[[David Weinberger holds forth!]] [[excuse the bad typing; this was done blind at the dinner table; will clean up later. --ed]] ...which to me, is closer grammatically to a qustion mark. now an ellipsis: ... I was trying to think about how tto talk abou toto this group.. I wanted to do a presentation with my eyes closed, to be a little less intimidated. I'm going to talk about 3 unrelated topics... b/c I think there's actually some formal similarity among them... I realized that in talking abou 3 topics relatively briefly... I'meffectively blogging. So this is so disjointed, I"m going to have to announce "I am done with this topic..." the 3 topics are: tags/taxonomy, ethics/phil of morality, and blogging and...I'll be pretty much done. so. first, about taxonomy, in part b/c for the past couple of weeks I've been wroking on a perpetual book proposal... it's always going to be done in 2 weeks. it sup to 25-0 words for a 8---- word book. it has someething to do with the fact aqhat when yu organize information, the princiles you use are radically differenct from what you use in the real world... but the real world, for 2500 years i t's been how we do it. the book's abbout these human institutions in comparision with reality] over the past 2 weeks, the hot topic has been tags... the tagorati/digirati/cyberati.. just the 'rati. tanks to techonrati. and there's sth really interesting going on: thetraditiona context is the way we organize stuff; the canonical way is the DDS. which organizs all human knowledge so well that we kno exactly where to place things on the shelf... so it ecomes not just an alhpa list of books by author but a map of the lanscape of knowkledge itself... as dewey decided. but he was this 23 yfryr old punk... lut of school for [n] years wehtn to this nartrowminded school, tiny christian school... he got out and decided, that would be ag ood thing, I'll just organize all o fknoowledge. he decided not entirelty on his own, to do the decimal thing, so each of them would get s ubcaterogry, he took 1000 integers to divide up. and it's amazing! when you lok at the classification, they're wacky at best. so when you look at the 200s, that's religion. 99 of the integers are given to christian topics.. jews get 296, moslems and religions derived of islam, get 297... and the buddhists, they're to the right of the decmal point. so you ask yourself, why hasn't this been fixed? the DDS is owned by thOCLC... why haven't the libratians, who clearly understand this is an issue, fixed it? tha anwers: b/c you'd have to sed thousands of local librarians in with razor blades to reink the back of the books... and you've have to do a lot fshuffling... you'd have to deethrone a couple of things and reoriganize them... but then you'd have the jews for jesus complaining, and the jews would ghrow them out immediately, and you'd have the bahai'i nd the scientologists... ahem. of course I do not speak fot ethe b erkman Center... it's the disclaimer if... we don't all want to get rattlesnakes in our mailbox [john p: there will be a speical meetinf for this thursday] you'd never ever get this org of knowledge right... it can't be done, /c ther ins't a sinle universal way of organizing this stuff... taxonomies aren't reflections of nature... andtools aren't reflections of what we want to tod so along comes tagging. and it's been around forever of coures, b/c a couple of sites in particular are putting it to good use... the first one is delicious. how many of you are using delicions? del.icio.us.... (10+ raise their hands_ it's joshua schachter, and his address is sth like burri.to so t seems to like these sort of naming thnigs. so it's not a new idea, but delicious gives s a reason to do it. it's a really simple site, really birlliant... at one leverl, you find a page you lifeke, you click a button... and now on delciions (At your page) that link is recorded. and you can type in a tag, any ltext you want, as you build up a list of hundredds - or thousands' twenty thousand, I think josh has. so that's useful. what makes it excitig is that it's a social site, so you can see other people's bookmarks... but what makees it really really exciting is that you can get people out of htew ays, and see all the pages that have been tagged with a single word... so you might want to se eall pages thgged with "Ghana" (of you'r ethan) you can get it as an arss feed... so you can go into your aggregator, an ddescribethat tag... so you can see what pgaes hae been tagged by the wisdom of the web.. likewise there's ssite called flickr, which is flicker without the e... [john p " look today; we'll be on flickr [ethan - we already are] look at webcred, and you'l see all the photos already there, and tagged] maybe someone will upload pictures of kittens and tag them webcred, but that's the web. you'll get pictures that you on't see anywhere else, related to iraq... (look at the irq tag... it's phenomenal) and out of this magically comes a social benefit.. whichto a large degree is true... we do know that people are hugely resistant to sicla tagging if there's no immediate benefit... when we tga, we are awarey that we are engaging in a social act... so we tag not only b/c we want to find it, but b/c we want to build this thing... we're also doing i b/cwe're building together somthig greater than the value that ay one of us gets out of it on our own... so what we're doing is building in flickr and delicious and technorati... which started noticing and indexing the tags in delicious, and weblogs as well... is we're beinning to see apps that take advantae of this. a layer of the web that wasn't htere before that's purely huan, an asolutely human layer goi gform trees that are crarefully organized (cats carefully made by somebody else, like the dDS) to "well, what's the best human way of making sense of this?" whatever, I will do that. from taxonoic trees, we're going to piles of lieaves... [with multiple tags (audience comment) which is really important] even you do not have to decide what is the bese;t we're dbuilding this pile of leaves that we will later figure out what to do with/ripe for inovation (a new layer of structure) btw, I think ofwhat this means for journalims and the meida one of the things_ is the notion of what countsa s a story is sth the media has necessarily had to decide... limited resources/paper/front page. now we are going to have anybody decide what's a sotyr, even multiply. now I want to talk about ethics.. philosophilcal ethics. many many eyars ago, I used to teach ;philosophy.. occasionally phil of moralit. and I found it increibly frusttrating. b/c the normal way yuo u teach the phil of ethics... what happenss is you give students a set of the most diff iclut ethical problems tht civ has ever faced... "what do you think about abortion?" you have to pick issues where you know there are two side s and they'll never get resolved. "if there are two of you ina lifeboat, which one of them do you eat?" and then if a student starts to get resolved about this, your job is to unhorse her. you have to say "well, did you actually think of" and you known them off! the students learn that there's no point in deciding anytinhng, b/c nothing's right... so they all become relativists and the world goes to hell. jay r - it change hwen you get tenure, though wd - but I idnd't get tenure, so I did something wroing. so a statement about the world that's factual... if you believe it, that's fine. a statement that has an 'ought' in it... if you beliee it and you don't do that -- then you DON'T really believe it. if you're going to study morality, you have to coome to terms with that. In freshman morality, there are two basoic statements: you have to establish a set of principle. the other track is, to estblish consequences. I don't care about principles,, I wnt to make the world better. so you end up with consequentialist philosophies like existentialism. the way to succeed in [it] is to come up with an idea, a brand, thtat is original. so you want to make sure that at every conference you go to, you prsent this brand... and you don't change your mind. if ou're an academic piloso[her, yuou never ever change your mind... [well, not if you're one of the great philosophers, but for mst of them...] what you do with teachers when teaching is the same thing you do when thinking through it: utilitarianis says that that which brings the most happiness or good, that's what you should do. so that works pretty well, caseu that eans yu shoulddo these things and not htose things... but don't get hung up on this, kindsds, cause then you might end up being moreal.... I'll I'll give you an example. the towns happiess goes up enough after an injusite that the personal unhappiess of one guy is overwhelmed, and then you ay 'that's what happens if you purseu utilitarianism'... you ocome up with principles, ande ask, 'does it put the good primnciples in the good bucket and the bad ones in the bad bucket'? if it doesn't, then thy're bad. [sth about nazis[ but there's an initla sense about how we get to identify these inisial buckets, what's good and bad... if you rock backwards and your dog's tail is lying under the rocking chair, and the dog screeches, then you rock forward again... and OI don't want to argue about thiat. if you disagree, then I really don't want to talk to you...ok? it's not really about complicated sympathy, "let me put myself in the dog's mind..." it's more about putting yourself in a shared world with someone else, and recognizing that that person matters... not just to think, b/c this isn't just an intellectual activity, but to care about the world the way the other preson does. [this is all cribbed from MArtin /HHeidegger, btw, who *was* a nazi]. so I might as well sit down... So there ws this guy Richard Roarty, one of the greats [Who! Whoo!] and he says something realy interesting about this. HJE says, historically we've looked to religion as our authority for moralit, and then to philosophy... and now we look to novels, and htis is a good ting... and ew care about the world, the way that it matters to somebody else... tihs is how we worldk out our morals now, and that's proper, b/c at the root of our morality is this shared caring. this is an advancel... b/c it makes morality more of our own, and gets back to what'w at heart. so I'm donwe with that, and now I'm going to talk about blogging. [audience: is this two or three?]] [audninece: is this small pieces loosely joined?] [jw - this is miscellaneous pieces, hardly joined.] so the kindds are all blogging now. and tihs conf has borned witness to the fact that... um, blogging - and Ive been a journalist, I still occasionally count myself as a journalist, neverhteless I'm speaking as a blogger here. I think I undersatn hwy loging looks to the media like journalistm and like media. and that's absolutely right for some of the people in the room, some of the borderline journalists/bloggers in the room. but ot dpesn't olook right to the marjoiryt of bloggers. bloggers are like the media... they are essentially in a one-to-many relationship with thei rreadership. that's the role the media is in. biut that s (I'm gonn aput my fingers togehter here)( *that much* of the blogosphere. the other 5-10millinoi here ha s nothing to o with that. so I want to talk about that for a bit. blogs matteer b/c they have a url.. they have a peranent address. so often on the internet, a little tiny thing makes a HUGE difference. what that does for them is it gives them a place, it gves them permanence. almost everything thatsdistinctive and valuavble about weblogs has to do with thei r permanent place... b/c at that place, we build public scells... I... my weblog is my web presence. it is who I am on the web... it is not my journal. I"ve written a journal... I' still write a newsletter. it s' different. my weblog is ME. it's all anybody knows about me on the ewb. it's ME ON THE WEB, oit's MYSELF. I"m writing myseelf into existence. I do it over time; I get to k onw the people I'm readoinbb/c I'm read thinm writ themselves into existence over tie. I thnk an important thing to remember is that we'rewriting ourselves into existence, but we're writing badly. now a lot of us are great writers, but that's not what I mean. A number of us write many times a week, sonme only once a week... and that's borderline.... but w're writing os quickly, and we need it to be so perfect, so well writtern, tat we can't let it go until it's been proofread, and fact-checked and polished... if that's the way you feel you can't witrte a weblog, b/c you'll be revisiong the reviison of your revision, 3 weeks later. sthen yo can't participate in the life of ghe blogosphere, which is writing and exchanging back and forth. so tere are a number of differences in blogging: 1) it's a less protectd form of writing, more personlaly visible 2) it encourages an ethos of forgiveness... now the blogosphere occasionally, like this wee,k, is not a model of forgiveness. but there is a differen perception of forgiveness... usually you don't write back to the blogger and sya "ooh! you made a spelling efrror! hahahahah" if that's how your'e gonna be, there's nothing left. so there is an ethos of forgiveneess on weblogs... [audience: if you're human] joho: taking back cointorl... my ext point is about weblogs and conversatins. these writinss are veyr onversational; not only do we have comments, but we are frequently in conv with other webloggers. just tdoay I saw this great post [by Dave], and I write about it it's slowe conv than around the tabl,ebut it's oimportant conversation. some of you mentioned in preconf mailings Herbert Gans [?] -- he talks about multiperspectival news (the beginning of a limerick... "you don't even have to choose... [zephyr: fuse]) blogs add something important to that. ye,s, of course, multiple perspetives (which have always been out there) but now we have something we've never had before: now all these perspectives are ohut there, they're talking to one another if I want to know aout something important I can go to a weblog, follow the links... I will find, not just a buddhist talking about the DDS and a moslem talking about it, but I waill also find a bunch of these poele talking with one another about this, I think you're right/wrong, here's how we deal with it... why you genius/cat=lover, here's what you're writing; ... osome of the heft and value of ojbjectivity can now be had through multiple ubjectivity, which is a little different from mltiperspectivla news... we're tlaking to one another. so what happens in this blogging worls is that we are together uklidng this world of meaning that's shot through with humanness, with human perspetive, which none of us can escape.. objectivity is a methodology, whch helps to isolate some perspctive sof it, but you can't escape form [it] blogs help to build this wworld: human meaning being built through conversaiton. partr 4) what do these qualities ihave in common? what quapities do these have in common? in tagging, in taxonomies, ethics and taxonoy what we're getting is an infusion of human meaning in sphere that were formally considered to be aoart from and guiding us... whether it's formal taxonomies, or principles staingnig before us... that are being given to us, as Dewey was ginving his categories to us, and ARistotle, by discerning giving his categories to us... discerning the categories of the world. nevertheless they are not ours, heses are thded atum, the stuff that is given. likewise with the media, we've been sitting on the couch, facing forward, and it's been given to us. well, that's not going to happen anymore. we are infusing the world with LOT emiankng, andit's incredibly messy, unbelievably idsorganized... of coures it's been transitioned in all of these arieas... so ew'ere oing to have conerences where peopl rpetty much understnad eachother butnot completely... but I'm not sure that htis is a temporary mess.. we're builkding thiese piles of lezave, infused with uman meaning, and we want to build tehse into things we haven't though to before: pov, tags, we're engaged in a global project of taking down the trees and rolling in the leaves... and I don't kno tat on the other side of this transition, where typcially thigns get organized, that we'll have the same kind of organization with a different set of ideas/people in place. I think maybe this iwll be a transition into enourmous, chaoitc, creative, hjuman mess. and the world will be so much better off for it. thanks. [that's it! tomorrow morning, eight-thirty...] [audience - that's funier that ayhting david said...]