magpie's shiny things

Peter Moreville con­tin­ues to drop peb­bles (boul­ders?) into my intel­lec­tu­al pond. This morn­ing it was Social Network Analysis. A short piece sum­ming up how he found him­self con­nect­ed to a net­work of peo­ple study­ing, well, net­works of peo­ple and how they both inter­sect and build the infor­ma­tion net­works that that they are oper­at­ing in. A tasty overview of his route from a pre­sen­ta­tion through a book and on to sev­er­al peo­ple. You are invit­ed to fol­low along through the linkage.

Why the hell did­n’t I meet this guy when I was in grad­u­ate school? Oh yeah, wrong school — I went to UW. (Yup I have one of the last Masters of Librarianship degrees ever grant­ed. I think it’s cool.)

In a pre­vi­ous post I talked about Adam Greenfield’s essay “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace” as an impor­tant com­pan­ion piece to Moreville’s Ambient Findability.

In his essay Greenfield also describes the haz­ards of allow­ing engi­neers to design the inter­ac­tions between humans and tech­nol­o­gy iter­at­ing the com­mon under­stand­ing that we the users are, at the moment, pret­ty roy­al­ly screwed.

I have to quib­ble with one state­ment that he makes- sys­tems designed by engi­neers always fail their end-users even when (not -unless- as Greenfield says) those users are the engi­neers them­selves. Just ask any­one who pounds code for a liv­ing how they feel about the bug database…

I’ve looked at a cou­ple of e‑book read­ers in the last month. So far noth­ing com­pelling has appeared. This morn­ing I had the though that the thing that will make me buy an e‑book read­er is:

mar­gin­a­lia

I love to write in books but I don’t any­more because mar­gin­a­lia influ­ences sec­ond read­ings too much. If I could cre­ate mar­gin­a­lia, (and under­lines, and high­lights, and snarky lit­tle com­ments, and …) that I could then show or hide depend­ing on what I’m try­ing to do at the moment I would be a long way to per­suad­ed that an e‑book read­er was in my future.

Or how about the abil­i­ty to pass around the mar­gin­a­lia that we cre­ate — I could send you a file and you could add my notes as an over­lay to your notes on your copy of the text? How cool would that be? (How cool would the data set of twen­ty or thir­ty sets of mar­gin­a­lia for one book be? ooo the pos­si­bil­i­ties for analysis…)

Well, mar­gin­a­lia and a tech­nol­o­gy that is read­able by some­one with lousy eyesight.

Some days it pays to fol­low the bun­ny trails. Having just fin­ished Peter Morville’s Ambient Findability, I wan­dered down the web trail and found a snarky lit­tle thing he wrote for the O’Reilly web site called UFOs and there way down at the bot­tom I found a ref­er­ence to Adam Greenfield’s “All Watched over by Machines of Loving Grace” — pays to read the foot­notes and cita­tions, no? Greenfield’s essay should be required read­ing to accom­pa­ny Ambient Findability.

I liked Moreville’s book, but I found his child­like delight in the rise of the always find­able future dis­con­cert­ing. I have that typ­i­cal intro­vert’s gut reac­tion of “hey, I don’t want you all to find me…” (Which Moreville alludes to/admits to in the UFO essay if not in Ambient Findability.)

Greenfeild’s essay bal­ances this delight in the pos­si­bil­i­ties with a dose of real­is­tic consideration.

Continue read­ing “Loving Grace”

I’ve added a blogroll to the site. Not, I can hear you think­ing, much in the way of news now is it? Prolly not.

I’m try­ing some­thing a lit­tle dif­fer­ent. Rather than the end­less­ly grow­ing col­lec­tion of links that I see spawned by vora­cious read­ers adding every­thing inter­est­ing they find. I’m going to keep the main blogroll to 5 to 10 sites at any time. Look for them to change every month or so.

Meanwhile enjoy a selec­tion of shiny good­ness from:

• //engTech
• Colour Lovers
• HorsePigCow
• Slashdot Book Reviews
• Susan Mernit