Hierarchy on its way out

A friend introduced me to del.icio.us a few weeks back and while I was initially a bit hesitant to use it (unlike her I'm not an early adaptor), I am now absolutely besotted by the concept.

Del.icio.us is a webbased feature which lets you store you favorite links and bookmarks online on the basis of semantic categories. Most of us organise our computer files and links in a hierarchical manner: we create files and subfiles to store them under.

For instance, if I am trying to hunt down a picture of a friend's party a while back, I would open a file called "LePew" then "Pictures" then "Olympus Camera" and then I need to rack my brains to remember when exactly this party took place, because I have stored all my private pictures by month. So if the party was in August 2005 I'd have to click on a file called "08-2005" to locate it. It's a bit of an effort, to say the least.

My weblinks were stored in a comparable manner. But del.icio.us now allows you to tag your links. For instance, if I was to store my own blog as a favorite, it would first of all be stored under its own name "Ubiquitous" and then instead of placing it in a file or subfile, I would simply attach tags to it: "blog, Pew, science, entertainment, ubiquitous, lesbian, Ghent, physics, life" etc... whichever term I would associate with this link. When I next try to find the link, I merely need to type in a few key-words to hunt it down, instead of trawling through a hierarchically structured directory.

What makes it easy, is that this type of storage is based on semantic and associative thinking. You don't need to remember dates or filenames. You simply think of keywords that naturally spring to mind when you yourself think of that file. And I'm becoming increasingly aware of just how associative my brain thinks. I rarely remember exact facts (which can be frustrating at times). But I do remember concepts, ideas, keywords,... that link into and out of others to connect the general dots and to see connections between otherwise unrelated or distantiated topics. I guess this is a common characteristic for people used to interdisciplinary environments and for conceptual thinkers. But what strikes me, is how different my keyword structures are from other people's.

Del.icio.us allows one to make "Tag Clouds" which is a visual representation of all your keywords. I've browsed the del.icio.us pages of several friends and they are generally very succinct and logical it seems, with keywords such as "blog", "music" or "fun". Whereas my tag cloud... well... see for yourself:

Anonimity Cloak Thwarted

Only two months in, and my decision to return to a life set in Ghent has had some fascinating consequences already. I was determined to enlarge my current social group here beyond its old established boundaries and like the true geek that I am, I enlisted the help of the wonderful medium of blogging for that quest. These last few weeks I've met some wonderful people both through blogging and some renewed efforts IRL. But last night, the reality of decloaking... of losing my blogging "anonimity", really hit home.

I was invited along to Spass and shortly after my arrival, someone asked whether I'd managed to unshrink my favorite sweater. It took me a moment to realise this question related to one of my recent blogposts. Much later on in the evening, someone else proclaimed they would start taking my writings with a pinch of salt from now on, because I had quite successfully disproven my statement that I rarely drink, by being so disgracefully trashed. *grin*

Which brings home a few rather painful realisations: (1) people pay attention, (2) if I distort the truth in the name of poetic freedom *cough*VANITY*cough* then I WILL be caught out and (3) I will have no more stories to tell IRL, because it's all been read on my blog.

On another note, I've observed a rather bizarre phenomenon. Three different random strangers I engaged in conversation at different points during the night, likened me to an L-word character somewhere mid-conversation. I found this immensely odd. "You know, you're so ***** from the L-word". Erm. No. I'm so me. It's fascinating how much this series seems to have infiltrated the mindset.

Anyway: D&TC and The Girlfriend did an excellent job last night with Spass. I look forward to the next effort.

The Sunday Struggle #1

I've decided to launch a new item on this blog: The Sunday Struggle. I generally find Sundays a struggle to get through with any sense of purpose, so from now on I will blog any entertaining links or gimmicks on a Sunday only.

- Persistent Kiwi

- A coverpop for geeks (Cheers Michiel for thinking of me this morning ;)

- Heritage Face Recognition. I started off with one picture, but being likened to N*SYNC and West Life band members hardly boosts one's self esteem, so I went a little overboard and did two more.

Special Needs Pew

I generally consider myself to be of the reasonably intelligent variety. But at times I do wonder if perhaps I too am "special needs". I am sure many of you are dying to comment on this statement, but no, this post is not a call for "ways in which we've known Pew to be utterly blonde". I'm merely making an observation here.

I seem to be incapable of posting a blogspot comment, without getting the word verification wrong at least thrice. I am seriously starting to consider clicking the wheelchair symbol in future, to hear the spoken version of the letters.

Mmmm... maybe I simply need glasses.

Sandman on Acid

If the last two things one does before going to bed are:

(1) chatting to MaTuVu about a myriad of topics amongst which, RSS feeds , snow and web2.0
(2) reading a long email from friend Will who's ski-instructing in a very snowy Whistler, Canada (where you would've been right now, if it hadn't been for a few unfortunate, misplaced innocent snogs)




then one *really* oughtn't be all that surprised to wake up to a dream like this:

"I'm a ski-lift operator in Wikipedia Land and RSS feeds show me their skipasses to get on the chairlift. One of the RSS kids was fidgetting on the chair mid-air and slipped through the restraining bars, so I have to quickly assemble my emergency laptop kit and Safari isolation blanket and climb up to the RSS kid to resuccitate it. After a long hard day of work in the freezing cold, I am welcomed by my friends in a little chalet with a kick-ass hot tub. But the hot-tub is occupied by a bunch of gatecrashing Memes. Will serves me a hot drink while MaTuVu breaks the news that Del.icio.us has declared war on Wikipedia Land in attempt to gain world domination. We will all have to ski very hard to save our own lives."

I dread to think what the hidden message behind THIS dream is *grin*