The Velveteen Rabbi writes beautifully about the importance of ambiguity and of repetition in liturgy. Sometimes not knowing what words mean precisely but saying them anyway can connect us to a meaning that transcends us. But she puts it better…

The Winnipeg Free Press in a review by Michael Stimpson thinks it’s a “good beach read for techno-geeks.” He thinks I make my case “persuasively and for the most part engagingly with anecdotes and side trips to illustrate his points,” although he found the sections on alphabetization and on Eleanor Rosch to be “excruciatingly dull.”

Tom Hopkins at Usable Interfaces deepens the discussion from categorization to truth. Isn’t truth what’s really at stake, he asks.

Certainly, traditionally the two are tied, since truth was taken to apply to propositions, and the canonical form of  a proposition is X is Y. The Y, one way or another, is likely to be or imply a categorization. We’ve always been happy to say both that Socrates is a human and Socrates is hungry, without thinking there’s a contradiction between those two, because Socrates can have more than attribute (i.e., belong in more than one category). Classically, though, we’ve wanted to be able to assign one category as fundamental, or “essential.” That accords with common sense: Socrates really is a human, whereas his hunger is just a passing attribute of a human. But we took that common sense and over-thought it, saying that each thing must have one and only one essence. Further, we thought those essences had to form a perfect, harmonious, beautiful order that exists independent of our awareness of it. In fact, its existence was taken to be a requirement for us to make sense of the flurry of perceptions, and a requirement for knowledge.

We’ve  been undoing the work of essentialism for a long time now. That has entailed recognizing our human role in letting various true categorizations emerge: We see Socrates as hungry because he’s in our restaurant now, but we see him now as a physical human because he’s in our emergency room. We can be mistaken in our categorizations – Socrates is in our restaurant to use the men’s room and is not hungry at all – but there are so many truths and so many possible categorizations that our projects and interests are far more important to what emerges than are any hoped-for privileged essences.

Tom’s post takes this down a different path, leading to the importance of “testimony,” which is a very fruitful way of proceeding. But, it’s Memorial Day, I’m on dial-up so  I have to post a first draft, and this is it…

My brother and I bought a used bought this winter — fifteen feet of leaky fiberglass, with a 90 horsepower motor that assumes that 15 of the horses in harness are dead and being dragged by the others — so I went downtown to register it with the authorities. If you have assembled the right set of treasure hunt collectibles, including a hand-rubbing of the vehicle identification plate, it all goes smoothly. But…

On the of the checkboxes on the registration form asks if I’m “retarded.” I thought we were done lumping the various ways our intelligences fail us into the one particular bucket, but I also wondered whether the state had minimum intelligence requirements for boat ownership. No, said the state employee on the other side of the counter. They also provide hunting licenses at the boat registration offices, and to get a permit that lets you carry a gun, the state does want to know if you’re “retarded.” They only have the one form, so they have collect the information for boat owners as well.

Inevitably, we read backwards from the metadata that’s asked of us. Had the form asked for prior felony convictions, known allergies or political party affiliation, we would have tried to make sense of the intentions behind the form. Requests for metadata are expressive. Which is one good reason you should bother to print up separate damn forms for boat owners and hunters.

What do the two have in common anyway, except that they both show up jutting their manly jaws forward in outdoor-wear catalogs? [Tags: metadata everything_is_miscellaneous]

From MetaFilter:

Does Twitter move a little too fast for you? Maybe Dawdlr is more your speed. The lovechild of PostSecret and the web-app-everyone-loves-to-hate, postcards sent in are scanned and posted twice a year. Next update? November 21st.

It’s Linnaeus’ 300th birthday today, and Wired.com is celebrating with a terrific article by Kristen Philipkoski.

The article also has a sidebar I wrote about Linnaeus, as well as 4-5 pages about Linnaeus from my book

TagAndFacet lets you tag Web sites, Outlook messages, and Windows files for easy re-finding. It also lets you declare “facets” — metadata categories of continuing use — so you can do faceted, tree-like browsing.  A version is available for free with a limit on how many items you can tag; a for-pay version should be available soon. (I haven’t yet tried it.)

Scott Rosenberg, co-founder of Salon and the author of Dreaming in Code, has posted at Salon an interview with me about Everything is Miscellaneous.

At his blog, Scott adds some “out-takes” from the interview, and recommends the book. Thanks, Scott. [Tags: salon scott_rosenberg everything_is_miscellaneous folksonomy taxonomy tagging]

(Disclosure: I’m on Technorati’s board of advisors. I saw an advance version of the changes, but otherwise had no direct influence. Also, although at some point I conceivably could make some indeterminate amount of money from Technorati, the fact that Dave Sifry is a friend influences my judgment more.)

Technorati has just done a major re-shaping of itself, which is interesting as a response to the increasing need for both pinpoint accuracy and broad context. Dave Sifry, the ceo, blogs about it here.

Technorati is driving down both roads simultaneously, which I think makes sense. On the one hand, if you want to do an old fashioned text search through blogs, the site has improved its engine and pared down the experience. If, on the other hand, you want to see information in context (and on the Web that of course means being able to explore that context further), the site has taken several steps:

1. The default search now is for tags, not for text in blogs. Tags are expressions of what the readers think a post is about, so some types of searches should return more accurate, relevant and interesting results. Of course, we also use tags in idiosyncratic ways, so only experience will tell whether and when tag searching is more satisfying than text searching. In any case, Technorati lets you click to search through text, if that’s what you want. (You can go straight to the text search page via s.technorati.com.)

2. Technorati continues to include more sources and more types of information. In fact, the home page no longer positions Technorati as a blog search engine. “Include everything” is one of the key recommendations of Everything is Miscellaneous, so I like its continuing inclusiveness :)

3. These changes seem to move Technorati towards embracing topics as a basic unit of meaning. For example, if you search for “ron paul,” you are taken to a page that assembles blog posts, videos and photos about the controversial Republican. There are tabs for music and events as well, although in this case Technorati didn’t find any. There’s also a “WTF” post, an explanation of the topic generated and voted on by users. (It’s displaying the WTF by siegheilneocon, which only got 27 votes, instead of the one by beckychr007, which got 61 votes, seeming to prefer the most recent to the most popular, which is either a bug or I’m not understanding it.)

Topics are an important way to cluster ideas. At the moment, Technorati has no concept of a topic apart from a tag, however. The infrastructure to do more is in place, because the site already displays a list of related tags. The results pages don’t bring in the content from those tags, though. For example, if “john mccain” were a related tag, it might make sense to bring some of that tagged material into the “ron paul” topic page. That would give us a broader view of the topic. Conflating topics with tags can increase the precision of results — but not for highly ambiguous tags such as “shot” — but can also reduce the context and thus our understanding. Granted, figuring out algorithmically what’s relevant and how it’s relevant is no small challenge. (Maybe if some topic pages were marked as especially worthwhile and stable, not all of the clean up and construction would have to be done algorithmically.)

Likewise, at some point it’d be good to start relating topics, so that the system knows that “ron paul” is (in some sense) contained by “republicans” and republicans are related to “politics.” This sort of information can eventually be gleaned folksonomically from the tags. Of course there’d be nothing wrong with using existing taxonomies and ontologies to help further refine the relationships among topics. It’s always going to be a messy, overlapping, shifting mass of connections, but, well, so are we.

This is not a criticism of what Technorati has done. In fact, I mean it as a way of expressing my excitement about where it goes from here.

In the 4th in the Harvard-Wired “Miscellaneous” podcast series I get to interview Neil DeGrasse Tyson, the astrophysicist and author of Death by Black Hole. We talk about our culture’s insistence on thinking there is one preferred way of ordering the cosmos. [Tags: neil_degrasse_tyson berkman astrophysics pluto planets taxonomy]