I saw an interesting presentation online today on Social Business Design. One of the slides points out that in business today a person must "always be on."

This reminded me of my days in the theatre. Some of the actors that I worked with were the kind of divas who were "always on" - always acting. Expending energy to make everyone - including themselves - that they were among the best in their craft, popular, funny: talented. Many of them crashed, hard. As Elizabeth Gilbert mentions in her Ted talk, an alarmingly high percentage of creative types have a short lifespan.

Before jumping on the bandwagon, have a plan for your career and business social networking. Stick to a schedule or set contextual boundaries.

Ubiquitous computing, omni-present social networks, smartphones, augmented reality - being firm in one's choice to disconnect is critical to sanity.

I am reviewing a presentation I am giving tomorrow night to the San Andreas chapter of the Special Libraries Association in San Jose CA. In it I talk a bit about embedded librarians - information specialists who do not necessarily work in a traditional library, but with a specific group within an organization. I am encouraging attendees at the event to consider the new career opportunities available to them thanks to semantic technologies - careers around knowledge organization and representation. I liken it to Database Journalism, which seems to be having a bit of a renaissance. This is a practice that began in the 1950s, where journalists would use computers and databases to retrieve and analyze data of interest. The semantic web stack is giving librarians a similar kind of renaissance in the realm of information management.

So I thought to myself, why not embed journalists? Newspapers are struggling, but how else do we get news? We could get it if each entity was responsible for managing its own data. But organizations need someone to manage that data, and report it out.

But wait you say - aren't those folks called PR people? And, don't they put a spin on things?

Yes. And that's the last thing we need. We need people who can remain unbiased and report fairly. How many organizations would be willing to allow a 3rd party to roam its halls? With appropriate trade secret protections, would an embedded journalist serve as much as an ethics officer as reporter?

This would likely be a less than full time position for most organizations. But it would have the trust and authority that comes with the organization providing the journalistic staff. Could the NYTimes or the WSJ embed a reporter in firms on Wall Street? Or would it be too tempting to cheat?

Perhaps I'm too much an optimist. I certainly don't want Big Brother either. Anyway, it's just an idea, and ideas are good.

I live in a quiet upscale town in PA. It's nice here, not too much different than the places that my husband and I grew up in. Big mall, specialized grocers, a PTA with co-presidents and 4 vice presidents. Sometimes I feel out of place being a working Mom, but everyone is generally friendly, and I don't get close enough to get splashed with guilt that I can't be a classroom parent or pack leader.

But sometimes things just get silly. Like last week. During recess, some of the moms who go and play with the kids saw a hunter leave the woods behind the school. They saw no weapons, just a guy in camouflage and orange gear. They told the principal immediately. The principal called the cops. The cops searched the woods. Yeah...

My husband hunts, and has become quite the responsible sportsman, both in terms of safety and security and responsible harvesting. Sometimes he just goes to the woods to run his bird dog, and track game - learn where they bed, where they eat, where they drink. Sometimes I think he just likes the peace and quiet away from a household with small children!

What if this man in the woods near the school were just out scouting for the weekend? Even if he wasn't, I have never seen any "No Hunting" signs on this area, nor am I aware of any laws/ordinances regarding hunting in the area. Nor do I believe he was inside any buffer zone. I could certainly be wrong.

I don't like being wrong. ESPECIALLY when weapons and children are involved.

If I were this guy, how could I have KNOWN what the rules were, and that there was a school nearby? Augmented reality and the semantic web come to mind. If the local and state laws were modeled in an openly available format, and the ordinance surveys were online, the data could be mashed together, and then combined in an AR mobile app. I could point my smartphone at the woods, and between recognizing the trees as forest, the direction of the user and the location of the user, and overlay could appear saying - "yes, you can hunt here." Or, "Nope, you can't hunt here - it's Wednesday at 10am and there's a school nearby." Even better for the hunters, it could say "yes, you could hunt here, but if you want until tomorrow it should be stocked with fresh game according to observations by friends you trust."

Such an app would have prevented panic at the school, an uncomfortable chat with the police, and ensured a more successful and enjoyable time in nature. It would take some work to get it done. But it's work that people would appreciate.

So I'm reading a post on ReadWriteWeb today about Opera Unite. I like this idea of having my stuff more under my control. I am a fan of hybrid solutions in most cases - those who have heard me talk about metadata/taxonomy/ontology work know that I promote using the machine's for what they do best (consistent, fast, cheap) and the humans for what they do best (creative, careful, expensive). As it would happen, I also watched Rory Sutherland's TED talk from this summer. In it he points out that if we all had a big red button on our wall that put $50 in our pocket (savings) every time we pushed it, then we'd all save more money. It would be easier. I want one! Why can't I have one on my desktop? One that I can click without having to go into my browser, logging into my bank, transferring funds...

Now, I know that I could set up an automatic transfer. But my bank's system is not yet sophisticated enough for me to set up my own rules for WHEN to trigger a savings event. So, I have to use my brain. And I have to go to my browser, and log in... I can either wait for my bank to provide me with usable tools that allow my finer control on my automated transactions, or I can program my own button.

I don't program. Never learned. Automator is still baffling. Greasemonkey, not much better.

Damnit. I have to learn something. Or my bank has to learn something...

So, I either have to put the effort in, or I have to make enough money to be able to influence my bank's decisions. Which means I need to work hard.

And that's the thing I see so many people forgetting. You have to do the work to get to that "greener" pasture on the other side. Is it greener? Is it worth the effort? You have to decide. Sometimes the answer is yes. But either way, you have to earn or be given the privilege and tools to be lazy.

I think I'll keep working on earning it.

Just an idea I wanted to get out of my head before I "lost" it!

As I've written before, the usage of memory palaces fascinates me. And to build one that can be used online as well as off I find even more intriguing! The problem has always been - why would anyone else want to use it?

I was just reading about yet another sentiment analysis startup. Now, the dirty little secret of most sentiment analysis tools is that they have two lists of words - one positive and one negative. They count up the times words on those lists appear in user-generated or professionally generated content, diff the numbers, and voila - we now know if your brand, product or (insert concept here) is successful or not! A very shallow solution all in all. Even if you do understand that in Boston "wicked" is a positive intensifier.

Here's the idea, which needs lots of work to gain more depth than the above solution. What if we could connect the dots in a memory palace with our sentiment about a concept we're storing in it? Over time, build a personal library of positive and negative images, metaphors and other connections that have meaning at the personal level, and therefore more accurately indicate our sentiment regarding something? Is that possible? Then of course you'd need some logic to compare one person's sentiment with someone else, based on the patterns of each individual's behavior. That's an algorithm I'd love to see.

And what if that memory palace was served up as part of my APML, to help refine my interactions with other sources of content? It could also be fascinating to see how other people use the same images as I do for similar or disparate purposes - just as symbologists discover different uses for the same symbols in different cultures and times.

Eek, I just started thinking about trust too... Apparently this is not going to be a post with answers! Quite a data model I've got going on in my head. Thankfully I find the process itself intriguing. :)

The "Friend Facts" app is wending it's way through Facebook. Yet again we get to see pretty pie charts detailing the mundane facts of our inner circle. Facts we already knew, we just never visualized graphically. Or perhaps never really thought about too much.

It raises many interesting questions: has our privacy been breached? Well, not really. We all volunteered the data that has been aggregated. We are only visualizing our friend's stats, who have it in their power to change what we can see of their profiles. And, as I said before, it's mostly stuff we already knew about our friends on some level. Unless of course we're a "super-friender" and add anyone who says "Bless You" when we sneeze! ;)

What bothers me most about this app is that I have to allow some 3rd party to analyze MY data in a simple, straightforward manner. Why shouldn't I be able to do it myself? I don't want to click on each of my friend's profiles, cut and paste their data into a spreadsheet and then create charts. That's ridiculous. It's typed data - meaning that each bit has context - we know that Female/Male/I Don't Know are to indicate "Gender." It's linked data - meaning that we can move from dataset to dataset (in this case a person profile) via a simple link: this is my friend.

Why do I have to allow access to my account? Access that will then be used to 'improve my interaction with ads' and then 'anonymously aggregate' my data with millions of other people's data for research and analysis resulting in a better experience?!? Has Facebook performed better for me since I allowed this app access? Hell NO! It crashes, asks me to "Try Again" or apologizes as the makers of an app work with Facebook to iron out the kinks. I barely look at the ads. What I care about is that I have a better social networking platform.

Another thing that bugs me is that I can only analyze my Facebook stats using this app. If it's a 3rd party app, why can't I add my Twitter account? (Or MySpace, Orkut, FriendFeed, Flickr or what-have-you?) Even if it WERE NOT powered by a 3rd party app, how user-friendly is it to lock my data up in a proprietary format that I can't access easily? In case you haven't figured it out Facebook, screen-scraping SUCKS.

I won't even start in on my CRUD needs (Create-Read-Update-Delete) between sites. If I update a friend's email on one site, it should update in them all. Based on the rules I choose. But that's another post. :)

OK, enough ranting. I have to go and make sure I successfully removed Friend Facts from my authorized applications list.

Yesterday during a bit of rain my son was watching a Disney channel show I had DVR'd for him. Suddenly, during a commercial, he started giggling uncontrollably, and I couldn't for the life of me understand why. I asked what was funny, and he replied, "They said the 'Suite Life of Zach and Cody' would be coming up next." ??? "OK," I asked, "why is that funny?" "Because this isn't real, and it's not coming on next! They're so silly!" he answered. I tried to explain to him that the DVR wasn't really all that smart, it just recorded what was on at the time. Of course, I then had to wonder just how difficult it would be to have swapped out a time sensitive ad like that, using a little bit of metadata and some rules. It is possible. The entire experience would have been better.

Lots of people will spend countless hours building a taxonomy or ontology to categorize things. Some will put in the effort to build rules for their favorite search engine to classify content. Most will rely on pattern recognition. Rules are hard - but make content experience much better. The old adage still holds - you get out of something what you put into it. The real challenge here is the social engineering - the communicating between teams. In this example, between the networks and the cable television providers. There isn't even a question anymore of having things locked up in proprietary formats; the W3 have provided standards for these tasks.

So, how much work are you going to do today? Me, I'm going to work a little harder.

I was recently asked what my ideal research tool would be. Here are some of the high level ideas I jotted down.

• My ideal research tool would be platform independent. It could very easily switch from my Mac laptop to the Windows PC at the library to my mobile phone, camera or pen scanner.
• It would allow me to very easily highlight or scan the UID (isbn, issn, QR code, bar code - whatever) of the object or class of objects that are the source material. ie, I've got a book that I'm taking notes from, and rather than copying down all of the pertinent citation information, I can scan the bar code and have it added to my personal datastore for me.
• I would be able to clip text (again, highlight or scan) and scrape like data automatically. Adding the resource type would be as simple as selecting a button. eg, I'm researching a person, I highlight their name, and click an icon depicting a headshot, thereby adding the text string to my datastore with the type "person." Over time the system would learn and suggest the right types.
• I could do the same thing with images. Images though could also be tagged quite granularly - I could draw a shape around an object of interest in the image, and tag that.
• All of the system (creator, publisher, software, hardware) metadata would be transferred to my datastore along with the research I choose to add.
• Built in NLP and analytics would give me a leg up on entity extraction, coding and clustering - but only at a high degree of confidence. I'd rather the system ask for my input than guess and mis-categorize something. So that workflow needs to be quick and painless.
• Internet based resources would be scoured for me based on my trust scores of said resources (or my trust in people who trust those resources.)
• Related data from the internet would be returned and organized with a "follow up" indicator. This data would be organized along facets such as electronic resource, physical resource (ie - I'd have to go to it or have it sent to me), fee or free, and all usual descriptive, system and administrative metadata provided.
• Experts in the field would be identified, along with the "proof" of their expertise. My connections to these experts would be delineated to assist with making contact. Their identification should include contact information, web presence, bibliographies and the like.
• It would include image detection - akin to TinEye and/or SnapTell.
• Audio and video should be allowed in the system. Again with the same capture, tag, type, and detection capabilities (Shazam).
• Collaboration capabilities are required. I should be able to set granular permissions at the object level, and easily integrate with any contact network - address book, social network, closed network.
• I should be able to make notes in the system on the data I'm capturing. I should be able to make generic notes, or make notes on a specific set of captured data - a text string, or portion of an image.
• I should be able to make links between objects of any kind, and type those links, and flag them for follow up.
• The datastore should be backed up regularly and automatically.
• I should be able to import tags/schema/ontologies of any kind as well as create my own.
• I should be able to publish any set or subset of my research as linked data with appropriate styling for the human user.

In case you were wondering, I do love Zotero and Zotz, and hope development on those continue. :)

I recently had the opportunity to think about the future of the browser. It was pointed out that presuming it should be a browser was limiting, and so the term user-agent was substituted. What does that mean? It refers to the means by which humans interact with the data, tools and experiences available to them via the internet.

One of the problems with promoting linked open data on the web is the "what's in it for me" question. Most people understand the value of sharing, but most people are too impatient to wait for shared data - of interest to them - to show up to receive value-in-kind. This is not particularly motivating for putting in even the smallest effort at formatting data in a re-usable way. We are a society that wants instant gratification. Frustrating, but all too often it is the case.

As for myself, I want my user-agent to be a memory palace. For a couple of years now I've been poking at the idea of a semantic memory palace. Why? It benefits me and those I share my data with. It helps me to become a more organized, more efficient and more astute person. I can gather data of interest, as I find it, organize it in a way that I personally can use it, and share my tags, provenance information and mashups with whomever I wish. I can use it to learn and re-enforce the memory palace in my head. I can use it, as the Roman orators did, to help deliver more compelling presentations. I can use it in reports, in games, in visualizations. I can learn about the differences between how I think about the world, and how others do; improving my ability to communicate through understanding, opening my mind to new ideas and possibilities thanks to diversity of thought. Simply put, I can improve my memory; halt and hopefully reverse the decay that began when my kids came along!

What is a memory palace? It's a technique for remembering things better, by using visualizations and mnemonic devices. (If you want an excellent study on the topic, check out Frances Yates' book Art of Memory.) First, you choose a "palace" - a home for your memories. It can be a real or imagined, but should be a place you know well. You "place" things to remember in the rooms of your palace, and as you walk from room to room you can collect them in the order you want to remember them in. So, let's say you have a list of groceries - bread, butter, milk - and your palace is your childhood home. At your childhood home, you always entered the side door through a porch, and then into a kitchen, which led into a family room. You could place your grocery list like this: the bread in the porch, the butter in the kitchen, the milk in the family room. Rules for creating palaces can be found by searching for articles on the topic "method of loci." Next you can create a stable list of visualizations for yourself that represent letters and numbers. The image of an apple to represent "A," the image or a bird to represent "B," or a line, vesica piscis, triangle, square etc. to represent the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4. Unusual combinations are more memorable as they invoke our emotions, so to help us remember our grocery list we might place the image of a bird, carrying a vesica piscis with its feet and clutching a stick of butter in its beak in our kitchen. This way we can remember we need two sticks of butter, and it's the second thing on our list. This is a gross oversimplification of the technique; hopefully you get the idea!

So what do I want my user-agent to do? I want to be able to set my own images - folk tag data in my [browser/repository] to one of these categories. I want to be able to drag and drop the data into a room in my palace, and create as many instances of my palace as I need. I want to be able to recall the data at any time, by palace, by room, by image. I want it to capture provenance data automatically (source, date/time). I want it to let me add keyword tags if I so desire, or choose a schema to add other kinds of data - say Dublin Core or FOAF, as needed. I want to tag with sounds - imagine if Shazam could also identify bird calls, or my friend's voices. I want to be able to very easily state that for me a block of red color means that I am tagging something as being 'energetic.' Eventually I'd love to be able to tag with smells as well; for now simply representing with text strings will have to do. My palettes of tags could easily become large; so a method for organizing, scanning/finding and shortcuts for applying oft-used ones would be needed. And I'd want each tag to be represented persistently, so the tool would need to be able to manage a namespace or integrate with one. I see bits and pieces of these capabilities all over the technology landscape: Zotero & Zotz, Shazam, SnapNow & Flickr, countless Firefox plugins. I've captured some of the crazier ideas Kevin and I have had in the post on multi-sensory tagging.

Of course I want my agent to do other more practical things! This is the one that I'm most passionate about at the moment. Now, if only I had learned to code... No matter, I'm working on formalizing my use cases and requirements notes. Maybe someone will build it someday!

[Note: making a private thread public.]

we could create art projects out of this multi-sensory tagging