Brandymore Castle

We need to enable people to curate collections. This means blogging the contents of an archive, which can be as simple as a blogger selecting certain items (by surrogate, typically a picture but also 3D rotatable image or video) and posting them to the blog along with any caption available through the collection's online database. They don't have to say anything original to be useful. The basic requirement is that archives places their collections online, giving access to potential curators outside the archive. Curating is anything a user does to create context for the cultural artifact, commenting, annotating, writing that contextualizes the artifact (like wiki pages). User curation of the archive helps people feel connected with the archive and its contents. Involving non-academics in the archives is important for the continued existence of an instituation and the collection, the value of which exists partly in the memories of people and in the objects themselves. I learned f...

In discussions about farmfoody.org, the idea came up that recipes represent people in a way similar to the way avatars represent people, only much richer because they contain search engine friendly content. The recipe becomes a way for people to explore farms by navigating to the profile the recipes belongs to, then exploring the connections between users (producers and consumers who are friends). Content is the person. I think we will see more of this as social media continues to expand an evolve. This can be seen, again on Twitter, where the person is represented by the content. When you go to a person's Twitter page, you see mainly their content. The "profile" is in the background. This allows Twitter to prominently display information about the content stream, because they do not have to deal with ten different kinds of content under ten different categories. Tweet streams have following friends, followers and the number of updates counted. If there were ten types of ...

I've been thinking about why Twitter is successful. And why some other services that attempted to compete with Twitter by offering "improved" features, like Jaiku, were not. Twitter had the first mover advantage. In the last month or so the buzz about Twitter has spread to average people through use on cable television networks and by cases where people reported on news events through Twitter by cell phone. Those are well and good, but there are other reasons for Twitter's success. One is the simplicity of its presentation. The real estate devoted to profile and "friends" or user to user relationships is compact. The profile is brief and concise. The friends (following) and followers are represented by badge-like elements showing the number of following and follower users, with the numbers linked to listings. The followers are displayed as compactly as possible, represented by tiny icons arranged in rows and columns. The various kinds of posts are filtered b...

I may not be the first, but I have noticed something on social networks that hadn't occurred to me, although it should have, if we have link rot, why not rot in the relationships between friends? I've noticed on our farmfoody.org site there are some lapsed users, since their email addresses are bouncing. It occurred to me that they still have friends but no longer participate in the site. These are ghost relationships suffering from what could be called friendship rot. I suppose Facebook must have millions of people who no longer participate but have accounts and friends. It must have a terrible friendship rot problem. I suppose this form of relationship rot extends to LinkedIn and other sites that depend on navigating networks of relationships between people.

It looks like the G1 is shaping up to be the manual focus lens fanatic's dream camera. A growing list of adapters is available from  http://www.rangefinderrestorations.com/photo_posts/G1adapterlist.html   or at  google docs  directly. I'd like to see an inexpensive adapter for Contax/Zeiss. I have the 50mm f/1.4 although I could use the Contax to 4/3 adapter with a 4/3 to m4/3 adatper. There is a lot of talk about using C-Mount cine and television lenses for ultra wide angle work, which is interesting, but I wonder how they will compared to the planned 7-14mm lens? I'm still waiting to see the HD video version of the camera. I'll be watching.

I've learned to avoid precategorizing anything in my bookmarks. I don't make a category unless it is necessary, unless I am using it. For example, I need to bookmark Amazon web services, so I create an Amazon Web Services folder, but I don't create a Web folder, with a Web Services folder inside, which I then put the AWS folder in. I don't have any other web services bookmarks yet in Google Chrome so I leave this for later. It just creates more folder depth to dig through before it's needed. I also try to avoid adding a bookmark just for reference. That just leads to clutter, where I can't find the bookmarks I use on a daily basis, because when you categorize information according to its classification or how it relates to other information, you lose how it relates to you, to useage. For example, if in browsing the web I find a half dozen interesting resources on manual focus lenses, but for cameras I don't use, the bookmarks will obscure the resources I use...

Manual focus lenses from the 1970s on usually have a mechanism to adjust the aperture during exposure so the lens can be held wide open while focusing to improve brightness. There is usually a pin extending from the lens into the mount throat or mirror box area. When mounting a legacy lens to a modern digital single lens reflex camera, this pin can sometimes contact surfaces in the mount throat, or possibly the mirror. It is dependent on the individual lens and camera model, so there is no general rule that applies. Since I purchased my Olympus E-510, I've collected a number of Rokkor lenses for Minolta cameras (and a X-700, which is a very nice 35mm film camera): 50mm f/1.4, 58mm f/1.4, 50mm f/1.8, 200mm f/4.5, 45mm f/2.0 (This lens makes a very compact camera mounted to the 510 and I like the color and rendering quality of despite it being very inexpensive lens.) Due to the small viewfinder and lack of focusing aids, such as a split prism, microprism collar and ground glass I was...

I like Olympus cameras. Ever since I saw and handled the OM-2 at the camera shop, when I was a teenager deciding on my first SLR camera (not that I could afford the OM's) and very impressed with the compactness of the OM-1 and OM-2 and performance of Zuiko lenses, I've had an affinity for Olympus. In recent years they have produced some amazing digital single lens reflex cameras, such as the first ones with Live View and the legendary E-1. But their marketing efforts have fallen short of what is necessary to explain the advantages of Olympus and Four Thirds photography. Olympus is running a photo contest , asking for images offering "proof" of the ability of their weather resistant cameras to go where most cameras cannot. This is at least heading in the right direction, emphasizing the extraordinary weather sealing that Olympus cameras have, the experience Olympus has with making tough, water-resistant cameras. If I wanted to take a camera with me while exploring cave...

A vital interest of mine is access to archives. I've been interested in the possibilities inherent in the web and network for increasing access to archives and enabling a greater number of non-academics to browse, organize and surface archive holdings. One of the most significant ways of exposing the holdings of an archives is blogging the contents. We really haven't got there yet, but I've noticed a small trend, which I hope signifies the beginning of exponential growth, of people blogging artifacts. I do not remember the first site I came across where a blogger was posting pictures of artifacts, usually photographs from an online catalog of a museum, but here are some recent finds. Illustration Art All Edges Gilt If we could just get every artifact in the world's museums and archives photographed or scanned and online, give the tools to blog the contents to millions of ordinary people interested in telling the stories of these cultural objects, think of how rich that ...

Tag clouds are dead. I don't want to mince words. I've been waiting for a long time for someone to say so, to let everyone see the elephant in the living room. What interests me is why tag clouds are dead. About ten years ago I was working on a prototype web application. It never saw the light of day. But it was called Strands and consisted of a wiki-like content management system that allowed anyone (it was based on SoftSecurity) to create pages, to post and edit content. Any author could include single keywords in the text. These would be automatically scooped up and entered into an index. You could display the posts associated with (containing) any keyword listed on a page like search results. The idea was that content could be navigated in any number of ways according to keywords added by users. It's wasn't social. It didn't know the user who contributed the keyword. The idea was to destroy hierarchy and create a user centered order to information, something clo...