Well, not exactly. Siderean has announced that a pilot deployment for Elsevier has over one billion RDF triples (the press release says “relations,” but I assume that’s what that means) in what Siderean calls a “relational navigation” system, i.e., a faceted system that allows for looser links across and among the resources.

I’m working off a press release, so I’m probably getting some or all of this wrong. But, it’s still a heck of a lot of relationships. [Tags: siderean faceted_classification everything_is_miscellaneous rdf]

The Berkman Center is holding a launch party for Everything Is Miscellaneous on April 30. I’ll give a talk at 6pm in Pound Hall Room 335, and then there will be a reception at 7pm at the Berkman Center at 23 Everett Street. (Pound Hall is a block away.)

You are invited. [Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous berkman]

Steve Smith has an interview with Matt Colebourne, CEO of CoComment, a service that tracks comments across the Web so that companies can see what people are saying about them. “We are looking at how we can help a community find its own experts,” says Matt. He writes about the next version of the product:

So they can look at a conversation stream of tens of thousands of comments and say, I only want to see those answered by people that I know. But then it is useful if you can start to pick up on the individuals who have natural authority on the topic. So we are building a ranking system or a behavioral system where people rate other people. But after a while, once the experts start appearing, they in turn should be able to bring other people up quickly. So an expert on medieval history can see I actually do have something to say on it and give me a positive ranking. That will give me a much higher rank than someone else who knows nothing about it. So it is like a peer review and commenter ranking system, but against the taxonomy of topics that allows the natural experts to appear.

Interesting.

At the moment, the service tracks a mere 150,000 sources. <font style=’font-size:80%’;>[Tags:<a href=”http://www.technorati.com/tags/berkman” rel=”tag”> </a> <a href=”http://www.technorati.com/tags/blogs” rel=”tag”> blogs</a> <a href=”http://www.technorati.com/tags/everything+is+miscellaneous” rel=”tag”> everything_is_miscellaneous</a>]</font>

Radio Open Source has posted the mp3 of yesterday’s show about everything being miscellaneous, with me, Karen Schneider, and Tim Spalding. Chris being Chris, he drives it more towards than the broad and philosophical than, well, anyone else on radio. And best of all, you can hear me get the name of the author of Moby-Dick wrong! [Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous radio_open_source christopher_lydon karen_schneider tim_spalding media taxonomy folksonomy]

From an email from Bobbi Carlton about a conversation she had recently with Bernie Margolis, president of the Boston Public Library (quoted with her and Bernie’s permission):

Bernie Margolis was … talking about how people think the Web is going to put libraries out of business. He says that the more hits on the BPL website, the more visitors come to the library. The more people learn about the library, the more they come in. The BPL sees a direct correlation between web traffic and foot traffic but that is because the library is more than a repository of things and information – it is a resource as well.

[Tags: libraries everything_is_miscellaneous bpl]

Larry Lessig has a great post asking us to call upon the Republican and Democratic parties to insist that all presidential debates (“at least”) be made free for use after their initial broadcast.

Abso-freaking-lutely! [Tags: politics copyright copyleft creative_commons lawrence_lessig everything_is_miscellaneous]

Yesterday I gave a talk at the Mass Technology Leadership Council‘s Social Media Cluster — 30 minutes followed by 90 minutes of questions and discussion. Paul Gillin, who’d suggested me to the group (thanks Paul!), and is the author of the just-published The New Influencers, made the point (relevant in context) that traditional direct mail marketers are thrilled to get a 3% return rate. “I don’t know of any other case where a failure rate of 97% is considered a success.”

From the front of the room Dan Bricklin responded instantly. “Sperm,” Dan said. It made me laugh. But, as Dan points out, it’s a common strategy in nature.

BTW, Dan’s posted a podcast of the session. [Tags: nature direct_mail marketing sperm dan_bricklin paul_gillin mtlc everything_is_miscellaneous ]

1. Tonight at 6pm at the Berkman Center, I’m leading an open discussion about civility, codes of conduct, and the price of making rules explicit. We serve pizza. You’re invited! [map]

2. Tomorrow night at 7pm I’m the guest on Chris Lydon’s Radio Open Source, talking about Everything Is Miscellaneous. It’ll also be available as a podcast, of course, because that’s what the estimable Radio Open Source does. [Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous cyberbullying codes_of_conduct radio_open_source berkman]

Dave Winer writes, “I want a checkbox that tells MSNBC that I don’t want any more Virginia Tech stories.” Exactly. (He’s making a point about checkboxes, not about Virginia Tech.)

In fact, for the past few weeks, as a part of my “stump” speech, I’ ve been showing a screen capture of USA Today‘s redesigned site. It includes a button you can click on to give a Digg-like thumbs up to an article. Great, except, um, where’s the thumb down? We want to be able to say to the Britney or Justin or We-Should-Teach-Our-Students-Judo article “No no no no no no no no.” We want to tune our news. But we also want our revenge. [Tags: news media digg dave_winer everything_is_miscellaneous ]

The Berkman is holding a launch party for Everything Is Miscellaneous on April 30. I’ll give a talk at 6pm in Pound Hall Room 335, and then there will be a reception at 7pm at the Berkman Center at 23 Everett Street. (Pound Hall is a block away.)

You are invited.

Last night the Center threw a similar affair for John Clippinger’s new book, A Crowd of One. These are really nice events. John’s talk was terrific and engendered a lively discussion, and the wine-and-cheese party at the Center embodies much of what’s best about the Center. So, I hope you’ll come. [Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous ]