Technorati has released a widget that displays of the top tags used on a particular blog. Here it is for this blog:

View blog top tags for this blog

And here’s one for my other blog, JohoTheBlog:

View blog top tags for Joho

(Disclosure: I’m on Technorati’s board of advisors.)

Matthew Burton has developed a site — ReadableLaws.org — as a thesis (under the estimable Prof. Jay Rosen) where we can translate legislation into understandable English and discuss its implications. The first bills posted include one to broaden Fair Use, one that criminalizes hiding information about video games to skirt the ratings, and an expansion of Internet monitoring to prevent child pornography.

I can see the implications pages getting bogged down because the site has no built-in way of handling disagreements, but the translation-into-understandability pages look like a great idea. (And maybe the implications pages will work out, too.)

This is all part of Jay’s NewAssignment.Net project. [Tags: laws wikis media legislation matthew_burton jay_rosen everything_is_miscellaneous]

Ok, so maybe a little blogging today…live from Union Station in DC.

Tristant Louis points to JibberJobber, a site that aggregates personal info from all those other personal info sites you’ve logged onto, liked LinkedIn and Plaxo. It’s all part of the continuous meta-oneupmanship we’re seeing as we pull together the info we’re dispersing like Johnny Appleseeds with holes in our seed bags. [Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous metadata]

This video is very funny, if you’re the type of Web 2.0 geek who finds “Quakr Oars” funny. (Thanks to BoingBoing.) [Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous ]

Harvard University Libraries held a workshop on social tagging and other such technologies last week. I blogged it here. Now the videos are up. Part I Part II. (I spoke in part I.) [Tags: tagging libraries folksonomy taxonomy everything_is_miscellaneous]

A study by Communispace (which, as an online community developer has a horse in the race) says that while big communities necessarily have lots of “eyeballs,”

Results indicate that 86% of the people who log on to private, facilitated communities with 300 to 500 members made contributions: they posted comments, initiated dialogues, participated in chats, brainstormed ideas, shared photos, and more. Only 14% merely logged in to observe, or “lurk.”

By contrast, on public social networking Web sites, blogs, and message boards, this ratio is typically reversed, as the vast majority of site visitors do not contribute. In a typical online forum, for example, just 1% of site visitors contribute, and the other 99% lurk.

The long tail lives!

A different study by Melcrum says that 55% of corporations already have blogs or are planning to within the next 12 months, and 63% plan to be distributing videos on the likes of YouTube. 73% have no plans to use SecondLife. 70% have no guidelines or policies for blogs and other social media, and only 26% were “sure how to monitor what was being said about” them.

[Tags: social_software blogging long_tail marketing everything_is_miscellaneous ]

I just received my first copy of the final, real, tangible edition of Everything is Miscellaneous. The book goes on sale May 1.

The book is sitting on our dining room table like a mousetrap I’m afraid to check. I’m squeamish. No one likes to see a dead mouse. I dread reading it because all that it can contain for me are errors, infelicities and missed opportunities. The paper has absorbed the ink. It is irrevocable. My sentence has been pronounced.

But I’m going to have to read it because I no longer remember exactly what’s in it and what I cut. I couldn’t even at the drop of a hat summarize the book’s argument, at least not without some throat clearing and stumbles. And it is an argument that develops over the course of chapters, which may be a problem for reviewers who expect a business book that blurts out its idea early on. But Times Books has been great about dropping hats all over, so I’m going to have to be able to recount the argument in a couple of pithy sentences…and then, if all goes well, repeat those sentences in lots of venues.

I think it’s a good book. At least, when I finished it, I thought I’d done pretty much what I had wanted to do. So, don’t take the fact that I’ve hidden the printed copy under a pile of junk mail as a judgment of the book itself. Rather, it’s the done-ness that scares the bejeebus out of me. It was much less scary when it was still possible.

[Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous publishing books phobias ]