=1&articleID=000F16A0-10E3-1493-906183414B7F0162
[stuck behind a paywall – pj]

sorry, i don’t have a blog, or i would have put this message there instead. [No problem, Jane. I blogged it here for you. – pj]

Social Networking Hits the Sports Pages

Both USAToday and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution cited ibiblian and SILSian social networking researcher Fred Stutzman recently. It’s not surprising that they would seek out and cite Fred and his work, but to have it cited on the Sports pages! That’s something else entirely!

Although the stories are more of the continuing moral panic over students’ use of social networking sites and the unabashed transparency with which students live their lives on the Web especially in their use of MySpace and FaceBook, the fact that they appeared not on a lifestyles page or a tech page or a news page or even on a business page shows that social networking has gone very mainstream.

Blogs and social networking sites have been having their runs on various newspaper comics; Boondocks recently did a bit on MySpace. There is not much ink left unspilt.

My guess: Next for stop social networking is on the TV pages. Don’t expect to see social networking in classifieds tho. Craigslist might make sense but not the vanishing classifieds.

Fred has smarter things to say about his research on his blog.

BarCampRDU Update

Fred sends this:

* BarCampRDU doors will open at 8AM on Saturday. Get here early to avoid the rush.
* We need people to bring WAPs. Can you bring yours? If so, configure it to broadcast “BarCampRDU” as the SSID. You’ll just plug it in the wall on the day of. Label your WAP.
* We need people to bring power strips AND extension cords. Bring one and share alike. Label your cords and power strips.
* BarCamp confirmed attendance is at almost 120, and we’ve got a few spots left for the pre-event. If you haven’t confirmed, do it now as you’ll lose your spot on Thursday!
* BarCamp will end around 6, rather than 5:30. This is so we can accomodate 4 afternoon time slots.

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