i may be a bird in a cage but at least it's your cage

things, in a numbered list:

1. livejournal, what are your favorite instrumental scores, from movies or tv? bear mccreary's battlestar galactica (2003) score (both s1 and s2, and one of the things that i was most excited about for season three? NEW SCORE MUSIC) is one of my favorite things to write to, and i also very much enjoy joel goldsmith's stargate scores and howard shore's lord of the rings scores, but i don't know how to find others that i would like.
   
   [throughadoor, i really loved the track from the fountain on your end-of-the-year mix; is the rest of the score that good?]
   
   HELP ME, LIVEJOURNAL, YOU'RE MY ONLY HOPE! good instrumental scores: what are they, and will you send them to me?
   
   
2. the other day, i hid my bundles on delicious and ordered by tags by frequency, just to see what my most-used tags were. ( talky talky about my top ten most used delicious tags )
   
   
   
3. i have, of late, become completely obsessed with the database backend that runs itunes -- how does it index? how does it update the xml that stores your library? IS IT SMARTER THAN ME OMG. this is in part because i am picking back up a summer project to listen to and rate every song in my library (i only have 2800 left to rate! that seems like a lot until you know that i have something like 7300 songs in my itunes library) and in part because in last semester's hideous database class of doom, i had to do a project on how audio files are stored in databases. that class has ruined my life in more than one way, i tell you what -- every time i rate a song, i think, but how does it know to DO THAT? how does the searching work in the index? IS IT A DENSE OR NON-DENSE INDEX BY SONG NAME?
   
   then i want to lie down on the floor and cry, because i am a HUGE NERD.
   
   
4. i'm hoarding all the fic i've finished since the holidays for 14valentines, and i'm having a very hard time with the hoarding and the waiting -- i have two finished stories sitting on my hard drive, plus another that needs to go to beta sometime soon, and three that are half-finished, and i want to post them noooooooooow. thankfully, february is closer than it feels. which is also sort of a depressing thought.
   
   
5. ( sg-1 10x11: the quest, part two -- not really spoilerly but cut in case )
   
   

today i am: a) hungover; b) exhausted; c) possibly getting sick. NOT ON, BODY. of course, all the red wine i drank during the second half of the carolina/virginia game didn't help.

(or, Why Everyone Everywhere (But Especially People In Fandom Who Read A Lot Of Fic) Should Be Using A Social Bookmarking Site; or, I Told queenofalostart I Would Write This Up) [edited to reflect changes in del.icio.us, 07.25.06]

it is no secret that i think del.icio.us, a social bookmarking site that uses tags for organization, is just about the best thing in the entire universe. it is also no secret that del.icio.us has changed my life for the better, in terms of everything from being able to find that stargate atlantis story where rodney orders a john as a mail order bride to keeping track of all the best of music lists from this year to being able to sort my thesis research out by viewing other people's bookmarks.

but still, still despite all my preaching, not all of you are using del.icio.us. why not? is it scary? do you just not bookmark enough stuff to make it worthwhile? because i really am telling you: this site will change the way you file information, and it will change the way that you use the internet. i swear.

( del.icio.us: a user's guide for the uninitiated, and a collection of helpful hints and tips for users who are already comfortable with the basics )

so. now. go and bookmark, darlings, and tell me your del.icio.us usernames so i can effectively stalk you. (unless i am already stalking you, in which case, please carry on with the good links.) or don't - i am most certainly not the boss of any of you, you don't have to do what i say.

right. now if you'll excuse me, i have some slacking off at work to do.

( footnote )

(oh my god, look at the content of my last five posts: ace of base - abbey bartlett's breasts - drunk undergrads - stargate atlantis porn - Serious Academic Thoughts Re: Folksonomies. my brain is the biggest spaz ever.)

i have, of late, been reading a lot about how open, user-defined tagging systems are not, technically, folksonomies. because user-defined systems don't actually use controlled vocabularies¹, "folksonomy" is - at least by the letter of the dictionary definition - the wrong term for them. this is an argument i understand; compared to, say, the library of congress, random internet users certainly aren't creating any kind of real controlled vocabulary or folksonomy.

but at the same time, i think that a lot of the people bristling at using this term aren't looking at things quite the same way i am - they see "millions of internet users, all mashing around and not creating a structured vocabulary for tagging". i look around and see "self-chosen communities creating controlled vocabularies that are useful to their specific community purposes, regardless of the people around them."

the different is this: let's look at two sets of, for lack of a better term in the latter case, controlled vocabularies.

the first one i want you to consider the library of congress subject headings. if you want to talk about controlled vocabularies creating taxonomies, the l of c subject headings are pretty much the only perfect example in the world.

the library of congress controls its subject headings in a couple of ways; only authorized people are allowed to make changes to them. that isn't something you'll ever get on the internet, of course, and that's part of why the tagging systems being developed now are so good - anybody can contribute. but second, they already have a structure set up. the library of congress takes one subject heading - say, "communicable diseases" - and creates a set of terms that surround "communicable diseases" for ease of searching. they use broader terms - "diseases", "infection" - and narrower terms - specific types of disease, things such as "communicable diseases -- africa" - and related terms - "epidemic", "quarantine".²

this creates a highly structured, easily searchable, easily manuverable thesaurus of subject headings. the advent of online library catalogs only makes it even easier - a user could easily hop from one related subject heading to another, just using inter-catalog links.

and that is, theoretically, what tagging bookmarks, or photos, or even journal entries (though for now please discount livejournal's tagging system; because it isn't social, per se, it's individual, it doesn't quite ... the issue of controlled vocabularies in re: searching for specific content doesn't apply). i am, for the purpose of this theorizing, considering tagging systems on social network sites - del.icio.us, flickr. like that.

the second controlled vocabulary i want you to consider, just as an example, is the del.icio.us page for astolat's story "transcendental"³. i picked this link because it's got a fair number of people who've bookmarked it, but not too many. the actual content of the link is moot except in subject - it's a stargate: atlantis story with a central pairing of john sheppard/rodney mckay.

twenty people have bookmarked this story: most of whose user names i recognize on sight, at least two of whom i have on my own personal friends list. the few user names i don't recognize immediately, i can trace back to someone i know within one degree of separation. what we have here is a small community, self-chosen by their affection for and desire to read stories about colonel john sheppard and dr. rodney mckay getting it on.

of these twenty people, 12 have labelled this story with a tag of "sga"; 9 have labelled the story "mckay/sheppard", with an additional 2 labelling it "sheppard/mckay". 5 use "fic", 4 use "slash". it isn't a perfect system - are we using "sga"? "stargateatlantis"? "stargate", "atlantis"? author names? additional characters? - but we aren't perfect, we're human, and the fact that a majority of the people who tagged this used one standard term is pretty amazing. break it down further, and you can even see a controlled vocabulary starting to form:

sga
sga -- mckay/sheppard
sga -- fic
sga -- fic -- slash

without prompting, without a higher authority⁴, a self-chosen community of users have built their own vocabulary. a vocabulary other users in that community could navigate with ease; and if other people can't, well - they probably honestly didn't want to find the good porn ANYWAY.

louis rosenfeld makes some good points in folksonomies? how about metadata ecologies?⁵, and i think that the phrase "metadata ecologies" is an interesting one, one i want to think more about. but i disagree with him that data will get out of hand as users flood del.icio.us and flickr with more and more tags; overall, it might get out of hand - but i doubt that there are many users who consider the structure of data overall. they consider data structure within their own closed or limited communities; and user-chosen communities, in my opinion, are what come closest to making tagging really work like it should - like a controlled vocabulary should.

( footnotes! )

so this fandom? has not only made everyone i know LOSE THEIR MINDS but also apparently it fixed my porn. which is. nice. in a severe understatement sort of meaning of "nice".

that said, i am TOTALLY NOT WRITING IN THIS FANDOM, but if i was, i would be writing these stories. (SHUT UP I CAN HEAR YOU ALL LAUGHING AT ME.)

( the one that is basically an excuse to use a cheap line about penguins (and also porn) )

( the one with the incredibly complicated setup (and also porn) )

and because i care about you all and i know that not all of you care that i am going to write a sg:a story about penguins, two useful things related to del.icio.us: thing one, a firefox extension for del.icio.us, and thing two, several habits of wildly successful del.icio.us users, which has really good advice for using del.icio.us. and if you're not using del.icio.us to keep track of all the good new mckay/sheppard stories, why the hell not? it's my favorite thing on the internets right now.

now if you'll excuse me, i have to go cutter my l of c numbers for main entry, print my cataloging final out, and then i will be DONE, DONE, DONE with this semester.

( the one where, oh my god, even my thinly disguised porn scenarios have FOOTNOTES )

because scratchyfishie called me on it, i must confess: i'm using you guys for preliminary research for my masters' thesis. i hope you can forgive me (and, um, keep answering my polls).

the poll behind this cut is designed for anyone to take; whether or not you use del.icio.us or another social bookmarking system that uses tagging, whether or not you have a macintosh computer, whether or not you read or bookmark fanfiction - in fact, i'm particularly interested in your responses if you DON'T do any of these things. please answer all the questions with your gut feeling, whether or not you have any idea what the answers are talking about. it would be most appreciated by a starving graduate student trying to find a thesis.

( a poll about tagging and del.icio.us )

thanks. (and please, like always, feel free to link this around; i'd like as big a sample as possible.)

two neat del.icio.us tricks, courtesy of the new interface:

one: if you tag something "for:[delicious username]", minus the brackets and quotes and plus an actual username, it will SEND THAT LINK TO THAT USER. fucking awesome. (to see if anybody's sent you something, check the "for" link at the top of your main delicious page.)

two: if you click "inbox" on the top of your main delicious page, it will take you to your inbox - where you can add users and other user's tags, and when those users update either any tag (if you choose to view all) or the particular tag you chose, it will put all those new links on one page for you; basically, it's a simple rss reader inside delicious only, and you can choose to limit content, which is AWESOME. like, if i chose to monitor serialkarma's "sga" tag, which i do, any time h. added a new link to that tag, it would show up in my inbox. again, i say: fucking awesome.

scratchyfishie, this is what i was talking about when i said they were working on building more community between users. neat, eh?

if you have an account at del.icio.us, tell me about it, so i can stalk you more efficiently. especially if you post links to mckay/sheppard fic on a regular basis. actually, if you post links to anything at all on a regular basis. i always need more fodder for not doing my work.

in other news, last night i dreamt that joe flanigan was on an episode of homicide where he got married to this woman who could turn into a fly and then she ATE HIM. yeah, i don't know about my brain, either.

pretty much the boy and i spent the entire weekend lying around on the couch watching tv and making out, which is not a bad way to spend the weekend. and since i'm having a sorkin renaissance, let me just say this ( about early season three of west wing )

we also saw capote, and without giving anything away i can fairly say that it was the best movie i've seen this year, knocking a history of violence out of the top slot, and it just reinforced something that i've believed quietly and to myself for a long time: phillip seymour hoffman is the most talented actor working in hollywood today. he was absolutely phenomenal, and the movie is killer.

my brain is just. wow. all over the place, today.

i've been thinking a lot about tagging since my poll last week - how people use tags, both on livejournal and elsewhere, how tags can be useful and not useful, how to create a tagging system for yourself, how to create one that can be used by other people.

when i started using tags on my livejournal, i had a lot of clever little names for my tags, things that i thought were funny or interesting or, well, clever, and i found out fast that they weren't any help to me at all - because not only could other people not use my tags (and if i wasn't tagging for other people, who the hell was i tagging for, because yo - i don't need to read my journal archives, except to occasional find a post to link to, but other people sure as hell might want to find something), but the fact of the matter was i couldn't use my own tags.

so that went out the window and i started to poke around lj a lot - i looked at makesmewannadie's tags, i looked at atrata's tags, i looked at thefourthvine's tags. i looked at the tags that i could use on other people's journals, and i tried to structure mine like that. sure, there are some tags that remain that aren't in my neatly built and filed hierarchy system, but they're pretty straight forward (and i couldn't in good conscience put "food & drink" under "meta" or even "personal") and they're pretty useful, if i do say so myself.

but not everybody's are - and i'm not saying they should be, i'm just saying they're NOT, factual - and that's where i run into problems.

You and I don't have to agree on what your photo is about. This takes classification and about-ness out of the hands of authors and experts. Now it's up to us readers to decide what something is about.
-- from this blog entry

( blah blah blah folksonomies )

i need a cataloging icon in the worst way.

The more entries I put tags on, the more curious I become about how livejournal as a whole is using this functionality. Consequently, a poll. Feel free to link this around - I'd appreciate it if people did, actually, and if you have anything to say on the topic that I don't cover in the poll, comments are always welcome.

[Poll #598872]