Happy Holidays Everyone

 As always during the holiday season there’s so much going on like buying gifts, visiting family, decorations, celebrations and the like.

In that sense you know there are dozens of sites transitioning to holiday content for their members and others sites that exist solely for the season. I went in search of a few I thought really had the mindset of the season…caring, sharing, goodwill to your fellowman and some good ole’ fashioned Christmas spirit.

Take a look…

ABC Family  This site definitely believes in making Christmas a 25 day event and why not, it’s only one time a year.

Away    What a cool site. Its a travel guide site with expert tips, interest choices, times of year, etc. A new way to plan a great trip for any season during the year.

Photovisi   Want to make a nice collage instead of sending the family plain photos this season? Photovisi is a free collage maker that simple and fun to use. You can also save the collages as wallpapers for your own computer.

GuideStar  The holidays always make people more willing to give of themselves, so why not use GuideStar to help you find what you’re looking for. This site is a very detailed, comprehensive place to find information about philanthropic and non-profit organizations.

Thankfulfor  We should always be grateful for the good things in our lives. These things give us hope. This site lets you have a public/private journal of  personal gratitude. Something you can use daily.

and last but not least…

43Things   Have you ever needed positive reinforcement when trying to reach your goals? 43Things is a new type of social networking site that’s based on just that. It’s more about achieving the goals and hopes that you list rather than interpersonal links and gratuitous pics. You can keep a journal of your progress as well as find others like you who are trying to achieve something positive for themselves.

Well, now that I’ve shared those lovely sites with you all thats left to do is this…wish you a safe and happy holiday, a prosperous New Year and lots of love and laughter.

By LaShonda Faison

I have recently become a ‘flickr pro’ member and started using groups more meaningfully. It is a social networking site that taps into my unconscious, I feel. Frequently I am surprised to see my own connotations that spring up when presented with a new image uploaded by one of my contacts.

I love the daily flickr newsletter and those previews, the mix of them, 5 in a line maximum per contact, every day a visual treat. They trigger unknown associations in me. I click on the one that makes me most curious when I don’t have much time to explore all of them.

You never know, sometimes it’s light and shadows, details in the background, personal tags that add another layer of meaning, a comment by another viewer that is moving. It’s so intense the dynamic, like being pulled into a narrative that resembles a film. A few images tell a story but the story differs from what the person saw who took the shot which also differs from the real story. Interpretation of the interpretation.

Today, TooSix uploaded a simple neonsign saying Kreuzberg – the part in Berlin where I spent nearly 7 years – it made me do what expected least: a German poem-style memory unfolded, I typed without really thinking. I hadn’t been aware this was still living inside me. So fresh. Nothing’s ever lost. Nice. Grateful for the inspiration, thanks TooSix.

Gute alte Zeiten. Sehnsucht. Ratten. Strassenkehrer. Doner Kebap. Best in town. Politische Debatten nach 2 morgens. Ach.
Ein Neon Schild. Nicht mehr. Nicht weniger.

During last week’s tutorial i noted down a few things to look up because they interested me.  A few of these, then.

Card sorting, which i’d never heard of before.  I can see the point but wonder how useful it would be to our project.

Awful web sites:  I’d never seen Interflora’s web-site before but it was an amazing moment of comedy.  I’ve found a lot of bad and ugly sites over the last week (it’s not like they’re in short supply), as well as a couple that review the most awful ones they can find and go over what’s so bad about them, in order to learn from their mistakes.

One of these is:
www.webpagesthatsuck.com

AJAX and SOAP, which are to do with programming but despite staring at the information for ages i eventually had to concede defeat as it all went in one eye and out the other.

But that interested because, aside from being funny, Ajax allows one or more parts of a page to be refreshed without having to do the whole page.  What i’ve been looking at is infinite scrolling which would mean not having to click on “next” for more search results for example.  I haven’t been able to try it out as i don’t have Firefox on the computer i’m using, but as ever it looks like not everyone’s delighted with the possibilities.

Objections raised include that you’d never be able to reach the bottom of the page, normally – although i couldn’t really see what was wrong with this; you couldn’t choose to have the old way where you click on “next”, i.e. opt out and make infinite scroll not happen; and there’s no permanent link you could share or come back to for your search results.

My favourite bit, folksonomies.  I’m really interested in user-created things like this, where the people invent something seemingly chaotic at first – in this case an apparently uncontrolled vocabulary – that gradually takes on some order and control because the most-used terms or tags rise to the top.

For example, tag clouds in www.librarything.com (how predictable that i love this web-site; later i intend to sign up to readernaut.com and find out what’s so brilliant about it).

This week in Net 11 was all about content sharing; how content is shared on the Web and the copyright issues that have sprouted from it.

Sharing Content on the Web

Sharing content on the Web is as simple as preparing it on a PC and uploading it to the Web. It is the way in which that content is used by others to add value to it that is interesting, as well as the way the content is collaboratively organized and cataloged.

Folksonomies

• e.g. Delicious
• Increased value derived from metadata (data about data), through tagging.
• As users submit content to a site with descriptive tags (metadata), a folksonomy evolves whereby users can share and search for content based on tags.
• Folksonomies are created collaboratively, are flexible and easy to add to to, and contributors are not bound to any framework (no predetermined categories or terms).
• ‘Bottom up’ (rather than ‘top down’ like taxonomies)
• Continually evolving.
• Lack of synonym control means same tags can be used for different content types
• Often limited by single words (no spaces)

Content Sharing Examples

Two examples of content sharing websites are Flickr & YouTube.

Flickr is a primarily image based content sharing service, that allows users to upload their photos to the Web and organize them via a tagging system. Images can be made public or private, and public images can be searched for based on the tags entered by the tags entered for the image. Through additional settings, other users can also contribute to the tags of an image.

YouTube is a video sharing website, where users can upload videos to be hosted by the site. YouTube also utilizes a tagging system that enables the searching (or browsing) of video content. While many use YouTube for entertainment purposes, there also exists a community that uses video as a means of communication and expression.

• Due to it’s reach, YouTube provides an ideal platform for the growth of internet memes – a form of cultural information that becomes popular via the Web (good timeline of internet memes).
• Mashups (mixing combination of copyrighted material to produce original content) fall under the banner of ‘derivative works’, yet have lead to a number of ‘grey area’ copyright disputes.

Creative Commons

Offers a less restrictive copyright that allows content producers to share their work. Authors can set specific conditions (attribution, share alike, noncommercial, no derivative works) to apply to their work, which allows greater flexibility.

Activity – Playing Around

This activity involved using bighugelabs and an image from Flickr that allowed the use/alteration for non-commercial use, to create original content.

My two attempts can be found here:

Note the attribution below the images, which was required under the Creative Commons licensing.

On Thursday 22nd October the 9th Annual E-Books Conference was held at the Mitchell Library in Glasgow. This event felt timely due to the recent increase in dedicated mass-market e-book readers available on the market and the proliferation of large screen smart ‘phones, such as the iphone.

The first presentation, for which Colin Galloway kindly stepped in to present as Linda Bennett was unfortunately unavailable due to illness, gave an overview of the changes that the book market is currently undergoing.

Liam Earney, of JISC, presented on the JISC national e-books observatory project which aims to explore the way that e-books are used and the impacts that they have. The study was carried as the demand amongst academic librarians for unlimited concurrent and perpetual access to e-texts for their students creates concern amongst publishers that their future revenues will be destroyed as students purchase fewer of the “core” textbooks.

David Pattern of Huddersfield University Library rounded things off before lunch with a lively presentation on OPAC 2 and beyond which looked at how library professionals can seek to make their online catalogues more in tune with their users experience of the web by simplfying the front end and adding more web 2.0 type tools to enhance their experience and increase the access to the data held by libraries. This has to be a priority if e-books are to constitute a higher proportion of a libraries stock in the future as, without the physical prescence, if they are not easily available to students, they are effectively invisible.

After lunch, representatives of suppliers (Springer, Dawson and OCLC) discussed what they are doing to make e-books more available to users and some interesting experiments with different payment models which could, hopefully, increase access to information for users.

To round the afternoon off, Dan Franklin, Digital Editor of Canongate gave a thought-provoking presentation on the future of e-publishing, with specific reference to the ability of digital devices to provide a multi-media experience, which is undoubtedly more exciting than simply replicating the printed word on an electronic screen. This was highlighted with the demonstration of writer and musician Nick Cave’s new novel, which is available in print, electronically and as an iphone app.

Update: Slideshows from this event are now available in the scottishlibraries slideshare account.

I just read this great article by Tom Reamy in KMWorld. It’s about popular (and widespread) misconceptions about taxonomies and folksonomies. I loved the attitude in this piece, and it expressed frustrations I’ve had with peoples’ blind love of folksonomies, and with the misconception that hierarchical classification systems maintained by experts are an outdated effort that only librarians still care about. Reamy emphasizes how a hybrid approach, using a taxonomy and user-generated terms, is where the real value lies. He also points out the myth that folksonomies allow us to break free from the authority of “those dictatorial librarians”:

…folksonomy sites do have a central authority, and it is the most oppressive and most dangerous type of central authority there is — the authority of the majority. Against the will of the people, there is no recourse, no way of insuring the rights of the minority[...] It seems to me that having a system in which there is a central group of authorities or librarians that you as a minority can appeal to might work better than letting the collaboratively emergent dictatorial majority unconsciously ride roughshod over the minorities.”

The other thing I wish people would shout from the mountaintops is that the LCSH is (are?) not a thesaurus. Mary Dykstra says it best in her 1988 rant in Library Journal: just because LC decided to use the terminology of thesauri (RT, BT, NT, UF) doesn’t mean the semantic relationships between the headings are on par with those in real thesauri. Citing the 1974 ISO standard on what constitutes hierarchical relationships between terms, Dykstra uses the example of the heading:
Oysters
NT Cookery (Oysters)

In LC’s defense, this subheading doesn’t appear to exist anymore. I checked some of Dykstra’s other examples:

Proposal writing in business
BT Contracts, letting of
(Contracts, letting of is now an RT, and the BTs are Business and Business writing)

Children
NT Television and children
(still in there)

Here’s one I found:
Fortune-telling by Chinese characters
BT Chinese characters

Fortune-telling and Chinese characters are different types of entities. Fortune-telling by Chinese characters is not a type of Chinese character.

A lot of these issues stem from the insane degree of pre-coordination in the LCSH. Headings often represent multiple concepts, while in thesauri, terms represent only one concept. “With the use of a thesaurus, several terms (analyzed) may be strung together (synthesized) according to syntactic rules to form a subject” (Dykstra, 1988). I’m not saying LCSH isn’t useful and that it’s not currently serving many of us (relatively) well. It’s just frustrating that many people seem to think the LCSH is representative of thesauri in general. Reamy makes a similar point at the beginning of his article, but his complaint is with the use of the term “taxonomy”, not “thesaurus”:

A fundamental flaw in the vast majority of articles on folksonomies and taxonomies is the almost universal use of the Dewey Decimal System (or Library of Congress Subject Headings) as the example taxonomy. Using the Dewey Decimal System as your example taxonomy shows that you have no understanding of taxonomy creation and use in today’s world.

This brings me to a question that keeps bothering me. What really is the difference between a classification system, a taxonomy, a thesaurus, and an ontology? A nice set of definitions is available on this Hedden Information Management site (the creator teaches at Simmons College). These are things I need to have burned into my brain, especially if I’m going to avoid being led astray by the many instances of the terms being erroneously used interchangeably. These tools are too important to be so confused with one another, especially by professionals.

Cited/linked:
Dykstra, M. (1988). LCSH Disguised as Thesaurus. Library Journal 113 (4): 42-46.
Reamy, T. (2009). Folksonomy Folktales. KMWorld 18 (9): 6-8. <http://www.kmworld.com/Articles/Editorial/Feature/Folksonomy-folktales-56210.aspx>

Kept brewing and thinking about brewing, after that last post. Been meaning to discuss my approach to “brewing bugs”: the yeast and bacteria strains which are involved in some of my beers. So, it’s a kind of follow-up.

Perhaps more than a reason for me to brew, getting to have fun with these living organisms is something of an achievement. It took a while before it started paying off, but it now does.

Now, I’m no biochemist. In fact, I’m fairly far to “wet sciences” in general. What I do with these organisms is based on a very limited understanding of what goes on during fermentation. But as long as I’m having fun, that should be ok.

This blogpost is about yeast in brewing. My focus is on homebrewing but many things also apply to craft brewing or even to macrobreweries.

There’s supposed to be a saying that “brewers make wort, yeast makes beer.” Whether or not it’s an actual saying, it’s quite accurate.

“Wort” is unfermented beer. It’s a liquid containing fermentable sugars and all sorts of other compounds which will make their way into the final beer after the yeast has had its fun in it. It’s a sweet liquid which tastes pretty much like Malta (e.g. Vitamalt).

Yeast is a single-cell organism which can do a number of neat things including the fine act of converting simple sugars into alcohol and CO2. Yeast cells also do a number of other neat (and not so neat) things with the wort, including the creation of a large array of flavour compounds which can radically change the character of the beer. Among the four main ingredients in beer (water, grain, hops, and yeast), I’d say that yeast often makes the largest contribution to the finished beer’s flavour and aroma profile.

The importance of yeast in brewing has been acknowledged to different degrees in history. The well-known Reinheitsgebot “purity law” of 1516, which specifies permissible ingredients in beer, made no mention of yeast. As the story goes, it took Pasteur (and probably others) to discover the role of yeast in brewing. After this “discovery,” Pasteur and others have been active at isolating diverse yeast strains to be used in brewing. Before that time, it seems that yeast was just occurring naturally in the brewing process.

As may be apparent in my tone, I’m somewhat skeptical of the “discovery” narrative. Yeast may not have been understood very clearly before Pasteur came on the scene, but there’s some evidence showing that yeast’s contribution to brewing had been known in different places at previous points in history. It also seems likely that multiple people had the same basic insight as LP did but may not have had the evidence to support this insight. This narrative is part of the (home)brewing “shared knowledge.”

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

There’s a lot to be said about yeast biochemistry. In fact, the most casual of brewers who spends any significant amount of time with online brewing resources has some understanding, albeit fragmentary, of diverse dimensions of biochemistry through the action of yeast. But this blogpost isn’t about yeast biochemistry.

I’m no expert and biochemistry is a field for experts. What tends to interest me more than the hard science on yeast is the kind of “folk science” brewers create around yeast. Even the most scientific of brewers occasionally talks about yeast in a way which sounds more like folk beliefs than like hard science. In ethnographic disciplines, there’s a field of “ethnoscience” which deals with this kind of “folk knowledge.” My characterization of “folk yeast science” will probably sound overly simplistic and I’m not saying that it accurately represents a common approach to yeast among brewers. It’s more in line with the tone of Horace Miner’s classic text about the Nacirema than with anything else. A caricature, maybe, but one which can provide some insight.

In this case, because it’s a post on my personal blog, it probably provides more insight about yours truly than about anybody else. So be it.

I’m probably more naïve than most. Or, at least, I try to maintain a sense of wonder, as I play with yeast. I’ve done just enough reading about biochemistry to be dangerous. Again, “the brewery is an adult’s chemistry set.”

A broad distinction in the brewer’s approach to yeast is between “pure” and “wild” yeast. Pure yeast usually comes to the brewer from a manufacturer but it originated in a well-known brewery. Wild yeast comes from the environment and should be avoided at all costs. Wild yeast infects and spoils the wort. Pure yeast is a brewer’s best friend as it’s the one which transforms sweet wort into tasty, alcoholic beer. Brewers do everything to “keep the yeast happy.” Though yeast happiness sounds like exaggeration on my part, this kind of anthropomorphic concept is clearly visible in discussions among brewers. (Certainly, “yeast health” is a common concept. It’s not anthropomorphic by itself, but it takes part in the brewer’s approach to yeast as life.) Wild yeast is the reason brewers use sanitizing agents. Pure yeast is carefully handled, preserved, “cultured.” In this context, “wild yeast” is unwanted yeast. “Pure yeast” is the desirable portion of microflora.

It wouldn’t be too much of an exaggeration to say that many brewers are obsessed with the careful handling of pure yeast and the complete avoidance of wild yeast. The homebrewer’s motto, following Charlie Papazian, may be “Relax, Don’t Worry, Have a Homebrew,” when brewers do worry, they often worry about keeping their yeast as pure as possible or keeping their wort as devoid of wild yeast as possible.

In the context of brewers’ folk taxonomy, wild yeast is functionally a “pest,” its impact is largely seen as negative. Pure yeast is beneficial. Terms like “bugs” or “beasties” are applied to both but, with wild yeast, their connotations and associations are negative (“nasty bugs”) while the terms are applied to pure yeast in a more playful, almost endeared tone. “Yeasties” is almost a pet name for pure yeast.

I’ve mentioned “folk taxonomy.” Here, I’m mostly thinking about cognitive anthropology. Taxonomies have been the hallmark of cognitive anthropology, as they reveal a lot about the ways people conceive of diverse parts of reality and are relatively easy to study. Eliciting categories in a folk taxonomy is a relatively simple exercise which can even lead to other interesting things in terms of ethnographic research (including, for instance, establishing rapport with local experts or providing a useful basis to understanding subtleties in the local language). I use terms like “folk” and “local” in a rather vague way. The distinction is often with “Western” or even “scientific.” Given the fact that brewing in North America has some strong underpinnings in science, it’s quite fun to think about North American homebrewers through a model which involves an opposition to “Western/scientific.” Brewers, including a large proportion of homebrewers, tend to be almost stereotypically Western and to work through (and sometimes labour under) an almost-reductionist scientific mindframe. In other words, my talking about “folk taxonomy” is almost a way to tease brewers. But it also relates to my academic interest in cultural diversity, language, worldviews, and humanism.

“Folk taxonomies” can be somewhat fluid but the concept applies mostly to classification systems which are tree-like, with “branches” coming of broader categories. The term “folksonomy” has some currency, these days, to refer to a classification structure which has some relation to folk taxonomy but which doesn’t tend to work through a very clear arborescence. In many contexts, “folksonomy” simply means “tagging,” with the notion that it’s a free-form classification, not amenable to treatment in the usual “hierarchical database” format. Examples of folksonomies often have to do with the way people classify books or other sources of information. A folksonomy is then the opposite of the classification system used in libraries or in Web directories such as the original Yahoo! site. Tags assigned to this blogpost (“Tagged: Belgian artist…”) are part of my own folksonomy for blogposts. Categories on WordPress blogs such as this ones are supposed to create more of a (folk) taxonomy. For several reasons (including the fact that tags weren’t originally available to me for this blog), I tend to use categories as more of a folksonomy, but with a bit more structure. Categories are more stable than tags. For a while, now, I’ve refrained from adding new categories (to my already overly-long list). But I do add lots of new tags.

Anyhoo…

Going back to brewers’ folk taxonomy of yeast strains…

Technically, if I’m not mistaken, the term “pure” should probably refer to the yeast culture, not to the yeast itself. But the overall concept does seem to apply to types of yeast, even if other terms are used. The terms “wild” and “pure” aren’t inappropriate. “Wild” yeast is undomesticated. “Pure” yeast strains were those strains which were selected from wild yeast strains and were isolated in laboratories.

Typically, pure yeast strains come from one of two species of the genus Saccharomyces. One species includes the “top-fermenting” yeast strains used in ales while the other species includes the “bottom-fermenting” yeast strains used in lagers. The distinction between ale and lager is relatively recent, in terms of brewing history, but it’s one which is well-known among brewers. The “ale” species is called cerevisiae (with all sorts of common misspellings) and the “lager” species has been called different names through history, to the extent that the most appropriate name (pastorianus) seems to be the object of specialized, not of common knowledge.

“Wild yeast” can be any yeast strain. In fact, the two species of pure yeast used in brewing exist as wild yeast and brewers’ “folk classification” of microorganisms often lumps bacteria in the “wild yeast” category. The distinction between bacteria and yeast appears relatively unimportant in relation to brewing.

As can be expected from my emphasis on “typically,” above, not all pure yeast strains belong to the “ale” and “lager” species. And as is often the case in research, the exceptions are where things get interesting.

One category of yeast which is indeed pure but which doesn’t belong to one of the two species is wine yeast. While brewers do occasionally use strains of wild yeast when making other beverages besides beer, wine yeast strains mostly don’t appear on the beer brewer’s radar as being important or interesting. Unlike wild yeast, it shouldn’t be avoided at all costs. Unlike pure yeast, it shouldn’t be cherished. In this sense, it could almost serve as «degré zéro» or “null” in the brewer’s yeast taxonomy.

Then, there are yeast strains which are usually considered in a negative way but which are treated as pure strains. I’m mostly thinking about two of the main species in the Brettanomyces genus, commonly referred to as “Brett.” These are winemakers’ pests, especially in the case of oak aging. Oak casks are expensive and they can be ruined by Brett infections. In beer, while Brett strains are usually classified as wild yeast, some breweries have been using Brett in fermentation to effects which are considered by some people to be rather positive while others find these flavours and aromas quite displeasing. It’s part of the brewing discourse to use “barnyard” and “horse blanket” as descriptors for some of the aroma and flavour characteristics given by Brett.

Brewers who consciously involve Brett in the fermentation process are rather uncommon. There are a few breweries in Belgium which make use of Brett, mostly in lambic beers which are fermented “spontaneously” (without the use of controlled innoculation). And there’s a (slightly) growing trend among North American home- and craft brewers toward using Brett and other bugs in brewing.

Because of these North American brewers, Brett strains are now available commercially, as “pure” strains.

Which makes for something quite interesting. Brett is now part of the “pure yeast” category, at least for some brewers. They then use Brett as they would other pure strains, taking precautions to make sure it’s not contaminated. At the same time, Brett is often used in conjunction with other yeast strains and, contrary to the large majority of beer fermentation methods, what brewers use is a complex yeast culture which includes both Saccharomyces and Brett. It may not seem that significant but it brings fermentation out of the strict “mono-yeast” model. Talking about “miscegenation” in social terms would be abusive. But it’s interesting to notice which brewers use Brett in this way. In some sense, it’s an attitude which has dimensions from both the “Belgian Artist” and “German Engineer” poles in my brewing attitude continuum.

Other brewers use Brett in a more carefree way. Since Brett-brewing is based on a complex culture, one can go all the way and mix other bugs. Because Brett has been mostly associated with lambic brewing, since the onset of “pure yeast” brewing, the complex cultures used in lambic breweries serve as the main model. In those breweries, little control can be applied to the balance between yeast strains and the concept of “pure yeast” seems quite foreign. I’ve never visited a lambic brewery (worse yet, I’ve yet to set foot in Belgium), but I get to hear and read a lot about lambic brewing. My perception might be inaccurate, but it also reflects “common knowledge” among North American brewers.

As you might guess, by now, I take part in the trend to brew carefreely. Even carelessly. Which makes me more of a MadMan than the majority of brewers.

Among both winemakers and beer brewers, Brett has the reputation to be “resilient.” Once Brett takes hold of your winery or brewery, it’s hard to get rid of it. Common knowledge about Brett includes different things about its behaviour in the fermentation process (it eats some sugars that Saccharomyces doesn’t, it takes a while to do its work…). But Brett also has a kind of “character,” in an almost-psychological sense.

Which reminds me of a comment by a pro brewer about a well-known strain of lager yeast being “wimpy,” especially in comparison with some well-known British ale yeast strains such as Ringwood. To do their work properly, lager strains tend to require more care than ale strains, for several reasons. Ringwood and some other strains are fast fermenters and tend to “take over,” leaving little room for other bugs.

Come to think of it, I should try brewing with a blend of Ringwood and Brett. It’d be interesting to see “who wins.”

Which brings me to “war.”

Now, I’m as much of a pacifist as one can be. Not only do I not tend to be bellicose and do I cherish peace, I frequently try to avoid conflict and I even believe that there’s a peaceful resolution to most situations.

Yet, one thing I enjoy about brewing is to play with conflicting yeast strains. Pitting one strain against another is my way to “wage wars.” And it’s not very violent.

I also tend to enjoy some games which involve a bit of conflict, including Diplomacy and Civilization. But I tend to play these games as peacefully as possible. Even Spymaster, which rapidly became focused on aggressions, I’ve been playing as a peace-loving, happy-go-lucky character.

But, in the brewery, I kinda like the fact that yeast cells from different strains are “fighting” one another. I don’t picture yeast cells like warriors (with tiny helmets), but I do have fun imagining the “Battle of the Yeast.”

Of course, this has more to do with competition than with conflict. But both are related, in my mind. I’m also not that much into competition and I don’t like to pit people against one another, even in friendly competition. But this is darwinian competition. True “survival of the fittest,” with everything which is implied in terms of being contextually appropriate.

So I’m playing with life, in my brewery. I’m not acting as a Creator over the yeast population, but there’s something about letting yeast cells “having at it” while exercising some level of control that could be compared to some spiritual figures.

Thinking about this also makes me think about the Life game. There are some similarities between what goes on in my wort and what Conway’s game implies. But there are also several differences, including the type of control which can be applied in either case and the fact that the interaction between yeast cells is difficult to visualize. Not to mention that yeast cells are actual, living organisms while the cellular automaton is pure simulation.

The fun I have playing with yeast cells is part of the reason I like to use Brett in my beers. The main reason, though, is that I like the taste of Brett in beer. In fact, I even like it in wine, by transfer from my taste for Brett in beer.

And then, there’s carefree brewing.

As I described above, brewers are very careful to avoid wild yeast and other unwanted bugs in their beers. Sanitizing agents are an important part of the brewer’s arsenal. Which goes well with the “German engineer” dimension of brewing. There’s an extreme position in brewing, even in homebrewing. The “full-sanitization brewery.” Apart from pure yeast, nothing should live in the wort. Actually, nothing else should live in the brewery. If it weren’t for the need to use yeast in the fermentation process, brewing could be done in a completely sterile environment. The reference for this type of brewery is the “wet science” lab. As much as possible, wort shouldn’t come in contact with air (oxidization is another reason behind this; the obsession with bugs and the distaste for oxidization often go together). It’s all about control.

There’s an obvious reason behind this. Wort is exactly the kind of thing wild yeast and other bugs really like. Apparently, slants used to culture microorganisms in labs may contain a malt-based gelatin which is fairly similar to wort. I don’t think it contains hops, but hops are an agent of preservation and could have a positive effect in such a slant.

I keep talking about “wild yeast and other bugs” and I mentioned that, in the brewer’s folk taxonomy, bacteria are equivalent to wild yeast. The distinction between yeast and bacteria matters much less in the brewery than in relation to life sciences. In the conceptual system behind brewing, bacteria is functionally equivalent to wild yeast.

Fear of bacteria and microbes is widespread, in North America. Obviously, there are many excellent medical reasons to fear a number of microorganisms. Bacteria can in fact be deadly, in the right context. Not that the mere presence of bacteria is directly linked with human death. But there’s a clear association, in a number of North American minds, between bacteria and disease.

As a North American, despite my European background, I tended to perceive bacteria in a very negative way. Even today, I react “viscerally” at the mention of bacteria. Though I know that bacteria may in fact be beneficial to human health and that the human body contains a large number of bacterial cells, I have this kind of ingrained fear of bacteria. I love cheese and yogurt, including those which are made with very complex bacterial culture. But even the mere mention of bacteria in this context requires that I think about the distinction between beneficial and dangerous bacteria. In other words, I can admit that I have an irrational fear of bacteria. I can go beyond it, but my conception of microflora is skewed.

For two years in Indiana, I was living with a doctoral student in biochemistry. Though we haven’t spent that much time talking about microorganisms, I was probably influenced by his attitude toward sanitization. What’s funny, though, is that our house wasn’t among the cleanest in which I’ve lived. In terms of “sanitary conditions,” I’ve had much better and a bit worse. (I’ve lived in a house where we received an eviction notice from the county based on safety hazards in that place. Lots of problems with flooding, mould, etc.)

Like most other North American brewers, I used to obsess about sanitization, at every step in the process. I was doing an average job at sanitization and didn’t seem to get any obvious infection. I did get “gushers” (beers which gush out of the bottle when I open it) and a few “bottle bombs” (beer bottles which actually explode). But there were other explanations behind those occurrences than contamination.

The practise of sanitizing everything in the brewery had some significance in other parts of my life. For instance, I tend to think about dishes and dishwashing in a way which has more to do with caution over potential contamination than with dishes appearing clean and/or shiny. I also think about what should be put in the refrigerator and what can be left out, based on my limited understanding of biochemistry. And I think about food safety in a specific way.

In the brewery, however, I moved more and more toward another approach to microflora. Again, a more carefree approach to brewing. And I’m getting results that I enjoy while having a lot of fun. This approach is also based on my pseudo-biochemistry.

One thing is that, in brewing, we usually boil the wort for an hour or more before inoculation with pure yeast. As boiling kills most bugs, there’s something to be said about sanitization being mostly need for equipment which touches the wort after the boil. Part of the equipment is sanitized during the boiling process and what bugs other pieces of equipment may transfer to the wort before boiling are unlikely to have negative effects on the finished beer. With this idea in mind, I became increasingly careless with some pieces of my brewing equipment. Starting with the immersion chiller and kettle, going all the way to the mashtun.

Then, there’s the fact that I use wild yeast in some fermentations. In both brewing and baking, actually. Though my results with completely “wild” fermentations have been mixed to unsatisfactory, some of my results with “partially-wild” fermentations have been quite good.

Common knowledge among brewers is that “no known pathogen can survive in beer.” From a food safety standpoint, beer is “safe” for four main reasons: boiling, alcohol, low pH, and hops. At least, that’s what is shared among brewers, with narratives about diverse historical figures who saved whole populations through beer, making water sanitary. Depending on people’s attitudes toward alcohol, these stories about beer may have different connotations. But it does seem historically accurate to say that beer played an important part in making water drinkable.

So, even wild fermentation is considered safe. People may still get anxious but, apart from off-flavours, the notion is that contaminated beer can do no more harm than other beers.

The most harmful products of fermentation about which brewers may talk are fusel alcohols. These, brewers say, may cause headaches if you get too much of them. Fusels can cause some unwanted consequences, but they’re not living organisms and won’t spread as a disease. In brewer common knowledge, “fusels” mostly have to do with beers with high degrees of alcohol which have been fermented at a high temperature. My personal sense is that fusels aren’t more likely to occur in wild fermentation than with pure fermentation, especially given the fact that most wild fermentation happens with beer with a low degree of alcohol.

Most of the “risks” associated with wild fermentation have to do with flavours and aromas which may be displeasing. Many of these have to do with souring, as some bugs transform different compounds (alcohol especially, if I’m not mistaken) into different types of acids. While Brett and other strains of wild yeast can cause some souring, the acids in questions mostly have to do with bacteria. For instance, lactobacillus creates lactic acid, acetobacter creates acetic acid, etc.

Not only do I like that flavour and aroma characteristics associated with some wild yeast strains (Brett, especially), I also like sour beers. It may sound strange given the fact that I suffer from GERD. But I don’t overindulge in sour beers. I rarely drink large quantities of beer and sour beers would be the last thing I’d drink large quantities of. Besides, there’s a lot to be said about balance in pH. I may be off but I get the impression that there are times in which sour things are either beneficial to me or at least harmless. Part of brewer common knowledge in fact has a whole thing about alkalinity and pH. I’m not exactly clear on how it affects my body based on ingestion of diverse substances, but I’m probably affected by my background as a homebrewer.

Despite my taste for sour beers, I don’t necessarily have the same reaction to all souring agents. For instance, I have a fairly clear threshold in terms of acetic acid in beer. I enjoy it when a sour beer has some acetic character. But I prefer to limit the “aceticness” of my beers. Two batches I’ve fermented with wild bugs were way too acetic for me and I’m now concerned that other beers may develop the same character. In fact, if there’s a way to prevent acetobacter from getting in my wort while still getting the other bugs working, I could be even more carefree as a brewer than I currently am.

Which is a fair deal. These days, I really am brewing carefreely. Partly because of my “discovery” of lactobacillus.

As brewer common knowledge has it, lactobacillus is just about everywhere. It’s certainly found on grain and it’s present in human saliva. It’s involved in some dairy fermentation and it’s probably the main source of bacterial fear among dairy farmers.

Apart from lambic beers (which all come from a specific region in Belgium), the main sour beer that is part of brewer knowledge is Berliner Weisse. Though I have little data on how Berliner Weisse is fermented, I’ve known for a while that some people create a beer akin to Berliner Weisse through what brewers call a “sour mash” (and which may or may not be related to sour mash in American whiskey production). After thinking about it for years, I’ve done my first sour mash last year. I wasn’t very careful in doing it but I got satisfying results. One advantage of the sour mash is that it happens before boiling, which means that the production of acid can be controlled, to a certain degree. While I did boil my wort coming from sour mash, it’s clear that I still had some lactobacillus in my fermenters. It’s possible that my boil (which was much shorter than the usual) wasn’t enough to kill all the bugs. But, come to think of it, I may have been a bit careless with sanitization of some pieces of equipment which had touched the sour wort before boiling. Whatever the cause, I ended up with some souring bugs in my fermentation. And these worked really well for what I wanted. So much so that I’ve consciously reused that culture in some of my most recent brewing experiments.

So, in my case, lactobacillus is in the “desirable” category of yeast taxonomy. With Brett and diverse Saccharomyces strains, lactobacillus is part of my fermentation apparatus.

As a mad brewer, I can use what I want to use. I may not create life, but I create beer out of this increasingly complex microflora which has been taking over my brewery.

And I’m a happy brewer.

On August 17, 2009, I attended the third Toronto Semantic Web Meetup organized by William Mougayar.  The topic for this event was “Human-Machine Collaboration & the Problem of Information Overload”.  The presenter was Karl Dawson, CEO of phiScape AG, a company specializing in “distributed computing and data integration in heterogeneous environments, with particular application to digital media and knowledge management systems”.  Karl also gave us an advance screening of his new product Topicmarks, “a browser plugin which helps people learn more efficiently and effectively by extracting significant concepts from unstructured text”.  I first met Karl at the inaugural Information Overload Awareness Day Toronto event, where he presented “Information Overload – More Personal Than You Think” using the Pecha Kucha format.

My Thoughts Enclosed…Rb

Giving Back to the Presenter

The first part that caught my attention about this event, was not the presentation itself but the guideline that surrounded it.  William Mougayar, the organizer, made a fair statement at the beginning of the presentation which set the tone for the evening.  William indicated that as part of our contribution back to Karl for his presentation, we should try to provide Karl with ideas and comments that would help tailor or market his product.  I found this to be a very insightful comment to be made prior to a presentation.

Quite often, presentations are followed by a Q&A session.  These Q&A sessions typically consist of numerous attendees failing to engage in dialogue.   When they do, it is typically self-benefiting questions that are asked.  There is nothing wrong with asking questions to further expand your understanding of the topic.  However, we often fail to provide value back to the presenter who has taken the time to share his knowledge for often little more than a round of muted applause.

What made this presentation different, is that William made it clear at the beginning of the presentation that this would be a two way exchange of knowledge.  To me this is what defines a successful presentation: attendee engagement.  By outlining the challenges or gaps the presenter is facing at the beginning of the presentation, you provide an opportunity for the attendees to focus their contributions to the topic.

As we all know, it is often very hard to make money on the web in software development.  How to monetize innovation is a challenge that faces not only startups, but established pioneers of the web.  The key is to target the pain point of your target audience.  Unless you make a direct correlation to a problem of significance, your audience is unlikely to part with their ever tightening capital.  By targeting a solution to a problem that people can equate monetary value to, you can achieve market equilibrium for your product.  I also consider this to be the fundamental failure of most companies in this tough market.  To many staffers in organizations are not fully aware of the real goal of their employment.  Thus the company fails to meet the expectations of their clientele, but that is a topic for another day.

Our part in the presentation, was not only to digest the knowledge that was being shared with us.  Our contribution would be to provide our insight to how Karl’s product could be tweaked to address potential pain-points in the market.  This to me is a great use of crowdsourcing of your product management and market analysis.  By tapping into the knowledge of your audience through an engaged presentation, all parties come out feeling the presentation provided shared value.  It is my hope that the feedback given to Karl at the end of the presentation was both constructive and of value.

Those Who Control the Knowledge, Control the Masses

Karl indicated that there are between 20 and 45 Billion pages of accessible content on the Internet.  He put forward that there is likely another 500 times more pages of dynamic content that are non index-able using mainstream means.  Modern search engines rely heavily on diverse forms of indexes to aggregate their content.  Karl puts forward the accurate notion that to harness the power of the untapped content can be a marketable advantage.

Karl also put forward the notion that search engines provide both the access points for the Web, but also its advertising engine (e.g. Google AdSense).  As these search engines become more and more commercialized, their interests may not necessarily match your searching needs.  Their need for control over the results of your contextual search will likely become another challenge to attaining net neutrality.  How Search Engine Providers and Internet Service Providers manage the content being made available is an ever growing concern as the Internet we now know evolves to its increased commercialization.

Karl discussed briefly on a study that was made to identify the best means for searching content.  The following query languages were reviewed: Keywords (e.g. NLP-Reduce), Natural Language (e.g. Querix), Controlled Language (e.g. Ginseng), and Graph-based Formal Logic (e.g. Semantic Crystal).  What was found what that full English questions were judged to be the best form for casual users.  However, keywords queries tended to provide for better results.  As such, it can be conclude that a combination of keyword and natural language would most likely provide both the ease of query and the quality of results.  A discussion on Talking to the Semantic Web: Query Interfaces to Ontologies for the Rest of Us further discusses the query options applicable to the Semantic Web.

The framework that is the Semantic Web is to facilitate context for both Humans and Machines.  It fundamentally starts with associating a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) with Resource Description Framework (RDF) metadata.  RDF is an assertional language comprising of what is referred to a the RDF Triples.  RDF Triples make statements about URI resources by using a Subject, Predicate, Object statement (e.g. This Blog entry (subject) was written by (Predicate) Robert Lavigne (Object)).  By binding properties to URI resources, we are providing valuable context that can be used not only by Humans but by the Systems who support their efforts.

Semantic Web Stack (via Wikipedia)

Ontologies, such as Web Ontology Language (OWL), provide specifications for the conceptualization of content.  Ontology hopes to addresses the n-space of exponential content growth and thus information overload.  By providing multi-dimensional connectivity to content, we can harness the full power of the metadata available.  Most ontologies have an upper level that provides a pre-defined definition.  The problem we face however is that the web provides us with no upper level ontology for the majority of its content.  Everyone has their own definition of content that has evolved by independent means.  The merging of independent definitions is a large challenge in bringing definition to our global content.  Those who control the content will also control the access to content in a defined and controlled language.  The consolidation of language and the “battle of the bots” to structure the content will define our accessible knowledge.  The possibility of “gaming” the results is a real concern as we become more and more dependent on this evolving source of knowledge.

Prosumers and Their Role in Semantics

In a growing world of Prosumers (producer-consumers), our accessible knowledge is no longer simply stemming from the experts in a top-down distribution hierarchy.  We are now faced with a bottom-up creation hierarchy with the weight of the masses contributing to our knowledge.  I Slept Through Class is a prime example of the commercialization of educational content in a Prosumer market.  The knowledge we access is no longer segregated into expert opinions and individualistic expression.  As such, we often must ask ourselves where does this knowledge come from and can it be trusted,  This is were the role of the Prosumer plays not only a part in the creation of content but also the validation of content.  Introducing a layer of accreditation and attribution is key to building trust to the “wisdom of the crowd”.

Trust is at the top of the Semantic Web framework and is supported by a layer of proof.  This is an ever growing issue for the masses with the rise of Prosumers.  This is becoming more and more common in the market as crowdsourcing becomes more mainstream.  Prosumers are also key to the successful contextualization of the untapped content the web has to offer.  As the author has the initial responsibility to annotate their content, the role of the producer should be clear.  Descriptive elements, such as Dublin Core, entered by the author should ideally precede publication of content to the web.  However, it is also the consumers responsibility to expand on these annotations.  This is were concepts such as Folksonomies come into play.  Social tagging provides not only added context, but also provides added validation by the masses which inevitably will build a layer of trust in the content being retrieved.

Knowledge is complex and highly subjective.  There exists two primary types of knowledge: A priori and a posteriori.  As such, we need to make use of Heuristics to break out of our defined logical processes.  Our systems need to shift from deductive reasoning to an inductive-based model.  The development of content synonyms will hopefully lead to the necessary lateral thinking required to achieve this goal.  With that, Personal and Shared Knowledge will hopefully meet and thus define the required ontology to achieve Human Machine Collaboration.

The following is an edited version of a wishlist I had been keeping on the side. The main idea is to define what would be, in my mind, the “ultimate social bookmarking system.” Which, obviously, goes way beyond social bookmarking. In a way, I even conceive of it as the ultimate tool for sharing online content. Yes, it’s that ambitious. Will it ever exist? Probably not. Should it exist? I personally think so. But I may be alone in this. Surely, you’ll tell me that I am indeed alone, which is fine. As long as you share your own wishlist items.

The trigger for my posting this is that someone contacted me, asking for what I’d like in a social bookmarking system. I find this person’s move quite remarkable, as a thoughtful strategy. Not only because this person contacted me directly (almost flattering), but because such a request reveals an approach to listening and responding to people’s needs that I find lacking in some software development circles.

This person’s message served as a prompt for my blogging this, but I’ve been meaning to blog this for a while. In fact, my guess is that I created a first version of this wishlist in 2007 after having it on my mind for a while before that. As such, it represents a type of “diachronic” or “longitudinal” view of social bookmarking and the way it works in the broader scheme of social media.

Which also means that I wrote this before I heard about Google Wave. In fact, I’m still unclear about Google Wave and I’ll need to blog about that. Not that I expect Wave to fulfill all the needs I set up for a sharing tool, but I get the impression that Google is finally putting some cards on the table.

The main part of this post is in outline form. I often think through outlines, especially with such a type of notes. I fully realize that it may not be that clear, as a structure, for other people to understand. Some of these bullet points cover a much broader issue than what they look like. But the overall idea might be fairly obvious to grasp, even if it may sound crazy to other people.

I’m posting this to the benefit of anyone who may wish to build the killer app for social media. Of course, it’s just one man’s opinion. But it’s my entitled opinion.

Concepts

What do we share online?

• “Link”
• “Page”
• Identified content
• Text
  • Narrative
  • Contact information
  • Event description
• Contact information
• Event invitation
• Image
• Recording
• Structured content
• Snippet
• Access to semi-private content
• Site’s entry point

Selective sharing

Private

• Archiving
• Cloud access

Individually shared

• “Check this out”
• Access to address book
• Password protection
• Specialization/expertise
• Friendship

Group shared

• Shared interests (SIG)
• Collaboration (task-based)

Shared through network

• Define identity in network
• Semi-public

Public

• Publishing
• Processed
• Reading lists

Notetaking

• Active reading
• Anchoring text
• Ad hoc list of bookmarks
• “Empty URL”
  • Create container/page
  • Personal notes

Todos

• To read
• To blog
• To share
• To update
• Projects
  • GTD
  • Contexts
• Add to calendar (recognized as event)

Outlining/Mindmapping

• Manage lists of links
• Prioritize
• Easily group

Social aspects of sharing

• Gift economy
• Personal interaction
• Trust
• Hype
• Value
• Customized

Cloud computing

• Webware
• “Online disk”
• Without download
• Touch devices
• Edit online

Personal streaming

• Activities through pages
• Logging
• Flesh out personal profile

Tagging

• “Folksonomy”
• Enables non-hierarchical structure
• Semantic fields
• Related tags
• Can include hierarchy
• Tagclouds define concept map

Required Features

Crossplatform, crossbrowser

• Browser-specific tools
• Bookmarklets
• Complete access through cloud

Keyboard shortcuts

• Quick add (to account)
• Vote
• Bookmark all tabs (à la Flock)
• Quick tags

Related pages

Recommended

• Based on social graph
• Based on tags
• Based on content
• Based on popularity
• Pointing to this page

Quickly enter links

• Add in place (while editing)
• Similar to “spell as you type”
• Incremental search
• Add full link (title, URL, text, metadata)

Archiving

• Prevent linkrot
• Prepare for post-processing (offline reading, blogging…)
• Enable bulk processing
• Maintain version history
• Internet Archive

Automatic processing

• Tags
• Summary
• Wordcount
• Reading time
• Language(s)
• Page structure analysis
• Geotagging
• Vote

Thread following

• Blog comments
• Forum comments
• Trackbacks
• Pings

Exporting

All

• Archiving
• Prepare for import
• Maintain hierarchy

Selected

• Tag
• Category
• Recently used
• Shared
• Site homepage
• Blogroll
• Blogs

Formats

• Other services
• HTML
• RSS
• OPML
• Widget

Features

• Comments
• Tags
• Statistics
• Content

Offline processing

• Browser-based
• Device based
• Offline archiving
• Include content
• Synchronization

Microblogging support

• Laconi.ca/Identi.ca
• Twitter
• Ping.fm
• Jaiku

Fixed/Static URL

• Prevent linkrot
• Maintain list for same page
• Short URLs
• Automatically generated
• Expansion on mouseover
• Statistics

Authentication

• Use of resources
• Identify
• Privacy
• Unnecessary for basic processing
• Sticks (no need to login frequently)
• Access to contacts and social graph
• Multiple accounts
  • Personal/professional
  • Contexts
  • Group accounts

• Premium accounts

  • Server space
  • Usage statistics
  • Promotion

• Support

  • OpenID
    • As group login
  • Google Accounts
  • Facebook Connect
  • OAuth

Integration

• Web history
• Notebook
• Blogging platform
• Blog editor
• Microblogging platform
• Logbook
• General purpose content editor
• Toolbar
• URL shortening
• Address book
• Social graph
• Personal profile
• Browser
  • Bookmarks
  • History
  • Autocomplete
• Analytics
• Email
• Search
  • Online
  • Offline

Related Tools

• Diigo
• WebCitation
• Ping.fm
• BackType
• Facebook share
• Blog This
• Link This
• Share this
• Digg
• Plum
• Spurl
• CoComments
• MyBlogLog
• TwtVite
• Twistory
• Windows Live Writer
• Magnolia
• Stumble Upon
• Delicious
• Google Reader
• Yahoo Pipes
• Google Notebook
• Zoho Notebook
• Google Browser Sync
• YouTube
• Flock
• Zotero

Relevant Blogposts

• iPhone Wishlist
• Flock as Blog Editor
• Blogging Tools
• TIU: Spurl
• How Can Google Beat Facebook?

And the gates are opened and up comes Take Home Exam on the right, with Reflective Essays coming a close second. Writing Portfolio is coming a close third but, OH Novel Chapter and Synopsis are edging ahead!

So the countdown is on until I’m on holidays and all the assignments are in. Let’s finish one by writing this blog post! Today, we’re talking about the future. Specifically, how the future of user-led content will perform as products, and how it is relatable to my future as a writer.

Going off the tutorial discussion, the ideal of produsage becoming our main form of production seems debilitating for our economic structure. In terms of social and other forms of media, we’re experiencing the evolution of communication as we interact and become produsers. Despite current economic dilemmas, capitalism will continue. Our economy will right itself but will operate in potentially a different way.  This ideal of user-led produsage is more apt in a socialist society. But the discussion of the weekly topic proved that we can’t forecast the future of produsage, just postulate on possible scenarios for when the products become artefacts.

The future is bleak for me as a writer if the idyllic notion Bruns puts forward in his concluding chapter of his book Blogs, Wikipedia and Second Life is across the platform of all products. This break away from traditional capitalist hierarchies that our product/consumer led society thrives on will cause a crumbling of the current publishing structure, thus destroying any chance to make it as a novelist. The majority of publishing houses are owned by giant media corporations, with specific markets. It’s a brutally tough industry, but it works. Although it isn’t all bad. We’re rewriting how we write, but how the world views it, and the corporations are catching on.

Kindle is probably the most well known example of the digitialisation of writing. The eBook publishing companies are sprouting up everywhere, and as usual, the adult entertainment business was the first to catch on. There’s a great many romance publishers that deal exclusively in epublishing. This trend came about because of the users, for their convenience and privacy.  But the products are still produced not prodused.

James Patterson’s most recent book is probably going to end up his best, as his ‘chain thriller‘ competition recently closed, where about 28 other people wrote the chapters between Patterson’s first and last chapter. One part of the  process is obviously user-led by the community who reads/writes these genre novels. But the rest of production, from the PR to the distribution, is still conforming to the current publishing practices. So it’s one step at a time for writing and produsage.

This process of product into artefact is evolving, but it isn’t there yet. But on the opposite side of the spectrum, it seems like the process of artefact into product is in full swing. Many a blogging community support their writers through the buying of merchandise. While the users may not produce the content, their support is the only indicator of the success of the product. Blogs like Stuff White People Like and FU Penguin have created products from their very popular blogs but the most successful of online community projects (that users actually produce) that has turned into a product is PostSecret. Actor and blogger Wil Wheaton’s books and ebooks success is due to his online community of followers.

Ultimately, I think user-led products are unlikely in our current climate. So far, new media has seen the advent of services that thrive on produsage, but the likelihood that products created from a collaborative mass intelligence isn’t going to be commercially viable for our capitalism economy. Perhaps the future will prove me wrong, and if so, let me know when utopia arrives.

Twine… a new social bookmarking system that takes social bookmarking and recommendations to the next level… well, the same level where were with the Folksemantic Project, really…two years ago.  I can’t tell you how many white papers and articles I’ve written on the concepts that are now employed in Twine. I’m thrilled to see these principles in play. And bugged that the twine guy will become a multi millionaire while I work on online hazardous materials courses for a big box store so I can pay my mortgage. Semantic Web here we come… or really, here they come. I’ll be along once I figure out how to make the definition of hazardous waste engaging for the average 4th grade reader.

The Pro/Am divide discusses the difference between folks and experts in folksonomies. Folksonomies structure the new knowledge space, a space where you do not necessarily need the skills or higher education to contribute. Due to this structure those who are educated and perceived to be the experts are continually at odds with the system. For example Larry Sanger, co-founder and chief promoter of Wikipedia, partly left the project due to his belief and experience that “someone whose expertise rests on having done extensive original research on a topic gets no particular respect”. On the flip side, one of the central, founding ideas of such produsage sites is that it flattens hierarchical structures therefore the idea that experts should gain “respect” is denying the ideals behind the structure. Furthermore is Sanger and the like saying we need a return to a less organic, bottom up structure? With this criticism the ideals behind collective intelligence are in question, that together, with contributions from the expert and the amateur, the information available is richer and more in depth. Collective intelligence and the abundance of information does not provide credibility or reliability, returning again to the pro/am divide and the ability for the expert to provide this structure.

Axel Bruns recognises that there is no real solution by describing the struggle between experts and folks, “between two different systems of representing knowledge: one the expert paradigm, which ultimately and ideally aims to develop well-behaved, universally accepted, and internally consistent understandings of the world, and one, the folksonomic paradigm, which allows for multiplicity, conflicts of interpretation, and the existence of a number of alternative representations of extant knowledge…” What Bruns describes is that between the expert and the folk they have different beliefs on knowledge creation and the fact that there will always be this divide because of the very nature of each individual and their inherent beliefs. Each defies each other therefore perhaps there can never be an even ground.

Larry Sanger recently established Citizendium which perhaps is an example of trying to achieve a middle ground. Citizendium is an alternative model to Wikipedia that is more respectful of expertise, aiming at providing reliability and quality not just quantity. Sanger talking about Wikipedia, claims that he “maintained from the start that something really could not be a credible encyclopedia without oversight by experts”. Perhaps sites like these that will meet the need for experts and their beliefs on the structure of information. Re confirming the expert belief Sanger states, “there are special requirements of nearly every serious community [which are] best served by relevant experts; and so I think a prominent role for the relevant experts should be written into the charter”.

The argument behind Wikipedia, as for example providing to the amateurs, is the attitude that to make an entry or an amendment the individual must know about the topic therefore who is to say they are not an expert. This introduces the idea on what defines an expert and the idea perhaps that an expert/amateur is better modelled on a continuum. Those who support the Wikipedia bottom up approach could find Sanger’s view on why expertise needs special consideration in contributions to information as very narrow minded and furthermore denying the ideals behind produsage and collective intelligence that such sites as Wikipedia foster.

In summary, as Bruns recognises there will always be the divide between the expert and the folk due to their individual attitudes and beliefs towards knowledge creation.

Well this week’s blogging topic threw me for a doozy. Folks vs Experts.

Me, you see the girl with the laptop permanently attached to her lap, and the knowledge of social media, but beneath all that, I’m a traditionalist at heart. I think it comes part and parcel with being a writer. Publishing is an old form. And despite interests of subversive norms, writers will always stick within the framework of publishing industry if they want to get anywhere.

By becoming tertiary educated, I’m further supporting expertise. University education was my only pathway post school and by gaining a bachelor degree and potentially persuing a Masters, I become distinguished due to the letters on the end of my name.

The flipside: I’m an internet geek, can’t get me away from it and all the technology evolving. But despite loving the internet and much of what it has garnered, I dislike many of the masses I come across online. I use the net as more of a community based entertainment, where I can find people with similar (science fictitious) interests. Most of whom (the ones I communicate with) are of a similar intellectual background.

There’s a serious debate in my place as a writer in the current climate of publishing and my place as a person and professional on the internet, and thus how I’m positioned on this topic in each sphere. Do I stick with my career side of things and stay with traditionalists and say ‘yay degrees and our knowingness of specific topics’ or do I give into collective communities’ hive intelligence?

Short answer: I’m potentially allergic to bees.

So, after much internal debate,  my point of discussion will be based on debate within the communal folk intelligence that Bruns discusses in both his book and  produsage.org.

My main case study is not Wikipedia, but rather a community called Metafilter, a ‘community weblog’ that anyone can contribute. It’s goal is to “…Break down the barriers between people, to extend a weblog beyond just one person, and to foster discussion among its members.” It embodies the very definition of hive intelligence.

Metafilter is ten years old this year, and rather unlike the other ten-year-old community I’m entrenched in (Entrenched is a nicer word that admitting my Livejournal addiction), Metafilter is less individualised than the uncountable amount of personal blogs on LJ.

Warning: do not click on the following links if you are easily offended.

The specific folksonomy vs expertise case I’d like to examine is a thread on MetaFilter that discusses obesity and Fat Pride. The thread is called Fat Hate is Ugly and many of the comments are particularly unsavoury. I was linked to this today, about an hour or so after watching The Gruen Transfer’s banned ad and discussion. The Gruen Transfer is an ABC program that examines advertising. Each week the segment ‘The Pitch’ is an agencies attempt at fulfilling the problem solving brief of the week’s segment. Last week’s episode caused much controversy as one ad agency breached ABC guidelines due to it’s deliberate shock technique. The ad was banned from being screened on television, but placed on the internet accompanied with a fifteen minute discussion.

So within the same afternoon I was presented by a hive community’s discussion that descended into discriminatory arguments, and a list of experts attempting to discover a way in which to curb that discrimination.  This, for me, clearly describes the difference between folksonomy and expertise: that the experts are thinking about and trying to solve problems and the mass are actually living the problem.

I’m sure you will agree that one of the definite goals of PLM is to organize product related information. Finally, I can find all my product models, relevant drawings, BOMs, customer requirements, manufacturing plans and suppliers bids. Unfortunately, when I look at the existing PLM systems, I see that this is not always simple. Companies utilize multiple software tools to design and manufacture products. Sometimes companies need to develop special software tools to follow specific information related to their catalogs of standard, existing and future developed products etc.

I started to think about the approach we can take for a PLM system to make it significantly simpler compared to what we have today. Actually a few analogies helped me come up with this idea. My MS Outlook contains lots of mails. A while ago, I tried to categorized mails and put them in relevant folders. But this proved to be very painful, as it had been in the past. I started to develop taxonomy for my mails at first, but after a few month or trials, I decided that I will keep all mails in a single folder. But then I had trouble finding what I needed, so I decided to mark my mail with categories. So, today these tags (categories) lets me find relevant mails in seconds.

Another example is my home computer system with photographs. I can sort them according to multiple criteria. In the end, I finally understood that this is mission is an impossible task, so I put the photos in a calendar-based order and started to mark the photos with tags. Actually, I found that there are many available tagging systems you can use today.

Now, how can I use this experience to help me to build a more efficient user experience for PLM/PDM systems? My proposal is as following – TAG EVERYTHING– products, models, projects, users, documents, ECOs (Engineering Change Orders), BOM etc. With this total tagging approach, we will be able to build an environment that is tuned for a specific company. What is more important is that it will also be customized for a specific user’s need. Users will be able to build tagging systems within time and justify needs and tags usages. Lately, we can eliminate unused or obsolete tags (even if they were created by a specific user).

There are a few systems I evaluated that allow you to tag everything on your computer and are simple to integrate with your PLM system. I’m sure to build these tagging capabilities is relatively simple for existing PLM systems.

Here are some examples:

And, in the end, I found this approach in the core of Apple Mac. So, this is an open call. What do you think about this approach for PLM? May be you know systems that have already implemented this? Please share your experience.

New Viral Marketing Tool

A consumer phenomenon called “tagging” or “folksonomies”. Tagging is powerful because consumers are creating an organizational structure for online content. Folksonomies not only enable people filing content under tags, but even better, share it with others by filing it under a global taxonomy that they created.

This is how tagging works. Using sites such as del.icio.us – a bookmark sharing site and Flickr – a photo sharing site – consumers are categorizing online content under certain keywords, or tags.

An individual can post photographs of their iPod on Flickr and file it under the tag “iPod.” These images are now not only visible under the individual user’s iPod tag but also under the community iPod tag that displays all images consumers are generating and filing under the keyword. Right now Flickr has more than 3,500 photos that are labeled “iPod.”

Tagging is catching on because it is a natural complement to search. Type the word “blogs” into Google and it can’t tell if you are searching for information about how to launch a blog, how to read blogs, or just what. Large and small sites alike are already getting on to the folksonomy train. They are rolling out tag-like structures to help users more easily locate content that’s relevant to them.

Although tags are far from perfect, marketers should, nevertheless, be using them to keep a finger on the pulse of the American public. Start subscribing to RSS feeds to monitor how consumers are tagging information related to your product, service, company or space. These are living focus groups that are available for free, 24/7. Folksonomy sites can be also be carefully used to unleash viral marketing campaigns – with a caveat. Marketers should be transparent in who they are, why they are posting the link/photos and avoid spamming the services.

Some time ago I commented on the value of folksonomies, and I basically (still) think that tagging can be as valuable as ’scientific’ categorization schemes such as the Dewey Decimal Classification System.

In the meantime, however, I’ve come across this truly great Clay Shirky clip from 2005. It’s a conference talk on What Time Does to Categories, and one of his conclusions is that user generated indexes like folksonomies may actually prove more durable than its ’scientific’ predecessors.

Here’s why:

FOLKSONOMIES

Let’s first begin by discussing what folksonomy is because basically folksonomies is the plural form of folksonomy. Folksonomy is the method of collaboratively creating and managing tags to annotate and categorize content.

Benefits:

Basically folksonomy is using words that will help computer search engines to recognize your website and display it on a search engine results page in the proper category. Basically this is done through the use of tags or what other people refer to as key words. In fact folksonomy is also known as collaborative tagging, social classification, social tagging and numerous other names.

But something that you need to know is that even though folksonomies are internet based they are not a part of the World Wide Web protocols. What this means is that not every website on the internet uses folksonomies, in fact you will mostly find folksonomies in web based communities where there are provisions made at the site level for creating and using tags, basically the purpose of the folksonomies is to allow the users of the community to share user-generated content or to collaboratively label existing content.

Negatives:

For different reasons, folksonomy is not a better, cheaper or more realistic method of creating metadata. In that sense, folksonomy does not represent an epochal paradigmatic and substituting shift that will replace other categorization principles. Such idealism is more of an ideological position, false essence thinking about folksonomy as a method and a media-essential idealization of the Internet at the expense of other media than a scientific reflection. Folksonomy should not substitute taxonomy and faceted navigation. Folksonomy is a complementary knowledge sharing tool which potentially has the qualities that search algorithms, the classic taxonomies and poly hierarchical principles lack. The traditional methods are efficient tools for finding what you are looking for, while folksonomies are efficient tools for looking for what to look for. Folksonomy is thus an excellent tool for reframing, exploring, hypothesis-generating and contextualizing information on the basis of the user-created metadata’s pluralism; however, it is no good if you want to find clearly defined information quickly and reliably. Only by combining the three different methods is the complementarities exploited, making the search explorative, pluralistic and teleological

Examples:

http://del.icio.us/

http://www.metafilter.com/

http://www.technorati.com/

http://www.digg.com

In Heft 1 (2009) der Zeitschrift “Information – Wissenschaft und Praxis” fasst Jutta Bertram in dem Aufsatz “Social Tagging – Zum Potential einer neuen Indexiermethode” konzentriert den Stand des Wissens zusammen und wirft einen vorsichtigen Blick auf die Zukunft der Folksonomies. Einer ihrer Kernsätze lautet:

Festzuhalten bleibt, dass wir als Information Professionals mit der Etablierung des Social Tagging nun auch auf der Inputseite an Autorität und exklusiver Zuständigkeit verlieren.

Ein ausgewogener, sehr lesenswerter Artikel und für alle 13Dinge-MitstreiterInnen eine schöne Ergänzung zu Lektion 10.

Erst diese Woche ausgeliefert und also frisch erschienen ist Band 59 der “Arbeitshefte der Arbeitsgemeinschaft der Parlaments- und Behördenbibliotheken“. Er enthält die Master-Thesis an der FH Köln von Michaela Selbach mit dem Titel “Bibliothek 2.0 – Neue Perspektiven und Einsatzmöglichkeiten für wissenschaftliche Bibliotheken”. Die Arbeit hat einen umfassenden Ansatz und stellt nach einer generellen Einführung in’s Thema fünf Projekte an deutschen UBs vor: den Kölner KUG, das Projekt BibTip aus Karlsruhe, das Weblog der UB Mannheim, die E-Medien der LMU München und die Informationsplattform ISIS der SLUB. Die Veröffentlichung scheint mit aufgedrucktem Veröffentlichungsdatum November 2008 recht neu zu sein, ist es aber nicht ganz. Die bei Professor Achim Oßwald vorgelegte Master-Thesis wurde im August 2007 abgeschlossen. Sie ist- im Gegensatz zu dem Aufsatz von Jutta Bertram – in ihrer Hochschulfassung frei zugänglich.

Interessant finde ich die Veröffentlichung innerhalb der Publikationsreihe der APBB. Beispiele für Web 2.0-Anwendungen aus deutschen Behördenbibliotheken werden dort, wie oben genannt, nicht behandelt und sind, teils zu Recht, bisher auch kaum zu finden. Die Aufnahme in die Reihe kann aber sicher als aufmerksame Beobachtung der Entwicklungen durch die APBB interpretiert werden.

I thought I had put more book reviews up here than I have.  Here’s one of the ones I thought I’d posted.  At the moment I’m doing a lot on Knowledge Management  so here is high praise for Organizing Knowledge: Taxonomies, Knowledge and Organization Effectiveness by Patrick Lambe.  

Lambe is that rare mix, both a theoretician and a practitioner.  The book is solidly based in theory and well-proven by practice.  In the first half, Lambe takes you on a readable tour of how people have organised knowledge in the past and compare different approaches (hierarchies vs facets, for examples) and some of the implementations (the Dewey decimal system, and so on). While the second half gives you tools and strategies for defining and introducing taxonomies to an organisation. He doesn’t pretend it is easy, but the tactical tools and the methodological framework are workable. He’s clearly refined them by using them and some of the pain he has felt on the way comes through between the lines.  I sympathise with him almost as much as I admire him.

The book has the benefit of being fairly short.   I’ve noticed this with other books on the subject – perhaps books about online technologies need to get out so fast there’s no time to add padding, or else people dealing with knowledge management think too clearly to waffle.  Either way, it’s pricey per page but benefits from its brevity.

I cannot recommend this book highly enough if you are working in this area or are responsible for information architecture, knowledge management, or pulling sense out of corporate folksonomies.

If you want more from Lambe, he blogs at Green Chameleon.