Clay Shirky - who I thank profusely in EiM because of how influential and helpful he was, even though he may not know it - responds to Nick Carr’s criticism of page 9 of my book. Then he responds to Sven Bikerts’ complaints about the blogosphere’s effect on literary criticism.

It’s a rousing defense and brilliantly expressed. Thank you, Clay, once again. [Tags: clay_shirky nicholas_carr music everything_is_miscellaneous]

Tim Spalding at LibraryThing has introduced a new wrinkle in the tagosphere…and wrinkles are welcome because they pucker space in semantically interesting ways. (Block that metaphor!)

At LibraryThing, people list their books. And, of course, we tag ‘em up good. For example, Freakonomics has 993 unique tags (ignoring case differences), and 8,760 total tags. Now, tags are of course useful. But so are subject headings. So, Tim has come up with a clever way of deriving subject headings bottom up. He’s introduced “tagmashes,” which are (in essence) searches on two or more tags. So, you could ask to see all the books tagged “france” and “wwii.” But the fact that you’re asking for that particular conjunction of tags indicates that those tags go together, at least in your mind and at least at this moment. Library turns that tagmash into a page with a persistent URL. The page presents a de-duped list of the results, ordered by interestinginess, and with other tagmashes suggested, all based on the magic of statistics. Over time, a large, relatively flat set of subject headings may emerge, which, subject to further analysis, could get clumpier and clumpier with meaning.

You may be asking yourself how this differs from saved searches. I asked Tim. He explained that while the system does a search when you ask for a new tagmash, it presents the tagmash as if it were a topic, not a search. For one thing, lists of search results generally don’t have persistent URLs. More important, to the user, tagmash pages feel like topic pages, not search results pages.

And you may also be asking yourself how this differs from a folksonomy. While I’d want to count it as a folksonomic technique, in a traditional folksonomy (oooh, I hope I’m the first to use that phrase!), a computer can notice which terms are used most often, and might even notice some of the relationships among the terms. With tagmashes, the info that this tag is related to that one is gleaned from the fact that a human said that they were related.

LibraryThing keeps innovating this way. It’s definitely a site to watch.

[Tags: tags folksonomy librarything tim_spalding everything_is_miscellaneous]

The eighth and last in my series of Miscellaneous interviews, sponsored by the Berkman Center and Wired, is up. I talk with Richard Sambrook, head of the BBC World Service and blogger. We talk not so much about citizens as journalists as about citizens as those who exercise editorial judgment. How will the BBC compete in a world where we’re busily telling one another what we ought to read…especially as content gets pulled out of the sites themselves? [Tags: richard_sambrook bbc news journalism citizen_journalism everything_is_miscellaneous berkman wired]

At Livelook you can browse a map to find the web cams, and then gaze to your eyes’ content…

The latest in the Harvard Berkman-Wired Miscellaneous Podcasts series of interviews is up. I talk with my old friend Paul English, founder of Kayak.com (a travel site that kicks butt) about making a business out of other companies' information. But Paul is also deeply involved in health care issues in developing nations where aggregating information can have benefits even more important than saving you $20 on your flight.

John McGrath has launched TagsAhoy.com, a site that “lets you search your personal tags across a number of tagging sites (del.icio.us, Flickr, Gmail, LibraryThing, Squirl and Connotea.” He says he’s got’s plan for adding lots more, including more services and more doodads, such as tagclouds.

But being able to get all your tagged resources in one spot? Sweet! [Tags: tags tagsahoy john_mcgrath]

Here it is an iPod compatible download. (Try renaming it to .mp4 if your player thinks it can’t play it.)

Tom Matrullo lists some sites that do conversions not of the usual sort. (He even links this to the miscellanizing of information.) E.g., dollars into barrels of crude, and CO2 emissions to air flight info.

According to Ian McAllister, Amazon is rolling out more support for enabling users to subscribe to tags via RSS feeds. You can, for example, subscribe to the tag “sports” and specify that you only want books tagged that way or only products, or the most popular books tagged “sci-fi.”

It’s always good to add more and more leaves to the pile.

Larry Lessig has a great post asking us to call upon the Republican and Democratic parties to insist that all presidential debates ("at least") be made free for use after their initial broadcast.

Abso-freaking-lutely! [Tags: politics copyright copyleft creative_commons lawrence_lessig everything_is_miscellaneous]