Peter Merholz

I'm pretty sure that whole "pedestrians defining the sidewalks" thing is actually a myth. It may happen sometimes nowaways since the myth is now so widespread but it's associated with so many schools now that I can't possibly tell if any of them actually ever did it. (And I'm pretty sure the majority didn't.) My favourite example is when I hear that Berkley did it which doesn't seem at a plausible given articles like this: http://www.peterme.com/?p=18 that point out how they went out of their way to break the natural flow of pedestrians.

Great quote, thank you. A buddhist blog [1] attributes it to Shirdi Sai Baba, and notes the phrase is also attributed to the Quakers. [also, 2] ("Before you speak, ask yourself: Is it kind, is it true, is it necessary, does it improve upon the silence?") [3] cites it as a Spanish proverb. 1: http://thebuddhistblog.blogspot.com/2009/01/does-it-improve-upon-silen… 2: http://www.peterme.com/archives/000047.html 3: http://quotes.prolix.nu/Proverbs/

Then there'd be two ways to view the word "tagging." One is the UI and organization style you popularized through del.icio.us. The other is the common English gerund of "to tag", which is the way Common Tag is using it. Maybe it would have been better for them to call it Common Label... Re: common "tags" through a shared namespace -- seems like it'd be a good thing to do and would increase the relevancy of our stuff to search engines. Would Google actively support Common Tag or does Google support it naturally through RDF indexing? This approach also reminds me to review the debates on Ontology. http://www.peterme.com/archives/000558.html I would like to implement some kind of semantic marking for the data on my web site. If not Common Tag, what's the best way to say "this is an Author who has written that" or "this is regarding the Terminator movie (1984) directed by Cameron..."?

A criticism of Shirky's essay, which IIRC was fair: http://www.peterme.com/archives/000558.html I'm fascinated with tagging, ontology and organizing information, and consider current methods badly flawed; so much so that I tried to make a startup out of my ideas (turned out to be too complex/ambitious). My conclusion was that improving on existing systems is possible, but will require an awful lot of effort. The way forward, IMHO, is a kind of probabalistic ontology, based on mining lots of data combined with careful use of human intelligence. Unfortunately that's as far as I got with the idea, though I hope someone else can make more progress than I did. Improving the ability to organize information seems to me to be a crucial problem that gets far too little attention, probably because it is a very hard problem. I will be surprised and disappointed if the best we can do 10 years from now is just search, categorisation and tagging.

> I really curious about how mac user before google exists find them out. Before Google existed, software came with manuals. You buy software in a fancy box, but within the box there's not just a CD/floppy disks, there's also a large tome of written material teaching you how to use it. You would sit down, read through it, and learn to use the software. It is more of a testament to humanity's decreasing attention span that users now demand UIs to be discoverable without reading anything. Take a look at someone's discovery of the original Macintosh user manual: http://www.peterme.com/2007/08/27/thoughts-on-and-pics-of-the-original…

They should send a bottle of wine to Peter Merholz :) http://www.peterme.com/archives/00000205.html