Flickr and Yahoo!

Congratulations to Stewart, Caterina and all. Well done on selling a company with bottom-up tagging in it's DNA to a company with "Hierarchically Organized Ontology" in it's name.

The long tail of tags

Sitting in the folksonomy session at etech, I thought I'd look at the distribution of tags, and guess what, it's a power law, oh sorry 'it has a Long Tail'.



Tom says we should use the word fauxonomy...

Bloggers and diversity

Steven Levy picks up on Halley & Rebecca's discussion of the lack of diversity seen at Harvard conferences about blogging and media, but doesn't link to either of them.

Now, we do track Millions of blogs at Technorati, and all human life is there. Steven describes our top 100 as 'a list dominated by bigmouths of the white-male variety', but there are Japanese, Brazilian and Iraqi men and women there too.

The blogosphere is big enough now that my 'Caliban's Mirror' rule applies - what you see in it is what you go looking for; it reflects you and your interests.

While I am reading Jeneane, Shelley, Dorothea, Suw, Halley, Liz, danah, Denise, Megan, Stephanie and others regularly, you might not be (and it is your loss).

If you look at which bloggers the mainstream media have picked up on, the men tend to talk about politics, and the women talk about sex.

This superficiality is pointed out by Brian Micklethwait but he holds out hope as we can and do discuss ideas at length online, cross-linking, interjecting and, as Shelley does masterfully, satirizing.

San Jose Young People's Theatre updates

Rosie has been very busy collecting signatures and letters in support of San Jose Young People's Theatre, so we set up a new blog just for the letters:
Letters supporting San Jose Young People's Theatre

Rosie also put up the showtimes and ticket availability for Peter Pan

Here are links to the 3 video interviews with the children so far:

YPT: friendships that last
How YPT changed my life
What if YPT were closed?

And we are setting up a YPT young writers competition too, with support from Councillor Ken Yeager.

San Jose Young People's Theatre

I don't usually blog about family events here, but sometimes it is important.
My children have been attending and performing at the San Jose Young People's Theatre for four years now, and it has deeply impressed me.
Carole Ferris-Greer, the program director, has created something very special in a quiet corner of the San Jose Parks and Recreation department. For 22 years she has been bringing together a fresh cast of a hundred children every few months, and building them into a performance powerhouse.

These are not simple children's pageants, but properly staged, costumed, choreographed performances with complex sets and original staging. Each show is adjusted in rehearsal to fit the children cast in their roles, and every child in the chorus is given a moment to shine.

Carole is a master of what Larry Lessig calls 'Walt Disney creativity' - taking classic folk tales, and remixing them with contemporary cultural references to bring them alive for a new generation. Whether it is sly references to reality dating shows in Cinderella, with the stepsisters singing 'Material Girl', the apes singing Louie Louie in Jungle Book, or the replacement of the Indian song in Peter Pan with 'Colors of the Wind', each story is refreshed and updated.

So why am I writing about it now?

Despite its track record, its huge local support, the 100,000 cans of food it has generated in donations to the homeless, and the thousands of children whose lives have been improved by being part of it, the Young People's Theatre is under attack by the Parks and Recreation Department of San Jose city council.

Accordingly we have set up a support site at yptsupport.blogspot.com. We're seeing if the citizen journalism publishing tools of photos, weblogs and videos can make a difference.
Do please visit it, link to it and spread the word. Help us hold the local council to account.

And help make sure that future generations of children can experience this too.

Weinberger's interesting checklist

David's list of things to create looks like a lot of things I've worked on:

• Use the existing tools to invent new forms of digital story-telling


• True Internet video


• Distributed revenue infrastructure


• Discover which bloggers are saying interesting things


• Let us tag your articles


• Encourage voice


• Get on the right side of the copyright fight


• Open your archives because that's where the common good is

I wonder if I have a curled ladder in there somewhere.