James Vasile, who just gave a Berkman lunch-time talk, distributed a copy of a brief paper, “unlick the Rock,:” which is not yet up on the Web. In it, James suggests that we separate radio into its two functions: DJs who figure out what to play, and the delivery mechanism. Someone should create a plug-in (or sump’in) that lets everyone create playlists using simple HTML, and lets everyone listen to those playlists by scouring multiple sources for the music. So, if you have a copy on your disk, it’ll play that. If there’s an online distributor that has it available, great. If you have to buy it from iTunes, then it’ll let you. Or maybe you have a small p2p network of friends who are sharing music.

Interesting. It’d at least make it difficult to find someone to sue. And the publishers might make some money out of it. And, from my provincial point of view, it’d be a nice case of separating the metadata from the data…. [Tags: james_vasile internet_radio]

Karen Schneider (the Free Range Librarian) is one of those strong-voiced writers who really make a difference in her domain. Now she is leaving the American Library Association’s TechSource blog — which she was instrumental in beginning — in order to follow her writerly instincts. Her last post is a message to librarians that usefully points them toward their fears. [Tags: karen_schneider libraries ala ]

I like what Michael Wolff says in his Vanity Fair piece about his new news site:

The metaphor, for 150 years — from print to radio to network to cable — has been the front page: important stuff first. “It should have to do now with falling through something, or floating through the totality of information or of intersecting worlds and interests,” offers [Patrick] Spain, not a man wild with his metaphors. [VF, October, p. 126]

I’ve been saying for a while, and I think in Everything Is Miscellaneous, that the new front page is distributed across our day and our network. Much of it comes through our inbox. It consists of people we know and people we don’t know recommending items for our interest.

So, I was disappointed by Wolff’s new site, Newser.com. It presents a view of the news that’s much less hierarchical than a typical front page, and it’s well-designed for quickly finding what matters to you (including through editorially curated links), but: (1) It assumes its nine top-level categories reflect how every reader views the world; (2) Where are our voices? Comments? Blogs? (3) I couldn’t let it arise from my social network (where that network includes people I don’t know but whose views interest me). It competes with Google News, not with the intersection of Digg and FaceBook, which is what I’m waiting for. [Tags: news media michael_wolff ]

Martin Weller has an excellent article on the future of content, presenting an economic and a quality argument for why it’s bound to be (in my terms) miscellanized.

This is the first in a “distributed blogging” experiment that will have three other bloggers responding. [Tags: content publishing books clay_shirky martin_weller long_tail chris_anderson]

Rico at RicoBlog intersects EiM with discourse analysis and discourse grammar, about which I know nothing. He refers to Stephen h. Levinsohn’s  The Relevance of Greek Discourse Studies to Exegesis, which talks about the tendency for sentences to place the non-verbal elements that convey established info before the ones that convey new info. (I don’t know which non-verbal elements Levinsohn is referring to since the article is about the Greek version of the New Testament.) Rico relates this to what EiM says about going through one’s mail. So, even though I don’t know enough to understand it, I enjoyed Rico’s leap.

Donna Maurer, an information architect, writes about how she organizes her wine, thereby answering the question: What is the opposite of miscellaneous? But who cares? She is not aiming at organizational purity, although her scheme has the attention to detail that purists often demand. But those details represent the information that matters to her, and her system lets her find and use that information…exactly as you would expect from a leading information architect. A folksonomic, tag-based wine cellar — while a fun concept — is not exactly called for here. [Tags: tags taxonomy wine donna+maurer information_architecture ia everything_is_miscellaneous ]

My Times is in beta. I’m not sure how much of it I’m getting for free because Times Select comps people at universities. And I haven’t played with it extensively. But what I’m seeing I’m liking.

my.nytimes.com lets you choose your feeds. Of course, NY Times material is available, but you could make a page that shows the feeds from the Washington Post, Slate, and BBC and not the NY Times. The site lets you see suggested feeds from various NY Times celebrities. You can add widgets like a Flickr photo browser. You can lay out the page you want. You can add tabs to organize your many feeds. You can even add your own feeds. Plus there’s a meta-tab that will take you to Times Topics, taking them from their undeserved obscurity.

It’s not perfect, even at first glance. The feeds only show headlines, not any of the text. It doesn’t input or output OPML. The feed of the NYTimes columnists only shows the title of their posts, not the names of the authors. There’s still no way to comment on the articles, not even a thumbs up or down. The articles don’t link to blog posts about them.

Nevertheless, the decision to allow us to aggregate other sources on a page at the nytimes.com domain is a big symbolic deal. [Tags: nytimes media blogs newspapers journalism everything_is_miscellaneous ]

W. David Stephenson has created a word cloud of the latest bin Laden video. Interesting… [Tags: osama_bin_laden w_david_stephenson everything_is_miscellaneous visualizations ]

Fred Stutzman writes at TechPresident about WikiDashboard, from PARC, that provides a visualization of who has been editing an article with what frequency. Very cool and sometimes revelatory.

They ought to make this deliverable as a sound, so when you go to a page, you can tell the shape of the edit history by the pitch, quaver and number of voices. [Tags: wikipedia everything_is_miscellaneous visualizations parc fred_stutzman]

Dave Davison at Thoughts Illustrated gives an interesting illustration of the “filter on the way out” idea from EiM. He notices that Picasa has been silently aggregating the images in his blog. Now he can go back through it and notice relationships and trends. He gives six steps of working through the pile of images. The six step certainly seem to work for this example, but I’m not sure how generalizable it is since, in my view, the miscellaneous is a pile of raw potential for the emergence of every sort of understanding and meaning, from noticing that you’ve used lots of pictures of Michael Jackson to running statistical and semantic tools that discover deeply hidden relationships.

The idea behind “filter on the way out” is that it’s often (usually?) better to give users tools for sorting through the pile the way that suits them than to <i>only</i> give them a single, pre-baked categorization.