t-mobile local coverage check

T-Mobile has released an application which allows you to see the GSM coverage for a specific area in the US: T-Mobile Personal Coverage Check. Here's the map for our neighborhood:

Taxonomies and Tags: From Trees to Piles of Leaves

More on tagging, taxonomies, folksonomies, etc.: Taxonomies and Tags Big concepts contain smaller ones that contain smaller ones yet. Over the millennia, we have fashioned the structures of knowledge in just such tree-like ways, from the departmental organization of universities (liberal arts contains history and history contains ancient Chinese history) to the hierarchy of species. The idea that knowledge is shaped like a tree is perhaps our oldest knowledge about knowledge. When it comes to innovation on the Internet, metadata is becoming the new content.

But traditional taxonomic trees aren’t something we can throw away without a thought. They are an amazingly efficient way of organizing complexity because they enable us to focus on one aspect (e.g., that’s an apple) while keeping a universe of context (it’s a fruit, part of a plant, a type of living thing) in the background, ready for access.

Traditionally, people have been loath to attach metadata to objects, because it felt like a chore without immediate benefit.

Both trees and faceted systems specify the categories, or facets, ahead of time. They both present users with tree-like structures for navigation, letting us climb down branches to get to the leaf we’re looking for. Tagging instead creates piles of leaves in the hope that someone will figure out ways of putting them to use[...]

Market populism in the folksonomies debate

In Market populism in the folksonomies debate : Atomiq, Gene Smith compares the discussion (ranting, evangelism, hysteria) about tagging and folksonomies to the concept of Market Populism, the notion that markets are inherently democratic. At times it's been hard to separate out the practical enthusiasm for tags and folksonomies (which I share) from the ideological enthusiasm which suggests that tags are the One True Way.

On new media subsuming the old

Next: The Google Street Journal

Working at a major metropolitan newspaper these days can feel a bit like working for the East German Politburo, circa 1988. It's a good gig with great benefits, and people seek you out at cocktail parties, but you have this sense that your days are numbered.

Old media continues to fret over the rise of new media, the dividing line being the presence (or lack of) in the digital world. Old media continues to garner most of the advertising spend, while new media must make do with $0.01 CPM rates (I wonder what the CPM is for a typical ad in the LA Times or Chicago Tribune these days...oh wait, they don't use CPM but column inches. Hmm.).

Old media continues to lock away online content behind registration screens, and archives behind pay-per-article walls. While I don't have a problem with some sort of registration (they need to make money somehow, and with people frequently zapping their ads, registration is at least one way to gauge their audience), registration blocks these sites from appearing in search results. I don't know anyone who uses a portal these days, at least on the open Internet. My portal is either my bloglines page or the results from a Google search. I go days without reading a given site's home page, RSS and Atom give me deep links to the content I want to read. For all the fights over deep linking over the past decade, there seems to be no concern about the loss due to deep linking from syndicated feeds.

I read more online these days than I used to, I credit (or blame?) Bloglines for increasing my content throughput. I skim hundreds, if not the low thousands, of articles per day, opening new Firefox tabs for the articles which seem interesting (which means I still read the article in the context of the web page, unless the gist of the article can be had from the content in the syndicated feed).

The only problem I have is when I fall behind: it's easy to fall way behind. Clearly I don't want to sift through and read two-three-four days of syndicated feeds to identify the ten or twenty I'd have read had I seen them initially. Instead I need some way to identify these key articles… attention.xml (see: here, here, or here) might be a solution (basically, from what I've read, it's another feed of sorts, except it is a feed of your feeds and articles in those feeds, and possibly a rating or "read/not-read" rating attached to each article. Or not.).

I wonder if the decline (alleged, but I believe it) in old media audience share is reflected in advertiser's success rates?

I blame the French

… for making me sick. I've spent the past week with an on-again, off-again head cold which both Lisa and Nancy also appear to have picked up on our sojourn in Paris. Admittedly it could have been the flight over to Heathrow, or the soggy weather in London on the 15^th, but it's much easier (and more American) to just blame the french.

Oh well, it gives me an excuse to drink NyQuil on a regular basis.

While in London, I picked up some good CDs, and even considering the exchange rate, they were cheaper to buy in London than in the US (using Amazon.com as my reference point).

I picked up From Croydon to Cuba: An Anthology by Kirsty Maccoll for £18.99. MacColl sang solo and with The Pogues, and had been married to Steve Lillywhite, known for producing many U2 albums. She was killed in 2000 by a drunken speedboater in Cozumel, Mexico while swimming with her children.

Speaking of The Pogues, I picked up The Ultimate Collection for £13.99. It's two CDs, with the second consisting of 22 tracks recorded live at the Brixton Academy.

Also bought: Echoes: The Best of Pink Floyd for £11.99; Buddha Lounge, and Arabic Chillout for £4.99 a piece.

All are being ripped to the mp3 library and stored for posterity.