magpie's shiny things

Last week ago I wrote about the big blue bin virus that struck our neigh­bor­hood. While I was pon­der­ing that par­tic­u­lar post over my morn­ing tea I vague­ly remem­bered see­ing some­thing inter­est­ing along the same lines a day or two ago- or rather a pos­si­ble expla­na­tion of the mech­a­nism that caus­es weird behav­iors like putting out big blue bins on the wrong day.

But that’s all I had to go on. That and vague mem­o­ry that the web page had blue stuff on it and that the word “fol­low­ing” was used a lot. Do you see my prob­lem? There’s no way I can craft a set of search terms that’s going to find that out of all the stuff on the entire web.

Where I might have luck find­ing it is in the set of web pages that I had viewed in the pre­vi­ous 3 or 4 days. I have access to a list of those pages in my brows­er his­to­ry. And I could cer­tain­ly nar­row down the list of pos­si­ble pages by search­ing for some words like “behav­ior” and “social” and “fol­low­ing”. That would give me a short list of prob­a­bly 20 or 30 pages. Not a mis­sile at the heart of the prob­lem but a decent enough shot­gun approach that I can prob­a­bly find my nee­dle because the haystack has got­ten a lot small­er. (ouch, that metaphor mixed some­thing fierce.)

But how am I sup­posed to search just those pages? The lit­tle search bar at the top of the his­to­ry side­bar search­es the titles of the pages. Good for find­ing the CommonCraft video that explains wikis in plain eng­lish which has a good descrip­tive page title (and one that I can remem­ber.) but not so good for look­ing for some­thing that I don’t have a word for.

This morn­ing’s dur­ing the slog up tread­mill hill I read through Wm. Denton’s How to Make a Faceted Classification and Put It on the Web.

I’ll have a lot more to say about it in a cou­ple of days. (Beware.)

This morn­ing I only want to point you to the sec­tion 4.2: Faceted Navigation: Three Questions and Four Principles. I love his fourth principle:

The URL is the nota­tion for the clas­si­fi­ca­tion. It should be com­pact, comprehensible,and editable. When a knowl­edge­able user exam­ines it he or she should be able to under­stand how it is built and how edit­ing it could lead to oth­er entities.

Technically this can be a roy­al pain in the ass to cre­ate and many will argue that it is only use­ful for the uber-geeks. But think on it. How often have you gone to a book­marked page and then chopped off it’s tail or altered a word or two to get some place when you did­n’t feel like typ­ing in some big ass ole URL?

Bliss…

This lit­tle gem is not for the faint of heart. I wish “A Simplified Model for Facet Classification” had been around when I was strug­gling with Ranganathan’s colon clas­si­fi­ca­tion scheme in library school. I, and I believe many oth­er LIS stu­dents of my time, were entire­ly put off the idea of faceted clas­si­fi­ca­tion by the expe­ri­ence. A shame real­ly because facets are one of the most use­ful tools for wran­gling mas­sive amounts of stuff that has too many things in com­mon to make full text based search­ing useful.

Dr. Spiteri’s overview (and meld­ing) of Ranganathan’s work and the lat­er work of the Classification Research Group takes a bit of the sting out the mem­o­ries of all those Canons, Postulates, and Principles. (Not to men­tion the den­si­ty of R’s language.)

If you need refresh­er on the basic tenets of faceted clas­si­fi­ca­tion this is a good place to get it. But is you don’t already have some back­ground in clas­si­fi­ca­tion you’ll be lost in minutes.

I’m still look­ing for exam­ples of using facets to describe sys­tems (rather than retrieve infor­ma­tion.) Opaque request, huh? I guess I’ll just have to go and build one of my own.

We live in a place that has “curb­side recy­cling.” Kind of a stretch con­sid­er­ing the near­est curb is 9 miles from here but… Every oth­er week we put a huge blue wheel­ie bin in the buck­et of the trac­tor and haul it down to the coun­ty road to be picked up. (The green bins are for trash and they go out every week.)

Being every oth­er week there are of course some Thursday evenings when the most press­ing ques­tion is “Is this a recy­cling week?” There’s a lit­tle cal­en­dar in the fridge that answers this ques­tion when we’re not sure.

A cou­ple of weeks ago we duti­ful­ly loaded up the big blue bin and hauled it out to the road where it joined it’s fel­lows. The next day on the way to PO I saw lots of blue bins care­ful­ly lined up along the coun­ty road — all as it should be.

Until Friday night (okay, Saturday morn­ing) when I took the trac­tor down to the road to pick up the bins. Uh, the recy­cling bin is still full. What’s with that? Hey all the recy­cling bins are full. Idiots did­n’t pick up, I hate that now I have to haul a full bin back and it’s full and we won’t have any­where to throw the paper… and you get the idea.

But before I go off all pissed on some poor phone-answering cus­tomer ser­vice dweeb maybe I should check the sched­ule. Uh… huh?… real­ly? It’s not a recy­cling week. Says so right here on the sched­ule. So what’s up with that?

I have got­ten the week wrong before and either not tak­en the bin down when I should or tak­en it down when I should­n’t. What makes this inci­dent weird is that so many peo­ple put out their bins on the wrong week. Not just the five of us who live up here on our (dirt) road but peo­ple all up and down the coun­ty road. It was a vast line of big blue bins. Why?

A lit­tle thought and a lit­tle house­hold dis­cus­sion answered the question.

Me: Did you check the cal­en­dar yesterday?

Him: No, did you?

Me: No. But every­one else had put their big blue bins out so I took ours to the road.

Just enough peo­ple made the mis­take of tak­ing the big blue bin to the road on the wrong day to start a cascade.

And a lot of those bins stayed right there in their nice tidy lines wait­ing for recy­cling week, next Thursday.

Thanks to Black Dog for the photos.

In @toread and Cool: Tagging for Time, Task and Emotion, Margaret Kipp looks at the words peo­ple use to tag sites in social tag­ging appli­ca­tions (like del.icio.us) Most tags are, as we expect, tags that name sub­jects. Car, cat, cal­cu­la­tor, and such. Of the non-subject words there are many that seem to fall into two cat­e­gories: time and task relat­ed, and emo­tion­al reac­tions (affec­tive).

Time and tasks tags are things like the “@toread” men­tioned in the title or “thisweek” or “peterson_presentation.” Affective tags are things like “cool”, “fun­ny”, “gross”, and

Noting and clas­si­fy­ing these two types of non-subject tags seems to fit into the space of some­things that I have been pon­der­ing in the last week or so.

At the end of Everything is Miscellaneous, David Weinberger makes the point that, as cool as the great big mis­cel­la­neous pile of stuff is, tear­ing every­thing out of its place and throw­ing it into that pile can strip the implic­it con­text that exist­ed in the objec­t’s envi­ron­ment but was not explic­it­ly encod­ed in the object. Is adding time and task, and affec­tive tags the begin­ning of the user attempt­ing to recre­ate orig­i­nal con­text, or cre­ate new per­son­al con­text, or some of both?