Hope's Centre-Table

IT Trends
The article discusse the book but focuses more on the fact that, gee wiz, it’s an online book with print on demand options (this is new??). But may be worth a look…

ACM: Ubiquity – SINGULARITY: UBIQUITY INTERVIEWS RAY KURZWEIL

thanks, Steve:
Peter Morville, “Ambient Findability : How what we find changes who we are.” (O’Reilly, September, 2005)
Part of the Safari Books Online Series : http://tinyurl.com/c8564
For an accessible description on how the web-world has co-opted the language of, or implemented the ideas of, taxonomies, ontologies, metadata, folksonomies, and the semantic web, see chapter 6: The Sociosemantic Web (esp. 6.2: The Social Life of Metadata).
I imagine it would be especially interesting to those creating “outward directed” websites, i.e. sites that are created to attract visitors.
And, in remembrance of Foucault, considering all these classification/searching schemes in terms of Borges’ “Chinese Encyclopedia” animals list (http://www.multicians.org/thvv/borges-animals.html?1) the chapter might be even more interesting…

HarperCollins Will Create a Searchable Digital Library – New York Times

Mike always has the best quotes:
“Texts cannot be put into computers. Neither can numbers. Computers can contain and operate on patterns of electronic charges, but they cannot contain numbers, which are abstract mathematical objects not electronic charges, nor texts, which are complex, abstract cultural and linguistic objects.”
Michael Sperberg-McQueen, ‘Text in the Electronic Age: Textual Study and Text Encoding with examples from Medieval Texts.’ Literary and Linguistic Computing, 6/1 (1991): 34-46. (34)
This can be expanded for use with all kinds of computing technologies: remembering the distinctions between the computer and what we construct on/with it.