archive.Joe Lamantia.com

This is a small site with modest traffic. But it is still the case that a substantial set of inbound links lead people from diverse origins – search engines, blogs, content aggregators, feed readers, directories, etc. – to many destinations within the site every day. Some of these connections are visible in the del.icio.us tag clouds that appear with individual postings, my contribution to the Web’s ongoing collective experiment with tagging and social bookmarking.

French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu named this set of connections and the social relationships associated with them in the early 1970s, coining the term social capital, and thereby inspiring legions of civic and international organizations to create development, investment, and management strategies for this new valuable kind of resource.

But what is the value of the network?

Fast forward a bit, and we can see that no matter how you choose to calculate that value, Google has built a business relying the new resource of cumulative social capital, using it via mechanisms such as latent semantic indexing.

And we can see that in giving form and focus to the idea of social capital, Bourdieu set the conceptual stage for the recent explosion of social media and networking applications. Simultaneously destinations – albeit of unknown lifespan – and business ventures, the social networks are recent exemplars of longtime cultural movements of reification, virtualization, and visualization of fields – another key concept identified by Bourdieu.

Behind the scenes, the information architecture that solidifies the limited social capital of this site in physical / digital form is a motley collection of disparately named HTML files, tag destination pages, cgi-powered content streams, RSS feeds, local search results sets, etc. The prospect of getting another publishing platform to mimic this miscellany was – like tuning an instrument to play songs composed with notes from another music system – not something I could do as quickly and cheaply.

And so in combination with the perpetual urgency of the DIY mindset, the imperative of preserving the value of the existing store of social capital made the decision to upgrade along an existing path to MT4 simple.

Architecturally, this is the equivalent of sticking with the brand name you know well.

We’ll be upgrading to MT4 in the near future. Apologies for any technical difficulties that result.

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On Saturday and Sunday, I took advantage of the Blizzard of ’06 to:

1. imple­ment a tag cloud for navigation
2. tag all posts with sub­ject metadata
3. rebuild the some­what creaky col­lec­tion of stylesheets behind JL.com
4. add a recent com­ments tile

(And people say I don’t know how to have a good time…?)

The tag cloud is powered by the MoveableType plugin Tags.App. New stylesheets are loosely based on an OpenSource template from www.oswd.org called Phenom.

Between trips outside to shovel, I forgot to upload one of the new .css files. Following that, some Notes apologists justly sent me to school for displaying my comments in cripplingly small text font.

Thanks to the Notes faithful for the feedback, and condolences to any and all who contracted eye strain as a result.

At Peter Boersma’s invitation.
Who else has delivered newspapers?
Four Jobs I’ve Had
1. paperboy
2. radio DJ
3. pizza maker
4. entrepreneur

Four Movies I Can Watch Over And Over
1. The Blues Brothers (not the new one)
2. Le Samourai
3. In The Mood For Love
4. Last Life In the Universe

Four Places I’ve Almost Lived, And Still Plan To
1. Hong Kong
2. New York
3. San Francisco
4. Amsterdam

Four TV Shows I Love
1. Battlestar Galactica (the new one, the new one)
2. Iron Chef (not the new one)
3. The Daily Show
4. Arrested Development

Places I’ve Vacationed
1. Barcelona
2. Sorrento
3. Lisbon
4. Yuong Shua

Four of My Favorite Dishes
1. Seared Tuna
2. Osso Bucco
3. Pho
4. Spicy Fish Tacos

Four Sites I Visit Daily
1. Amazon – been buying a lot of books these past weeks…
2. allofmp3.com – where I get my music fix
3. cmswatch.com – indispensable when you’re working a cms gig
4. Coolhunting.com – when you need a break from the functional

Four Places I Would Rather Be Right Now
1. In an enoteca in Rome
2. Riding my Custom X
3. Sipping a mojito on the beach
4. In an art gallery

Four Bloggers I’m Tagging
1. Davezilla (much funnier than anything you’ll see here…)
2. Facetime (is there such a thing as italian motorcycle envy…)
3. Rashmi Sinha (rashmi’s blog is consistently of stellar quality – will she join in some frivolous sociability?)
4. Seth Gordon (seth’s in seattle now, will he have time to indulge an old east coast buddy?)

egosurf: vi.
“To search the net for your name or links to your web pages. Perhaps connected to long-established SF-fan slang egoscan, to search for one’s name in a fanzine.”
Now a consumable service at: egosurf.org
From the about page:
“egoSurf helps massage the web publishers ego, and thereby maintain the cool equilibrium of the net itself.”

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A tip o’ the hat to Richard Boakes for foiling a second-rate spammer by buying up the domain they were promoting with comment spam before they did.

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After months with­out com­ments — thanks to all the dili­gent spam­mers out there for car­ry­ing out their cor­ro­sive activ­i­ties with such thor­ough­ness, I’m open­ing the site up to feed­back again.
Of course, for the time being, Mov­able­Type just does not feel like coop­er­at­ing when it comes to comments…

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The April issue of D-Lib Magazine includes a two-part Survey of social bookmarking tools.
Social bookmarking is on the collective brain – at least for the moment -and most of those writing about it choose to take one or more positions for, against, or orthogonal to its various aspects. Here’s the position of the D-Lib survey authors:
“Despite all the current hype about tags – in the blogging world, especially – for the authors of this paper, tags are just one kind of metadata and are not a replacement for formal classification systems such as Dublin Core, MODS, etc. [n15]. Rather, they are a supplemental means to organize information and order search results.”
This is — no surprise from “a solely electronic publication with a primary focus on digital library research and development, including but not limited to new technologies, applications, and contextual social and economic issues” — the librarians’ view, succinctly echoed by Peter Morville in his presentation during the panel ‘Sorting Out Social Classification’ at this year’s Information Architecture summit.
The D-Lib authors’ assessment dovetails nicely with Peter’s views on The Speed of Information Architecture from 2001, and it shows how library science professionals may decide to place social bookmarking in relation to the larger context of meta-data lifecycles; a realm they’ve known and inhabited for far longer than most people have used Flickr to tag their photos.
I found some of the authors’ conclusions more surprising. They say, “In many ways these new tools resemble blogs stripped down to the bare essentials.” I’m not sure what this means; stripped-down is the sort of term that usually connotes a minimalist refactoring or adaptation that is designed to emphasize the fundamental aspects of some original thing under interpretation, but I don’t think they want readers to take away the notion that social bookmarking is an interpretation of blogging.
Moving on, they say, “Here the essential unit of information is a link, not a story, but a link decorated with a title, a description, tags and perhaps even personal recommendation points.” which leaves me wondering why it’s useful to compare Furl to blogging?
A cultural studies professor of mine used to say of career academics, “We decide what things mean for a living”. I suspect this is what the D-Lib authors were working toward with their blogging comparison. Since the label space for this thing itself is a bit crowded (contenders being ethnoclassification, folksonomy, social classification), it makes better sense to elevate the arena of your own territorial claim to a higher level that is less cluttered with other claimants, and decide how it relates to something well-known and more established.
They close with, “It is still uncertain whether tagging will take off in the way that blogging has. And even if it does, nobody yet knows exactly what it will achieve or where it will go – but the road ahead beckons.”
This is somewhat uninspiring, but I assume it satisfies the XML schema requirement that every well-structured review or essay end with a conclusion that opens the door to future publications.
Don’t mistake my pique at the squishiness of their conclusions for dis-satisfaction with the body of the survey; overall, the piece is well-researched and offers good context and perspective on the antecedents of and concepts behind their subject. Their invocation of Tim O’Reilly’s ‘architectures of participation’ is just one example of the value of this survey as an entry point into related phenomena.
Another good point the D-Lib authors make is the way that the inherent locality, or context-specificity, of collections of social bookmarks allows them to provide higher-quality pointers to resources relevant for specialized purposes than the major search engines, which by default index globally, or without an editorial perspective.
Likely most useful for the survey reader is their set of references, which taps into the meme flow for social bookmarking by citing a range of source conversations, editorials, and postings from all sides of the phenomenon.

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Proving that satire is one of humanity’s fundamental instincts, Packetrat strikes a blow for (wood)fiber-based communications networks with paperblogging, or plogging.
Outstanding.

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I’m exploring some blog tools, like blogstreet…

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