James Drogan

Re: Conversations with Dave

I can easily adjust the navigation on the new site. The right side of the page currently looks like

About Me is probably okay at the beginning of the list and droganbloggin is the name of the blog. However, Ideas and Information is where I publish my papers and presentations. Perhaps it ought to be third on the list.

I also don't have much in More About This Website. Perhaps I ought to announce new additions to Ideas and Information in this spot.

The too much and too many characteristics of the blogs will likely not go away. This is freedom of expression writ large. After awhile you learn the difference between the good, the bad, and the ugly. The Technocratic Top 100 ( http://www.technorati.com/live/top100.html ) is the basis for a good start at building a blogroll (my blogroll is at http://jmsdrgn.squarespace.com/blogroll/ ). The blogroll is like an investment portfolio. One needs to continually adjust the contents for value.

I'm not sure I agree that "...the industry is being driven by technicians and techniques - not consumer requirements." I see a lot of conversations that start "If I could only..." and, if someone else thinks it's a good idea, a prototype shortly makes it into the blogsphere. I'm also an Economist fan and their organization of material is superb. But getting everyone to line up behind that sort of rigor would be quixotic.

Dave Weinberger, something of a guru in the field, believes that with the power of the search engines we will someday be able to file everything in Miscellaneous. Indeed, Google's gmail, as I understand it, has no folders although you can label or tag e-mails. I had previously mentioned that I organize material into folders for archival, not retrieval purposes. I use Enfish for search when I'm looking for something on my machine. I've also investigated some other search engines -- Kartoo, for example -- that have interesting ways to graphically relate material.

Passing through my stuff with my research interests would be an interesting test. I also woke up last night thinking about some work I was doing with IBM Research towards the end of my tenure on the subject of intelligent text mining. I'll need to give some more thought to both of these.

I'm not much in favor of editing our exchanges. I tend to keep history the way it has unfolded. On the other hand, I've not figured out whether Outlook has a good means of structuring threads. If it can do it automatically, fine, but I'm not going to go through a lot of labor unless I really need to know.

There is also a class of tags associated with Technocrati that bloggers seem to be beginning to use. I'm not yet sure I see sufficient value to jump on that bandwagon.

Nevertheless and in spite of all the advances, much needs to be done in this field. We need a Burger King schema and retrieval mechanism that lets us have things our way.