Tagging Old Entries
As part of the current upgrade effort, I decided it was time to go through and tag older blog entries, the ones written before the introduction of tags. These entries were categorized, and the filesystem was used to manage the categorization. Each directory represented a category, and each subdirectory a subcategory. The directories were given descriptive names, suitable for use with the pycategories plugin for pyblosxom.
An obvious approach to automating the retagging of these old entries was to use the category hierarchy itself to provide the tags. I wrote a python program to walk the directory tree, and add tags to the old entries.
I chose to ignore the general
category, though, because as a
tag general
doesn't provide much information. I think I might try
a more sophisticated approach to those entries, analyzing the content of
the entry to choose tags. I haven't worked out all the details, yet, but
I'm considering building a map of tagged entries, based on the frequency
of certain words or phrases that appear in them, then applying that map
to a histogram of the entries currently categorized as
general
.
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Annotated Links to the Future
Talking to Jeff this morning made me realize I probably should have said more about yesterday's Links to the Future entry. He objects to the hype surrounding Web 2.0, and I can't say I blame him.
In the two links, my aim was to present two visions of the future,
one largely
pessimistic, and one largely optimistic.
Yet, in each, there are seeds of the other, and in a turn that would
make Laozi nod in
appreciation, there is pessimism in the optimism (viz. Jeff's
grumbling about XML breads and circuses; youtube, a darling of Web 2.0
evangelists, limiting users to viewing videos of people's cats through
their proprietary flash app; DRM
everywhere), as well as optimism in the pessimism (diminishing reliance on
industrialized food, increasing neighborliness
, greener
environs, better local economic opportunities).
Posting these links was not a breathless endorsement of either. XML won't realize utopia, and society won't come crashing down in some petroclysm. Rather, the potential of so-called Web 2.0 technologies may help to bolster a global society built on a post-petroleum economy. I imagine a world where, thanks to some of the information processing power granted by nearly-universal, open information architectures and high efficiency networks, location of self becomes less relevant. Wasteful office buildings and commutes curtailed, the peak oil tail lengthens, creating more time to develop replacements of diminishing petroleum-derived materials and processes.
And if the whole world turned into a sentient computing system, a sort of global Chinese Room, that'd be kind of cool too.
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