After years to talking about our move to “good enough” information, I’m just a little late to learning that Herbert Simon coined a term for this phenomenon in 1957. Yes, it’s the fiftieth anniversary of “satisficing.”

I found this via a very interesting blog post at Just Communicate by a knowledge management grad student who, in the course of discussing the wisdom of Cory Doctorow’s Metacrap article, also points to a post by Steven Bell at the Association of College & Research Libraries blog, on using social sites to move good enough research beyond good enough. [Tags: satisfice herbert_simon cory_doctorow just_communicate ]

Michael Wesch, who did the incredible info-visualization YouTube, The Machine Is Us/ing Us, has now done the same to explain the change from paper-based information to digital information. In just a few minutes, he explains the thesis of Everything Is Miscellaneous (which he credits, thank you). It is a brilliant piece of work. And totally delightful. [Tags: wesch everything_is_miscellaneous ]

Peter Van Dijck has set up a consulting company to help organizations organize their Web-based information in ways accessible to a world-wide community. Peter’s named his company 290s because that’s the “Other religions” category in the Dewey Decimal system.

Chris Locke has posted the cover of every book he’s read while researching his Mystic Bourgeoisie blog. It’s oddly compelling.

If he’d sized them by how important they were (and by how much of each he’d actually read), we’d have a Book Cover Cloud.

Tom Matrullo has a brief but thoughtful post that points out that the metaphor of the “miscellaneous” is spatial, whereas temporality is at the heart of so much of the Web.

Great point. Temporality is crucial to many (most?) of the innovations on the Web. E.g., the boon of Twitter and Jaiku isn’t that they promote short blogging but frequent blogging and blogging of transient events.

And Tom is right that the miscellaneous calls up spatial images. I refer to it as a pile of leaves frequently. And that strips the temporality out of it. Temporality shows up merely as one more piece of metadata that might be useful, e.g., wouldn’t it be helpful to know when a particular tag was created? The pile itself is temporal as a continuing presence that grows and gets enriched. But that’s pretty inert. It’d be interesting to re-express it in temporal terms. I don’t know how to do it, but it’d be interesting.

More important, Tom’s right (as usual) that we should pay attention to what the miscellaneous metaphor hides.

I like Jaiku both because as the second entrant, it learned from Twitter, the first entrant, and because Jyri Engeström is one of those brilliant, sweet people who make the world better in several dimensions at once. Besides founding Jaiku, Jyri has produced some quite thought-provoking pieces on the role of social objects in forming social networks.

It’ll be interesting to see where Google surfaces the UI for entering Jaiku microblog posts and where it surfaces the posts themselves.

And most important, of course, is whether Jaiku will be renamed Jaigoo or Jookle. [Tags: jaiku twitter google blogging Jyri_Engeström ]

Wordie started out as a joke – a site that was all tags and no content. Now it’s added tags. I have to run for a train, so I don’t have time to all into its loop of metareference, but John McGrath explains it all here.

I started poking around at Madame Levy’s quilt gingerly. As luck would have it, the first link I followed was to Arcade Fire – Neon Bible live in an elevator. As I kept poking, I found more and more. As Frank Paynter, who pointed this site out to me puts it, this is curation. It is indeed curation as art. [Tags: madame_levy curation art]

Want to see quickly what sorts of things interest the Denver-area Angel Capital Summit? Visit the tag cloud.

It’d of course be interesting to track this cloud over time, or in comparison  to other groups of investors’ clouds, or to venture capitalist clouds, or to social responsibility clouds…

According to the Harvard Crimson, the Harvard Faculty of Arts & Sciences’ governing body has proposed an open access policy according to which faculty members would make their research available for free either on a university site or on their own site. This would be in addition to publishing in academic journals, some of which charge $20,000 a year for a subscription. It’d be an opt-out program. The Harvard Crimson has a good editorial supporting it.

Yay! Locking research up in for-pay journals slows the pace of knowledge. The peer review system — one important way ideas are vetted — does not require the existing print publication system. Harvard’s move will not only make more information more widely available, it may help nudge the system itself into a form that better serves our species’ interests: As more schools adopt open access programs, researchers will have an increasing disincentive not to lock their work up.

I’m actually not sure how this will work, especially with regard to its being opt-out. If I’ve just had an article accepted by The Journal of Hydroponic Pediatrics. do I then also submit it to the Harvard open access server? If so, in what sense is that opt out?

Obviously, I’m also interested in what sort of metadata and aggregation facilities Harvard will supply to make these articles easily findable.

But what pleasant questions to contemplate! [Tags: open_access harvard publishing copyright a2k]