I meant to mention this on the last show, but if you're at all interested in folksonomies, you need to take a listen to Clay Shirky's presentation entitled "Ontology is Overrated: Links, Tags, and Post-hoc Metadata."

Two quick teasers from the summary: "Ontology, far from being an ideal high-order tool, is a 300-year-old hack, now nearing the end of its useful life. The problem ontology solves is not how to organize ideas but how to organize things -- the Library of Congress's classification scheme exists not because concepts require consistent hierarchical placement, but because books do."

"As we have learned from the Web, when data is decoupled from physical presence, it is fluid enough to be grouped differently by different readers, and on different days. The Web's main virtue, in handling data, is to transmute organization from an a priori, content-based judgment to one that can be ad hoc, context-based, socially embedded, and constantly altered. The Web frees us from needing to argue about whether The Book of 5 Rings "is" a business book or a primer on war -- it is plainly both, and not only are we freed from making that judgment firmly or in advance, we are freed from needing to make it explicit at all."

This is hot stuff, folks. Guaranteed to greatly inspire some, while boiling the blood of many others.

Update: If you want a little taste of Clay Shirky on folksonomies, listen to the April 7 edition of Future Tense. I still strongly recommend the longer presentation.

Today I attended the Kentucky SOLINET Users Group (KSUG)/Kentucky Virtual Library Users Group (VLUG) Joint Conference (conference link is .pdf).

It involved the business meetings of the two sponsoring groups, updates from some relevant organizations, and breakout afternoon sessions. I attended a session covering new databases offered by the Kentucky Virtual Library (KYVL).

Not super-educational overall, but if I learned anything today, it's that I'm not particularly adept at networking. Granted, I'm not feeling particularly well and am not my usual outgoing self. Nevertheless, I wasn't really feeling any connection to the other attendees or much compulsion to forge those connections. I did meet a few interesting folks, but couldn't muster the determination to engage some of the bigwigs in attendance (such as the State Librarian).

Oh, and tomorrow is our dreaded summer reading kickoff and I have the privilege of being supervisor all day long. Joy.

It's been little more than a week since I promised I would meet all of you faithful readers some day. What a difference a week makes. It appears I will finally make my first step in that direction as I have been selected to attend the 2004 Computers in Libraries conference. I could hardly contain my excitement when I got the call.

So who's with me? Who will I get to meet in a month's time? And what social events have been/need to be coordinated? I'm up for anything and everything.

I tend to oscillate between spending a lot of time online reading blogs and such and reading the traditional codex. Lately, I'm prioritizing texts in book form, which has been a nice change of pace. I recently did something that I've never done before (at least as my memory holds) - I read three non-fiction books in a row.

After finally finishing Cryptonomicon and being something of a puzzle geek, I had to read Simon Singh's Code Book for a little further probing into cryptography and ciphers. Then my reserve for The Meaning of Everything came in and I devoured that with great fervor (again, puzzle geek, who, not coincidentally, has a fondness for dictionaries). And having just finished Fast Food Nation, I'm left with only fiction. Well, actually I have Dave Eggers' A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, which is cataloged as a biography. Anyway, I'm soliciting suggestions for interesting non-fiction. I'm open-minded, but not overwhelmingly patient, so engaging subject matter and style are key. My fiction list goes on for miles - hardly need advice there.

In order to maintain the high pace of reading that I've generated for myself, I've returned my Currently Reading section (courtesy of allconsuming.net) to the sidebar. I figure that if you bookhounds can see what I'm reading, I'll be more compelled to demonstrate some progress or be risk being seen as an underachiever. And we wouldn't want that, would we?

Steven posits that future aggregators should be heading in the direction of providing only relevant information rather than making us do all the filtering ourselves.

I don't know Steven. I can't say I'm interested in aggregators that make relevance decisions on my behalf. All I want is a single mechanism to look at all *potentially* relevant sources. I can only imagine how much I would miss if what I read became based on an algorithm, even if that algorithm is constantly updated to reflect my reading patterns. Maybe it would be helpful if the program was able to highlight items it believed were *more* relevant, leaving the ultimate decisions to the end-user. I think the future of librarianship is still predicated on the idea that humans will always be the most subtle filters of relevance. Now an aggregator that helps me locate and identify potentially relevant sources, that would be something.

On the advice of Simon, I've signed up for The Informed Librarian Online, a free newsletter dedicated to "Professional Reading for the Information Professional." Quoting Simon: "It's a monthly e-newsletter which provides links to the contents pages of various library and info science journals. It also links to the full-text or abstracts if they are available online." In addition, they provide a list of recently published books of potential LIS interest. Many of the listed journals are of the variety listed daily on Peter Scott's blog, but collated for your convenience.

Steven has done more to expose this blog than anyone on the planet, so I am happy to return the favor. Today, he posts about a completely web-based conference taking place from October 20-24. The Learning Times Library Online Conference 2003 features a variety of interesting presenters (including a keynote from the man himself).

Unfortunately, as an unemployed information professional, these sorts of things are well outside my budget. I'll be lucky to afford a tank of gas to get to my interview. But I digress.

The conference board is still seeking submissions for papers or other deliverables to present virtually. Apparently, a reduced registration fee exists for those with accepted submissions and it's a chance to learn some cool online presentation tools. Definitely worth a look.