How do you come up with folder or tag names? How do you do it without giving yourself a micro-headache whenever you save a new bookmark or post?

It seems like a shared experience among developer--bloggers, to go into tagging-mania mode, thinking "at last, I'm going to organize everything on my site!" I remember I went on a crazy tagging run a couple years ago, only to realize that the categories I came up with weren't really useful. This reminds me of how when people buy label-making machines, they go on a frenzy, labelling everything in their house.

Often times, I find, that it's too much of a hassle to predict, in the moment, exactly how you'll want the category to be used. If, for example, the first post on your blog is a picture of your cat, photoshopped with funny text, and a link to lolcats, do you label it as "cats," "personal photo," "lolcats," "funny link," "photoshop," "humor." You don't know what to do because you don't know whether by post 500 if any of those categories will be relevant.

I thought of one method recently, and it's the same method I use when I file my papers now. I try to put them into a folder, based on whatever comes to mind. I just spit it out. I don't think twice about whether the category will have longevity or not, I just label it. For example, I have a piece of paper with a receipt for my car inspection sitting on my desk. It lingers there because I don't know which folder to put it into. And so I just put it into a folder titled with the first thing that comes to mind, "car inspection receipt." This then leaves the process of coming up with relevant categories as an emergent task. Eventually maybe this folder will merge with "receipts" or just merge with "car stuff."

I wonder if people in clerical positions have a natural talent for coming up with proper folder names, and can anticipate ahead of time the "right" name for things. I'm a little envious of these people. I imagine that the ability to name things appropriately, has other life benefits. i.e. "She's too wild for me." "He's too square." etc. Effectively sorting through your experiences, I believe, is crucial to learning.

For example, this post is categorized, spontaneously as "my little productivity hacks."

Lifecycle of Articles - In magazines, an article appears on the shelf for a fixed period of time and disappears, with little reverberation afterwards, save for the occasional letters to the editor or op-ed. On the Internet, reverberation is heavy, and often more important. As an article gets linked, it then gets read. As it gets read, it gets commented. Eventually the article balloons into something more than the original post. So while in the print world, the buzz comes after the article's publication, in the blogosphere, the buzz is the article's publication.

Articles in the blogosphere also grow and shrink as need be. There are plenty of retractions, re-editing, and addendums. Articles are dynamic in the blogosphere, but static in magazines.

Auxiliary Comments - There are no forums in magazines, which is unfortunate. There are reams of great material within forums, and often the commentary is more important than original articles. Look at the popularity of the acronym RTFA (Read the F-ing Article), a common exhortation on places like slashdot.org. The user often bypasses the original article and goes straight to the highest-ranked posts. That's where the good stuff is. A lot of good writers feel comfortable commenting after someone has posted the original article, but won't have the desire to collect their own works into a blog or portfolio. Magazines and newspapers have no forum aspect. The printing is the end. There is no town hall meeting.

Group Authoring - I don't like how the blogosphere is like a flat plane of single voices. In magazines, there's a lot of collaboration that goes into the production of the original article. There is the original writer who gets the by-line, but there's also copy editors, illustrators, photographers, an editor-in-chief, and a publisher. Plus interns to get the coffee and analysts to do fact-checking and data-gathering. In print publishing, this group authoring is concentrated and organized.

There is a sense of group authoring in the blogosphere. You will discover a video with no text associated with it on one site. But you will find the commentary on many other sites. So there is an emergent group authoring on the Internet. However, you may not always find the relevant information. I often read articles on the Internet missing some basic and crucial information, and it will only be a week or two later before I find a related article that fits the pieces of the puzzle.

There is one example of heavy group collaboration working well, even better than magazines, on the Internet that I want to highlight: Wikipedia's coverage of the Tsunami. There are hundreds of people working on the article, bringing in all the relevant graphics, statistics, and histories that I couldn't find organized anywhere else.

A single blogger, on the other hand, can only provide her one voice. This provides deeply personal stories and novel theories, but not really broad and rich content.

Concentration of Risk - Time Magazine can delegate and pay reporters to cover the Inaugural because they can guarantee they will generate revenue from that coverage. They may also send ten to twenty people there, even if only the material from only five of them generates eighty-percent of the interest in their articles. In the blogosphere, on the other hand, it's unpredictable whether an author will get proper payoff from doing a specific coverage.

Service-oriented - Magazines are more service-oriented than blogs. In the New Yorker, for example, every issue has a catalog of all cultural events happening in NYC. Someone is paid to collect that data. It's really mundane to produce it, but it's important. The blogosphere, on the other hand, consists of people at-will doing every piece on whim. They don't provide consistent sub-services. Instead, they write about what they want to write about. Leave the collating to the monkeys, or automated places like craigslist.

I haven't updated Philosophistry in a week, but don't let that fool you.

I've been heavily active on my mind blog, on my LinkBlog (1) and (2), and now my self-programming diaries. (to keep track of all these blogs at the same time, visit the Philosophistry Portal)

It seems I have a sort of fixed blogging attention-span, such that the more I throw into other blogging services such as MindSay or Blogger, the less attention I put into other ones, like this one.

I also am finding much difurcation in my blogging habits. There is this desire to keep on setting up blogs for different interests with different formats, audiences, and mediums. It's like I'm constantly adding tentacles to my existence on the web. Like when I noticed I was spending a lot of my mindblog talking about my personal self-help, I decided to separate into the self-programming diaries.

Either way, it's fun. Blogging has taken my writing skills to the next level and I'm a much more effective communicator than a year ago. I've since found my writing assignments in school to be child's play.

okay, kids. the journey's over. I need to take this blog to new directions. I've evolved as a writer, I've learned my limitations etc..

so in pre-emption of the classic "sorry lack of updates" post, I'm going to switch gears to a different style of writing that will let the ink flow.

hmm, okay should set some general rules:
1) blogFabrics don't have to be there all the time, nor do blogaurals, and dirty colored tiles
2) first-drafts are better
3) the more personal the better
4) uncouth, rapid, write-first ask questions later
update:
5) flooding is cool
6) posting trash is not cool

Mark Cuban is the richest blogger in the world. Check out his blog, BlogMaverick. Cuban made $2 billion selling broadband media provider Broadcast.com to Yahoo. Read some bio bits here.

On his blog he has an entry where he slams Donald Trump by describing his personal encounters with the man. Read the juicy tidbits there yourself. It's a nice peak into how immature and normal these rich kids are.

After leaving your office, I promised myself that if I ever got liquid and had an obscene amount of money in the bank, I would make a point not to remind myself and everyone else around me of it every minute of every day — unlike you. (read the rest)

This brings blogging to a new level. It shows how blogging and the Internet has compressed the world into a tighter global village; we now have access to more intimate details of the interactions between alpha males. While we maybe had this before in a few random interviews or in a book, this is one of the earliest times that you see it done live and unprompted by an interviewer. The bulk of current media via TV and print, only displays the dramatic side of celebrities: either the heights of their charisma or the lows of their criminal behavior. What comes out is this false impression that these celebrities are somehow super-human. The honest truth, as Cuban's blog helps reveals, is that they are jus as stupid as the rest of us. It therefore gives hope to the common people that they can rise up if they wanted to as well.

Note: he is probably not a billionaire anymore due to the dot-bomb's crashing his Yahoo stock.

Second Note: I remember Tommy Lee used to dish slime at other celebrities, like Kid Rock, via his band's site a few years ago. Good stuff.

Third Note: Yeah, Cuban's obviously doing this to help promote his show; it seems he's taking donald's on-camera remarks too seriously otherwise.

I wouldn't say that I blog. Rather, I run a small online magazine where all the staff positions are compressed into one person.

aside: what the hell is the point of this post

At some point in the future, Philosophistry could be so completely reflective of who I am that a critical point is reached. This would be a point whereby me and my blog are perfectly synchronized. At this point, my mental and physical health can be observed in both the real world and through my blog. For example, right now I'm under physical duress thanks to weekend reverly and torrential rains. Likewise, visiting my blog over the past few days only shows basic parts of my site being updated, like the link bar above, the away message, and the artist bar. My last main post was also short and a posted a while ago. In tandem, the BlogFabric above has been stagnating a bit and the site's overall quality is less than excellent.

Synchronoy, like harmony, is an interesting phenomena to occur between objects. In the book Sync I've been learning how inanimate objects naturally obtain synchrony, such as pendulums keeping pace, binary stars having stable rotations, and water molecules freezing up simultaneously. It's even conjectured, that synchrony is the essence of self-assembling mechanisms, such as the spontaneous generation of life on Earth.

So to relate this to the web, if my blog moves in perfect step with myself, then we have achieved harmony. But if small perturbations in me or my blog are automatically reflected in the other medium, then synchrony has been achieved.

Blogging is part of a tradition of web extensions for human experience. Since 1990, new tools have been developed to act as surrogates of existing human faculties: Google as the surrogate brain, Instant Messaging as the surrogate mouth, and eBay as the surrogate hand of resource exchange. Blogging appears as the surrogate face of personal identity. Through every post you are saying to the world, "this is me, this is what I'm thinking, this is what I'm about." Blogging becomes an alternative or simulated existence for the person.

Eventually, the simulation could become too real. The simulation becomes a simulacrum, which according to Baudrillard, is a copy without an original. At this critical point, the blog's initial frame of reference, you, has disappeared, and author and content have become one.

// Like I said, I'm a little out of sorts, and hence, I apologize for this post's incoherence.

UPDATE: I've since retired this wild and crazy all-over-the-place design of this site.

What happened to your site, it's so big!?

Why the horizontal scroll bar?! Scrolling left and right forces me to choose between liberal and conservative. And I can't think like that?!?! aaaah!

Chill. If the new scares you, you can always view the watered-down philosophistry. But don't you want something more like PhIl0sOph1stry rather than plain-jane .... philosophistry?

So you're not convinced? Let me put on my web-designer socks. Or rather my web-designer <socks> and walk over there and <teach> you a lesson.

Continue reading...

I feel that the horizontal scroll bar is a lonely UI component.

My first passion has been web design.

My site is best designed for a 4-directional mouse scrollbutton.

Happy New Years Philosophistry. As you enter near the 1000th entry, how about a new design?

Let me sit down and explain whats been done to Philosophistry...

Continue reading...

I want to take the cross-product of blogging and wikis.

The blogosphere feels like High School all over again.

Just like in High School, there is the popular crowd. You know who they are in the blogosphere. Ernie, Rebecca, Will, Pirillo, Winer, Aaron. And then there's Cory Doctorow. The alpha-male cum yearbook editor-in-chief, giving a great meta-commentary on the usefulness of blogging, and co-authoring a book on blogging.

Continue reading...

I took Excel and tried to map my thoughts onto it. First impression: I love it. Mapping your thoughts in a 2D matrix is interesting and different than a traditional text. A traditional text is a one-dimensional line, a stream, where ideas follow from each other. The excel spreadsheet allows associations to fly around in a plane.

I think this is more closely aligned with the way the brain works. Every idea pops open 4ish ideas for consideration.

Plus, there are also colored bars to play with.

Enough talking see for yourself:

First Excel Blog - Just an all-over-the-place mosh pit kalidescope of colors and words.

What is Blogging? and the Global Mind - What started as a mental discussion about what exactly blogging is, somehow transformed into a pounding on the concept of measuring synchronicity between humans and between neurons to see if we're a global mind yet.

Observations on I-15 - I was driving home from Palo Alto, and mapped my stream of consciousness while on the road. Lots of goodies in here.

Continue reading...

What if I died in the real world, but somebody took my existing blog, and then just rewinded it... you know, put it on loop from the beginning, and take entries from one year ago and post them as new.... for ppl who didn't know who I was or had never been to my blog before, they'd certainly get the impression I was still alive and doing something.

We already have ghosts right now in the form of newsgroup posts that don't get lost, e-mail addresses that keep getting spammed to even after they're gone, google caches, and internet archives...

Hell, records of my existence in the real world would probably get lost 100 years from now, but I know that on the web, if you google my name today and then google it 1000 years from now, I'd still be around.

(NB: you could delete all time-sensitive posts, like one's related to news articles. On Philosophistry, 50% of the posts could be recycled regardless of time)

What do the colors in the blogfabric mean?

First open up the color table. These are the 200 some odd html color names which can correspond to actual hex codes in HTML (betcha didn't know there were so many of them).

Anyways, while color selection is more of an Ouiji-board-like process there is method behind the madness.

Depth of Hues
Deeper hues mean that I am under a higher-intensity of emotion. Lighter hues mean that I am more relaxed and meditative. For example, if I posted something with "lavenderblush" in the Reds column, that would mean I'm fairly passive at that moment. versus "orangered" indicating I'm fired up, charged, ready to go.

Continue reading...

I made this site map for Philosophistry using my blogfabric thing. My hands were shaky from playing halo and I was kinda wired, so it was a brief flash of insight. yes!

I go here and I sort of let my eyes just scan and pan across the page, seeing where they naturally want to stumble into. Consider it like a fancy ouiji board. I also consider the existing blogfabric, in case I want to lean toward some continuity. but generally speaking, if the time inbetween posts is short enough, the colors shouldn't differ too widely, or if you're being unnatural.

Man, everytime I upgrade my blog-strategy or the type of content I post, I find that there already exists a community of people doing the same thing.

For example, I'm trying to do this thing where I draft articles first, stew on them for a little while, and then I post them. But, now that I start to pay attention to this, I find that there's a world of essayists constantly pumping out analysis on all sorts of topics.

Continue reading...

I'm just now starting to meet my physical blog neighbors. I can already start to see a virtual community forming with all the trappings of communities in the real world: neighbors and neighborhoods. The blogosphere is just aching for someone to bring the killer app that combines physical location and the opportunity to expand your identity through mediums like blogging, and technologically through RSS. I can imagine an RSS/Blog chat that would just be AIM + your away message on steroids. Someone ought to layer friendster, xanga, and IM ... I see a hot start-up waiting to happen here.

I worked with Trepia for a bit to implement this, but they were more interested in people dating than sharing their lives. Check out their app design though, I think they're on the right track.

When it comes to diary entries or self-unveilings on this blog, my goal is not merely to just therapeutically vent, but to exposit different ways of self-expression. I may not be a unique individual, but when I go the extra bit to release my private ruminations, I'm hoping to bring a novel perspective to the art of reflection. i.e. I'm trying to reach beyond the simple, "dear diary..." or "why is it that blah blah"; I make an effort to trek far along the aesthetic dimensions available in blog-format.

Continue reading...

Yesterday, The Other Philip, Mr. Greenspun, tries to answer the question "what is the point of blogging" and mentions Nietzsche, Everyone can write like Nietzsche or a Marcus Aurelius, even if few people ever come up with enough clever small ideas to fill a 200-page book. This was just a few days after I made a similar inuendo How can these stodgy professors compete who only know continental philosophy with a specialty in Hume and Nietzsche when the blogosphere is churning out mini-Nietzsches everyday? (link)

Continue reading...