Recently in tech Category

Usually I just don't write anything and don't tell anyone. This time I'm letting everyone know. Don't expect any writing from me on here for a month or two.

Why? Well I mentioned before I really want to change blogging software and haven't gotten around to it. Now I'm sick of dealing with all the comment spam I've been getting. So I'm turning off comments (I'll try to leave them on on this post) and changing software and doing a mini-facelift. Please come back and see me in a month or so.

In the meantime, you can keep up with what I'm doing by following me on twitter, looking at my pictures on flickr, or follow everything in one place using SocialThing! (which AOL just acquired). Or you could always e-mail me -- I might even write back.

Oh and today is my dad's birthday. Happy 70th Birthday Dad!

Last weekend I went with my parents to the Smithsonian Folklife Festival. For those of you not familiar with the festival it's a yearly festival downtown on the mall that celebrates the living culture of states and nations. Every year a different nation, state, region or theme is picked. This year is all about Texas (the state), Bhutan (a country in the eastern Himalayas, bordered by China and India), and NASA (who is celebrating 50 years).

I think my mom was a little surprised when I asked if they were going to go this year and if they were, if I could come along. Admittedly it was not one of my favorite things to be dragged to growing up -- I remember it being hot and humid and crowded and boring. The heat, humidity, and the crowds were all the same, but I had more patience for listening and learning than I did growing up and it wasn't nearly as boring as I remember -- they had a ton of activities for kids this year (I don't know if they had the same thing when I was growing up or if I was too shy to want to participate). We had some interesting conversations with monks from Bhutan and engineers from NASA.

This year as part of the festival, the smithsonian has started the 2008 Smithsonian Folklife Festival Documentation Project group on flickr for people to share their photos taken at the festival.

The 2008 Smithsonian Folklife Festival Photo Sharing Project strives to strengthen both the mission of the Smithsonian Folklife Festival to promote cultural democracy, visitor participation, and cross-cultural conversation and the Smithsonian Photography Initiative's mission to document how photography plays an integral role in our lives and throughout the Smithsonian.

If you have a chance, check out some of the great pictures being posted to the group on flickr. It's really neat being able to see the festival from so many points of views and perspectives.

The Smithsonian has also joined The Commons project on Flickr. The commons got a brief mention in my blog in my tagging post but deserves a greater mention. As stated on flickr:

The key goals of The Commons on Flickr are to firstly show you hidden treasures in the world's public photography archives, and secondly to show how your input and knowledge can help make these collections even richer.

If you haven't taken some time to explore the commons, you should. There are some great photos reflecting our nation's and our world's past. So much of this content was hidden away or only viewable from a single location. Now it's available to everyone. How great is that?

It's naked day!

To know more about why styles are disabled on this website visit the Annual CSS Naked Day website for more information.

Last week I had the opportunity to hear Thomas Vander Wal speak. Thomas coined the term "folksonomy" which describes the collaborative tagging and organizing of content on the web. Thomas' presentation was very inspiring and got me thinking about a lot of things. One of which was how I (and my friends) use tags.

Tagging is a way or organizing information in a way that's meaningful to the user and others. It's a way of helping people find and re-find information. For example, if you look at my photo library on flickr. There are close to 3,000 photos I have uploaded so far. Let's say I'm looking for a picture of a moose I took in alaska. Looking through nearly 3000 pictures to find a moose, doesn't sound like a lot of fun. I tagged all the pictures I took in Alaska with the tag alaska. That bring the total down to 600. Getting better. But searching for the tags alaska and moose gets me 14 results. From there it's pretty easy to find the shot I was looking for.

Another use for tagging is to group together like information. For instance, last summer at BarCamp DC, signs were hung up to tag asking participants to tag blog posts, photos, etc with barcamp, barcampdc and barcampwashingtondc. Searching for these tags provides a set of results that gives you a pretty comprehensive overview of the day's events from many different perspectives.

I tag for my own find-ability first -- names of people or animals, the event, and anything else there is a chance I might want to find later (a particular toy the dogs are playing with, the quarters Cisco unwrapped one morning, etc.). I usually add some generic tags ("golden retriever" for Cisco) for the benefit of others looking for something. A lot of my research for things is coming from non-traditional sources, videos and photos of products uploaded by average people have weighed into decisions for a few purchases I've made.

If you're not tagging your online content: photos, blog posts, videos, etc., I highly recommend it. If you are, I'm interested to hear how you choose to tag things (and if you ever have the impulse to tag other people's content).

As a somewhat related note. If you haven't seen the Library of Congress photos on flickr, you should check them out. It's neat to be able to view these photos that they've made public. And they are encouraging the public to help with the metadata on the images, making them that much more valuable.