David Warlick has created word clouds based on the words Andrew Keen and I use in our debate in the WSJ. Pretty interesting. For me, the stand out result is that I use the word “amateur” far more than Andrew “Cult of the Amateur” Keen does.

 “It starts to mutiply, the grading of tones, until it becomes thousands of tones,” he [John Currin] reflected. “Some are accidental and some are intentional. It’s great when the accidental becomes indistinguishable from the intentional. That’s when it begins to seem like a living thing.”

Calvin Tomkins, Profiles, “Lifting the Veil,” The New Yorker, January 28, 2008, p. 58

I’ve been playing with Instapaper.com a little, and liking it a lot.

It’s a free site built by Marco Arment, who works at Tumblr (if I’m reading this right). You put the Instapaper “Read Later” button in your button bar, and click it if you’re on a site you want to read later. Go to Instapaper.com and you’ll see a list of what you’ve clicked. Simplicity itself.

There seems to be just one more feature: Any text you’ve selected on the page your instapapering is taken as that page’s description.

That takes care of my temporary bookmarking needs, a feature I’ve wanted for a while. But I wonder what would happen if my instapaper page were public and pointable. Could we start to use instapaper to build a collaborative newspaper that pulls together the recommended reading of people you respect?

[Tags: instapaper media del.cio.us tagging digg ]

I got a demo of SezWho.com, a system that enhances the commenting systems at blogs and other sites. If you plug it in to your blog, your readers can rate comments. The system tracks the reputation of commenters and uses that to weight their ratings of other commenters. (To rate a comment, you don’t have to join SezWho but you do have to supply an email address; they are going to enable you to rate anonymously, although since you won’t have a reputation, your rating won’t count for much.) You can click to see where else a commenter has commented.

Reputations are based on ratings, with influence gauged within communities of interest. Communities of interest are determined by the tags attached to the posts you’re rating.

Jitendra Gupta, who walked me through the product, points to the discovery element: If you find someone who comments well, you can click on her name and discover her blog and also easily see all of her comments on other sites.

The basic service is free. For a subscription, you get access to the details of the data about your site.

Privacy: You can manage your profile to some degree. If you unsubscribe, your history of comments and profile are hidden.

SezWho seems like an easy way to add functionality to your commenting system. It could be of great use for sites with so many comments that readers need some guidance, but I’m personally wary of adding a reputation system to smaller sites (like this one) where a comment rating system provides needless shaping of attention. It’s not like there are so many comments on EverythingIsMiscellaneous.com that you need a reputation system to figure out which ones to read. A reputation system provides a power to the crowd that, for smaller sites, we don’t need the crowd to have. For larger sites, it’s a different story.

Of course, that’s different from SezWho’s discovery function. Jitendra says that in the next release, there will be an option to “turn off the rating functionality and just have the context piece.” That provides a way to stitch together comments across sites, and, in general, stitching is a good thing because lack stitching is the number cause of wardrobe malfunctions.

[Tags: reputation_systems commenting reviews sezwho ]

BoingBoing (via Kottke) points to the Slice blog’s taxonomy of regional pizza styles.

Yeah? Well in the third order of order, we can have our pizzas with whatever toppings we want, including over a thousand from the Dewey Decimal system alone!

I tried to add “wwii” to this photo in the Flickr collection of Library of Congress photos, but was told that the 75-tag limit had already been met.

I wonder if Flickr can be persuaded to up its limit? There’s info we’re not capturing!

Poking around the photos the Library of Congress has posted at Flickr shows some of the strengths and weaknesses of social tagging.

For example, take this 1940 photo of two kids gathering potatoes in Maine. There are about 80 tags, ranging from potato, maine, and boys to rural, bucolic, plaid, browen, and pommes de terre. The comments include people appreciating the aesthetics of the photo, recollecting their own lives on farms, and nattering on gaily about the cute hats the kids are wearing. For example:

I grew up in southern Minnesota in the 50s. I was probably 5-6 yrs. old. In the fall after the potato fields had been harvested, they allowed people to come in and collect the potatoes that the machines had missed. I can still remember the cold cloudy day, playing with my brothers in the furrows of the field, throwing clods of dirt at each other, instead of picking up potatoes, and getting yelled at by my Mom.

and

this ‘human interest’ is really ‘awesome’ during the world war ll eras, you can survive eating potatoes in the whole year, wthout rice. potato a native of pacific slopes of s. america, in 16th c., with roundish or oval starch containing tubers used for food. batata or sweet potato, is widely known in the philippine island, brought to table and used for food. biggest plantation of potato in the philippines is in northern luzon.

Three people have played with Flickr’s feature that lets you draw a box around a portion of a photo and add an annotation. All three are wastes o’ time (obviously in my opinion): “I love these barrels” is not worth the visual interruption. (You only see the boxes if you move your mouse over the photos.) So maybe Flickr will turn these off for the LC photos. Maybe not. We’ll see.

Nevertheless, this is some very cool stuff. Sure, some of the tags are oddball. So what? In the great wash of tags, they will lose significance. Meanwhile, that photo of two children harvesting potatoes, which had been locked away behind brick and paper walls, now is in the world, gathering meaning, memories, and connections.

[Tags: library_of_congress flickr tagging folksonomy taxonomy]

At this quite new site you can post your favorite rules of thumb and rate others’. For example:

“When you’re playing blackjack, assume that any unseen card is an 8.”

“The crossbar on your bicycle frame should come just to your crotch when you straddle the bike with your shoes off and your feet flat on the ground.”

To manage the multiplicity, the site has 151 premade categories, and users are allowed to vote rules into or out of the “main collection.”

Doris Obermair interviewed me at the Picnic conference in spring 2007, and now has posted an edited version in which I talk about the effect of the miscellaneous on business. (With Spanish subtitles.) (By the way, I list videos here.) [Tags: doris_obermair]

Everything Is Miscellaneous is indexed, searchable, and previewable at Google Print. Yay!