Meaningful Data

This doesn’t really have anything to do with central themes of this blog, but I was quoted in a Times article today, about the new walking and seating area that runs along 8 blocks of Broadway (including an area directly in front of my office): Front-Row Seats on Broadway, if You Dare.

My quote is actually the closing comment in the article. I’m not going to spoil it, though, you’ll have to read the article.

Here it is, my slightly delayed final post about The Last HOPE. I have a tentative interest in the Social Engineering themes that were explored there. I see this as a sort of “How to win friends and influence people” for misfits. (I include myself in this category). Which is not to say that it’s an entirely antisocial practice.

Of course there were talks on prank calling and other activities which exploit most people’s tendency to trust others and take their actions and words at face value. I have to admit, sometimes this is hilarious, even if it does give me slight pangs of social irresponsibility. Here’s an example of one my favorites from classic (aka print) bOINGbOING: Carla crank calls a cryogenics company. (Nothing to do with HOPE, it just cracks me up).

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The SXSW panel picker is live, and I proposed two panels. If you’re going, or you might go, or you just like voting for things, please have a look and consider voting for my proposals. You’ll have to create an account to vote, but it should be pretty painless. Here are the descriptions of the panels I proposed:

When the Semantic Web Meets User Generated Metadata

The Semantic Web promises to make the internet smarter, in part by adding structure and definition around the content on the web. Sounds great, but who’s going to do all the work? As User Generated Content gives rise to User Generated Metadata, turns out it’s going to be… YOU! (Click here to vote for it)

Content Content Revolution: The Rise of Content Strategy

What’s Content Strategy, you ask? Navigation, publishing guidelines, taxonomy, syndication, style guides, UGC strategy, the semantic web? All this and more! Come hear some of the leading content strategy professionals discuss where this emerging discipline came from, why it matters, and where it’s going. (Click here to vote for it)

On another note, I didn’t get a chance to post my fourth (and last) post about The Last HOPE before I went out of town for the weekend, and I forgot to bring my notes. So that will have to wait until I get back next week.

The history-oriented panels at HOPE were very interesting, especially for someone like me who was kind of new to the scene. I am particularly interested in the aspect of history that pinpoints the people and moments where someone looked at something, ignored the expected mode of interaction, and made the creative leap to invent a whole new way of seeing, thinking and using the thing.

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Starting with my favorite “track,” there were several presentations at HOPE that focused on how to make stuff – either from scratch or by repurposing other things in unusual ways. This included a lot of LEDs, microcontrollers, unusual food, and a scale model of a dodo skeleton.

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AKA: How is a Hacker Con like a handbasket?

Two weeks ago I went to a hacker conference in NYC called “The Last HOPE” (HOPE = Hackers On Planet Earth). As I thought about how I’d write about it here, on my professionally-oriented blog, it seemed a little like a mental puzzle posed by Lewis Carroll: How do I explain how this relates to what I do in my day job?

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In a meeting today with my fellow Content Strategists, I was talking about the phenomenon where content is adapted from one format to another – for example, a TV show that’s made into a movie. My colleague Bob Maynard said “metaphrast” to identify this kind of occurrence, and I don’t remember every hearing that word before. A quick online search reveals that the commonly accepted definition is:

One who renders a text into a different form, as by recasting prose in verse.*

This is worded slightly differently from one site to another, but “prose into verse” seems to be the favorite illustration of the concept. Perhaps that’s what the ancient Greeks had in mind, but this is the 21st century. It’s the media age, so why limit ourselves? The only explanation I can come up with is that the word itself is not currently in fashion, so no one has bothered to update the examples in their definition.

Let’s see if we can reclaim this word in the service of modern content formats.

*A popular alternative definition I’ve seen several times is “A literal translator.” This strikes me as one of those definitions that’s deceptively simple – the more you think about it, the less sure you are what it means.