Doc has a nice post about the fact that everybody is miscellaneous (to use his phrase), and why being lumped with others gives him aggregaphobia (another nice turn of phrase). [Tags: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/doc/2008/02/10/aggregaphobia/ ]

Bestiario is a Spanish group that does some insanely watchable visualizations of networks of information. For example, poke around at their way of mapping del.icio.us links.

I’m not very good at interpreting visual data so I can’t tell if it’s helpful, but it sure is cool. [Tags: visualization social_networks ]

I’ve been playing with Instapaper.com a little, and liking it a lot.

It’s a free site built by Marco Arment, who works at Tumblr (if I’m reading this right). You put the Instapaper “Read Later” button in your button bar, and click it if you’re on a site you want to read later. Go to Instapaper.com and you’ll see a list of what you’ve clicked. Simplicity itself.

There seems to be just one more feature: Any text you’ve selected on the page your instapapering is taken as that page’s description.

That takes care of my temporary bookmarking needs, a feature I’ve wanted for a while. But I wonder what would happen if my instapaper page were public and pointable. Could we start to use instapaper to build a collaborative newspaper that pulls together the recommended reading of people you respect?

[Tags: instapaper media del.cio.us tagging digg ]

Two completely fascinating presentations on technology and education, from very different points of view.

Dylan William brilliantly advances, step by step, toward concluding that technology has a quite particular role to play in education:

What I’m going to argue is that the role of technology in improving learning is primarily in what I call third generation pedagogies. Where we have automated aggregation technologies, which actually take the responses of different students and do some smart things with those things. And give the teacher advice about what are the sensible next steps. The really brilliant teachers are doing this already. But most teachers can’t do it. And so the challenge of third generation pedagogy is to have the contingencies of teaching—that what you do when you know that the teaching didn’t work quite the way you intended—that is supported by technology.

Google’s Peter Norvig, among other things, adds to the mix the value of having students learning in teams so they can teach one another.

(Many thanks to Seb Schmoller for the pointers.)

[Tags: education teaching dlan_william peter_norvig ]

Tell Lijit.com what social networking sites you’re in and what content aggregation tools you use and it will create a search engine that returns results that you or your social network has created. Give it a try:

Lijit Search

Hugh McKellar at KMWorld has posted a long interview with me about the miscellaneous and business. Hugh is a good interviewer, and I am a long-winded interviewee.

Terrific post by Stu Henshall about what sounds like a fantastic talk by Dave Snowden (whose blog is here) at KMWorld. Dave combines the broad and deep with the incisive and the practical. Yikes! (Don’t miss the four posts from Dave that Stu points to as “must reads.”) [Tags: dave_snowden stu_henshall kmworld ]

I like what Michael Wolff says in his Vanity Fair piece about his new news site:

The metaphor, for 150 years — from print to radio to network to cable — has been the front page: important stuff first. “It should have to do now with falling through something, or floating through the totality of information or of intersecting worlds and interests,” offers [Patrick] Spain, not a man wild with his metaphors. [VF, October, p. 126]

I’ve been saying for a while, and I think in Everything Is Miscellaneous, that the new front page is distributed across our day and our network. Much of it comes through our inbox. It consists of people we know and people we don’t know recommending items for our interest.

So, I was disappointed by Wolff’s new site, Newser.com. It presents a view of the news that’s much less hierarchical than a typical front page, and it’s well-designed for quickly finding what matters to you (including through editorially curated links), but: (1) It assumes its nine top-level categories reflect how every reader views the world; (2) Where are our voices? Comments? Blogs? (3) I couldn’t let it arise from my social network (where that network includes people I don’t know but whose views interest me). It competes with Google News, not with the intersection of Digg and FaceBook, which is what I’m waiting for. [Tags: news media michael_wolff ]

FrontPorch presents itself as a positive example of the power of the miscellaneous…

The Wall Street Journal online has published an exchange between Andrew Keen (”The Cult of the Amateur”) and me. The full version is here. The condensed version is here. (I recommend the full version.) [Tags: andrew_keen web2.0 cult_of_the_amateur everything_is_miscellaneous ]