Daily Thoughts 1/17/2011 (Content Strategy, What technology Wants)

 Portrait of writer Vsevolod Mikhailovich Garshin. by Ilya Repin, 1884 Oil on canvas. 88.9 × 69.2 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Daily Thoughts 1/17/2011

This evening, I read some more of What Technology Wants by Kevin Kelly.  There is a real sense of anthropomorphism in this book.  Kevin Kelly attributes many characteristics of living systems to machines.  I don't agree with it in some ways.  The argument is interesting.  It reminds me of the idea that the fundamental building blocks of the universe at the quantum level is pure information.  There is a feeling that he is attributing the universe is a binary system.  It is the same kind of thinking that led Newtonian thinkers to think of the creator as the great watchmaker.  The book is very philosophical.

I put the book, The network is your customer : five strategies to thrive in a digital age by  David L. Rogers on hold.  I am also going to reread Content Strategy for the Web by Kristina Halvorson.

I have been thinking a little bit on the concept of content strategy a little more lately.  I think I am going to explore it a little more.

Our library system has integrated its catalog with the White Plains Public Library which is excellent.  They have some books which may be very useful to us.  This includes quite a bit on metadata and other web information.  I put several more books on hold, some of them from White Plains.  Metadata Principals for All Librarians by Priscilla Caplan,  Exploring Web 2.0 : second generation internet tools - blogs, podcasts, wikis, networking, virtual worlds, and more by Ann Bell and Online community information : creating a nexus at your library by Joan C. Durrance as well as The manual to online public records : the researchers tool to online resources of public records and public information by Michael L. Sankey.

Web Bits

The concept of Content Curation is starting to appear on the web again.  http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/2011/01/curation_is_the.html 

The idea is that so many people are creating new content, that it is very hard to keep track of it all.  Therefore, there should be curators for web content.  It seems a bit like a marketing ploy right now.