I guess we shouldn't be surprised at this point, but Bush just threw another freebie to his buddies in the oil industry. He just temporarily suspended the environmental rules on gasoline production, to try to make it easier to increase production.

Of course, it's not at all clear that the high gas prices actually have anything to do with restrictions on production. In fact, there was a study last week that showed that the profit margins of the major oil companies have shot up. By making it cheaper (and dirtier) to make gasoline, Bush has allowed the retail price of gasoline to drift lower while maintaining the oil companies' outrageous margins.

Did I miss the memo that went around saying that driving would need to become increasingly dangerous in the next decade to make sure we can prune the population and generally make sure that only the fittest and toughest drivers survive? I mean, isn't it enough distraction that people chat on their little cellphones with one hand while driving, eat, drink, shave, put on makeup and generally do as much as possible to deny that they're driving a ton of metal at high speed?

Apparently not.

According to the consumer electronics industry bible TWICE, in-dash DVD players are one of the hottest segments in the car audio right now. Unlike the kind of entertainment system you see built in to new SUVs and minivans (and I admit, our new Toyota Sienna has a DVD player) these will let the driver also watch whatever movie is playing.

Today on 10 the show features Forest Ridge School, where both of my daughters are in high school (and have been there since 5th grade).

The school has required all students to have laptops for a long time. Starting this year, they've standardized on a tablet PC. They make fantastic use of it -- all the way down to 5th grade.

Check it out.

I'm in the CHI papers session on Security.

The first paper is 'Why phishing works.'  Interesting point: both security designers and phishers use user interface techniques to accomplish their goals. Three basic categories of reasons why phishing works:

• lack of knowledge ( e.g. about URLs, security indicators)
• visual deception (e.g. 'vv' istead of 'w', overlaying windows,embedding fake address and status bar in page )
• bounded atention (i.e. inattention to secuirty indicators) 

In their study of whether people can correctly identify real and phishing sites, participant knowledge and use of security indicators was the best indicator of success in correctly identifying the sites. Though in walking through the examples, the reasons why people made mistakes were all over the place.

Interesting suggestion: that product teams 'spoof' their own design in the testing of their web sites, to see how easy it is to convincingly phish your site.

Another interesting design point: address bar prints the URL in small type that's hard to read; can you re-size the text to make it bigger and more readable?

Second paper: Secrecy, Flagging and Paranoia: Adoption Criteria in encrypted E-mail. There is an argument that people should encrypt all of their email. Conventional wisdom is that people don't encrypt email because it's too hard. Their user study showed that in fact people often don't encrypt email because there is a social meaning (in fact, a negative stigma) associated with encryption that they don't want to convey. People will use it for financial information, and for protecting secret planning information. But recipients think that if it's encrypted it must be important -- so encrypting all email would send the wrong message (no pun intended). This was a pretty limited study and it's unclear how much it can be generalized, but it's an interesting thought.

Third paper:  Do Security Toolbars Actually Prevent Phishing Attacks? There are many browser toolbars that try to help identify phishing sites. The categories of toolbars:

• neutral info: domain name, date registered, country registered
• System-decision: propose whether the site is OK or potentially fraudulent
• SSL-verification: presents a logo if it's a verified site.

Recurring point: security is almost never the user's primary task and we don't want to make it the primary task, but we do want the user to be motivated and engaged to make good decisions. Their results are that secuirty toolbars are not as effective as one would hope in preventing phishing attacks. The study reinforces the notion that users don't understnad or know how to parse URL's. Interestingly, anecdotal comments suggest that false-positives in spam filters cause people to expect anti-phishing spoolbars to be wrong some percentage of the time. In other words: often the phishing web site looks more credible than the toolbar. Also, since security is a separate, secondary task, people's desire and focus on getting the primary task done overrides the focus on the secondary task. This is a bizarre dilemma: we don't want to make security the primary task, but then users will often override security in favor of the primary task and open themselves up to phishing attacks.

I'm in the CHI 2006 session on Schools of Information, aka 'i-schools.' The session chair suggests that i-schools focus on information as the central concept vs. computers or computing.

There's no single model for an i-school; some evolved from computer science, some from library science, some are hybrids of several departments. There are about 20 i-schools in North America. They tend to grow up in places where there isn't already an independent School of Computer Science, at least partially as a way to raise the awareness and importance of subfields (like HCI) that tend to get buried in a department of CS that's buried in an engineering school.

If you imagine a triangular 'problem space' with information, people and technology at the points, you've mapped out the area of concern for an i-school.

This 'i-school movement' raises lots of hard questions:

• is HCI more central/relevant to i-schools than to Computer Science?
• will it make HCI even less central to CS?
• what publications are important for tenure decisions?
• is research biased toward studies and away from actually creating intellectual property that could be commercialized?
• over time, will i-schools 'silo' to the detriment of interdisciplinary subfields (like HCI)?
• what's the difference between a 'school of information' and a 'school of informatics'?
• within i-schools, is HCI in danger of becoming too diffuse?
• will i-schools buck the trend of the overall decline of enrollment in CS programs?

This is a very frustrating session. There's a long list of audience members waiting to comment or ask questions, so I'd never make it to the mike before the session ended, but they're asking all the wrong questions.  They're focused on branding, identty, and how to facilitate interdisciplinary work. The right questions to ask are all more basic:

• what kind of jobs are your preparing people to? (one of the panelists said that he hoped that their graduates would go to work in other i-schools!)
• have you actually talked to any employers to see if they value what you're offering?
• How do you 'market' i-schools to the rest of academia and to industry?
• where do researchers in your field publish? (besides CHI)
• Is it easier of more difficult to get funding for research when you're in an i-school vs. a CS, engineering or other school?
• will i-schools create anything that will ever get commercialized? (I realize this is in my list above, in a slightly different form)
• is this really anything more than an attempt to get HCI and interdisciplinary work more respect wthin the university?
• What kind of degrees do people get from an i-school, and do they mena anything to anyone? Is the undergraduate degree BS or BA? (similar question for the master's degree)

I'm in the CHI panel on Mashups.

The BBC Backstage guy is giving a 'Basics' talk on what Mashups are.

Why do developers get involved in building mashups?

• new business opportunities
• it's cool
• they're frustrated with missing features/abilities in what the main provider supports
• to get noticed.

BBC Backstage is BBC's developer network for supporting third parties creating mashups with BBC's data. They only support non-commercial use, and stress that all intellectual property remains solely with BBC. They offer broadcast schedule data, audio and video archives, plus travel data for the UK (train, road, etc.)

BBC launched today reboot:bbc.co.uk, a competition to re-design the BBC home page. Cool idea.

The Google guy is talking about the technical underpinnings of mashups. and why AJAX and lightweight feed protocols make it much easier to do mashup web apps. The data sources are growing faster than specific UI services are, which is a problem at one level and certainly exacerbates UI consistency issues since each mashup developer needs to roll their own.

A good question from the audience about how to address accessibility issues for AJAX applications and machups in general.

Not a lot of good answers to questions; mostly a lot of 'good question, there are people thinking about that, no answer today.'

The discussant is talking about the privacy and security issues behind mashups. For example: do mashups make it really easy to develop a phishing site?

Another issue: authentication for mashups. If you go to a mashup site and type in your password for another site, how do you know what's really going on behind the scenes? Will we see the return of Passport? or will Infocard pick up quickly, or will Liberty Alliance finally get going? Will SSL be required? (is that too costly in terms of getting an SSL certificate from Verisign?)

The discussant is suggesting that mashup developers should develop more like enterprise developers.

The Google guy just said that we need to be careful not to put too much burden on mashup developers to 'do things the right way.' and we should look for technical solutions instead. (my editorial view: there is a natural tension here, but if we really want mashups to take off, the responsibility needs to be both on the mashup enablers as well as the mashup developers)

Is there a separation between mashups on Web sites vs. cell phones? The BBC guy says no.

Some audience questions around the intersection of 'citizen journalism' and mashups, and the issues of accuracy, authenticity and reliability of information. Also if there are errors, how do we build a feedback mechanism from end-users through mashups back to the original data source providers?

Another audience question: mashups are a developer phenomenon today. Is there any chance to make it an end-user phenomenon? What would those tools look like? The Google guy thinks that it will happen eventually, but will just take time.

My takeaway: the discussant (Hart Rossman, SAIC) has thought far more deeply about the issues behind mashups than either the BBC or Google guys. Mashups are very very young, and the hype has masked a number of severe limitations. We've seen a set of relatively simple mashups where the end-users cna remain anonymous (like layering data on top of maps) and that maps (no pun intended) well to 3 of the 4 reasons stated above why mashups are getitng built: coolness, frustration, and to get noticed. The real business opportunities, in order to be realized, will require actually tackling the hard issues, and we'll have to see if and how that happens -- or if not, how quickly mashups dies as just one more fad.

I'm also disappointed at how little discussion there really was about the HCI issues related to mashups -- other than to point out that the HCI/usability community is not at all involved today.

The White House Easter Egg Roll has become a major political event this year.

Gay and lesbian families are organizing to participate this year, including wearing rainbow-colored leis so that they can be easily identified.

In turn, the White House has changed the time-honored process of handing out tickets to make sure that none of them are at the opening ceremonies -- and will thereby be excluded from most of the press coverage and anything resembling a formal interaction with the White House that might be interpreted as approval.

The next day I received an email from Peter Freer, a banker from the UK who decided to raise funds for the Jaden Foundation as part of a jungle adventure challenge that was held in Belize recently . Together with his team 'the Belize Bankers' he came in 3rd place. They apparently had to kayak, run and survive in the jungle with nothing more than the shirts on their backs for several days. Thank you so much Peter for doing this for the Jaden Foundation. I think you're crazy, but there you go. You all seemed to have survived the ordeal.

There was one problem with this whole story, though. The Jaden Foundation is not registered as an official charity. I didn't do this as it would have cost me $8000 to do so. And that money I would rather spend on the Belizean kids (100% of the Jaden Foundation donations go to school fees, books, uniforms, transport and whatever else the kids need).

Peter told me that he could only donate to a registered charity, which is fair enough. So I decided that this was a sign to push through a dream that I have had for years now: to try and get as many local kids as possible accepted into a private school. The Belize Christian Academy is the closest school to us and by far the best school in this part of the country. It is linked to a registered charity in the US, so Peter and his team mates could make the donation directly to the school to pay for school fees.

It is already amazing that all the children in our community go to school these days, but if they could be going to BCA that would make an ever bigger impact on their lives. Many of the kids are currently 'falling through the cracks'. They are being passed along the grades, but should really be kept back as they still struggle so much with the English language. Right now they are crammed into classrooms with over 30 kids and don't get the attention they would need to excel. At the BCA they would be in classes of only half the size and they would not be getting so confused by the mix of Creole and English (which is another problem at the state schools)

Anyway, I am not sure what it would take to get all the children from our community accepted into that school. It may be too expensive. In that case, I will focus on getting the youngest kids in that school and let the older ones continue in the school that they are at now.

It's going to be quite a challenge, as the school fees for the private school are $250 BZ ($125 US) a month per child. I will try to get a special deal or assistance from the school & hopefully that way I will be able to send all.

Anyway, Jay and Jasper have just made a wonderful donation to the Jaden Foundation. They have given us $400 US! John and Rich' parents donate a further 20 Pounds per month & have done so for last year! Thank you, thank you, thank you, you guys. And now it looks like Peter Freer and his team mates have raised roughly $3500 US (to be donated at the end of then month). So we are getting there. I can't tell you how much I appreciate your help. This is all so exciting!

If any of you blog readers out there would like to sponsor one of the kids, please contact me. You could even donate directly to the school, so the donations are tax deductible (rather give it to these kids than the tax man, right?)

Thank you,
Simone

P.S. I'll let you know what happens in the coming weeks....

• You sneak out of bed at 5.30 in the morning, just to be able to have a cup of coffee in silence
• You haven't been able to have dinner at the same time as your husband for weeks (a crying baby has had you eating in shifts)
• You pick up things with your toes as your hands are always taken up by carrying children
• You cut your finger and have to wear a 'Dora the explorer' bandaid, which is all you have in the house
• The theme tune to 'SpongeBob Squarepants' is stuck in a loop inside your head (Wo lives in a pineapple under the sea? SpongeBob Squarepants!)
• You lie awake at night wondering how on earth you're going to be able to pack sensibly for an upcoming trip (is it possible to bring the baby swing, car seat and the stroller? Will we be exceeding the luggage allowance on the flight? And how many presents and treats do we need to keep Lucas entertained for the duration of the trip?)
• You start to gravitate towards blogs written by other mums. Their words resonate with you like nothing else can
• And you could totally relate to Felicity Huffman's character Lynette in 'Desperate housewives' when she started to take her childrens' ADD medication just to keep up with her pace of life

Yep, being a mum is a crazy thing. It's wonderful and annoying. A blessing and a curse. You wouldn't change it for the world, yet you fantasize about life without children. You are jealous of your former self, of how all she had to think about was herself & at the same time you cringe at how selfish she really was. Being a mum is the ultimate paradox, a black hole of love, that sucks you in and forces you to lose yourself, yet helps you to find your truer self, there where you lost you (does this still make any sense?)

Anyhow, some of the parenting websites and blogs that I have come across and liked:

1. Five minutes for mom. They were even so nice to add my blog to their site and to interview me as well
2. Parent center. They send me weekly updates on baby's developments. It tells us what we can expect at each stage, which is great as we don't have many other babies around us to measure Aidan's development against
3. The mommy blog. Made me laugh out loud. Especially the part about traveling with young children (she deals with the same pre-travel anxiety as me)
4. Happiness is a good nap. Sweet personal blog by a single mother of two
5. Natural parenting. All about attachment parenting
6. Dr. Sears website. His 'Pregnancy' book & 'The Baby' book are my bibles
7. Think twice. Are you debating whether or not to vaccinate? Make sure you read this website.

And finally, you know you're a mum when it takes you at least 10 attempts to write a short blog like this....

I'm going to try to blog at regular intervals this week while I'm at CHI in Montreal. They have the student volunteers organized to do this too, so it should be an interesting collection of entries on the official CHI blog site by the end of the conference.

The opening plenary this morning, by Scott Cook of Intuit, was great. Scott is a very genial, affable guy who quickly builds a cnnection with the audience. The official topic for his talk, which he generally stuck to, was 'Creating game-changing innovation.'

He had many interesting insights into the business of innovation, many cribbed from Peter Drucker (in a good way, with appropriate credit given). Of particular note was his list of five 'models of innovation inside a company:

1. the lone genius
2. the boss is the genius
3. copy competitors' innovations
4. cloister the geniuses in a lab
5. make the people the geniuses

and of course he subscribes to the last one.

The heart of his talk, though was about five principles of innovation and invention. His principles:

1. Invention comes from mindset change.
2. Mindset change comes from seeing differently.
3. Savor surprises -- as learning.  (and 3a. celebrate your failures for the learning you derive from them)
4. Focus managers on a customer metric
5. Nurture and protect teams that are doing innovative work.

Cook talked a lot about how Intuit has a culture of always starting with the customer need. He gave several examples of how Intuit products were created directly out of customer studies that gave them key insights about how they weren't solving the needs of their customers.

It was a fun and inspiring talk. If you get an opportunity to hear Cook talk, I would strongly encourage you to do so.

This is just so disturbing on a number of levels: McNeil Consumer Healthcare has released a new version of its popular Children's Tylenol pain reliever that includes a set of flavor packets that let children produce the flavor they'd prefer for the medicine. One Web site reports that the package includes 'a bag full of tiny packets filled with powdered 'crystals' representing four different flavors: Strawberry, green apple, bubble gum and chocolate.' [src]

On one level, it's not a bad idea since most medicine tends to either taste yechy or is cloyingly sweet and syrupy, but what bothers me is that any time you make medicine seem more like candy, surprise, children think that it is candy.

This is the problem we have with our children and cough drops: all of them are only partially convinced when we say 'they're medicine, not candy', and the baby is sure we're lying because, heck, they're so yummy.

Have you looked at cough drops recently? Sure enough, they're now packaged and flavored as if they were hard candy, not medicine. I'm not talking about the menthol and eucalyptus flavors that us big folk might prefer when we're feeling a bit under the weather, but flavors like orange, black cherry, cherry, and 'tropical fruit'.

Heck, Hall's popular line of cough drops includes mint, ginger-grapefruit, strawberry, blueberry and even their 'Fruitables' line that they proudly describe as 'liquid-centre soothing candies with real fruit juice'. Sounds good, doesn't it?

I'm in Montreal for CHI 2006, then on to Princeton for an advisory board meeting for their engineering school next week.

I'm working up a really good rant about air travel, snce my flight out here very nearly went wrong on Friday. But I'll save that for another post.

Friday morning I dropped my kids off at school, and headed for the airport. On my way in the car I was listening to Marc Broussard, and the untitled/uncredited song at the end of the CD came on.

I wish you freedom
I wish you peace
I wish you nights of stars that beckon you to sleep
I wish you heartache that leaves you more of a man
I wish I could be there, but I can't

I wish you places that sit so still
Where people never ever change and never ever will
I wish I could hold you and make you understand
I wish I could be there, but I can't

Be good for your mama
Cause she'll need a hand to hold
Boy, she loves you
More than you'll ever know
There are rhymes and there are reasons
And times when nothing stayed the same
But you know my love still remains

I wish you wisdom
I wish you years
I wish you armies to conquer all your fears
I wish you courage for all that life demands
I wish I could be there, but I can't

Be good for your mama
Cause she'll need a hand to hold
Boy, she loves you
More than you'll ever know
There are rhymes and there are reasons
And times when nothing stayed the same
But you know my love still remains

I wish we were together
I wish I was home
I wish there were nights where I was never alone
I know I've said it but I'll say it once again
I wish I could be there, but I can't

Damn. I wasn't ten miles from the airport and my heart was already achng to turn around, stay home, and spend more time with my kids. Particularly since I missed a performance of my daughters' choir on Friday night, and I'm going to miss opening night of the school play this coming Friday. In three years they're graduating from high school and heading off to college, and here I sit in a $^%&! hotel room in Montreal, two thousand miles away from them.

I really look forward to CHI every year, but this year the conference hasn't even started yet and I'm already dying to get home. But thanks, Marc, for reminding me where my priorities should be.

I'm in the first session on privacy issues. Clare-Marie Karat is presenting a paper on a system for how to express formal privacy rules in natural language.

Here's a useful and simple definition of a privacy policy:

Who has access to what personal information:

• for what purposes
• to carry out what actions
• under what conditions
• with what obligations

Many of the question revolve around ways to handle exceptions -- which is the downfall of most data and workflow automation systems.

Karen Tang presented a paper on how to preserve privacy/anonymity in mobile location-based services. Person-centric applications reduce the fidelity of queries to increase anonymity. But location-centric services/queries are different in some ways and does the fidelity-degradation approach work? (no) so what does work? The discussion of the work point out that this is really an application-layer system, and that there are many threats from other layers particularly if the application layer system is dependent upon lower layers to accurately label locations.

Kirsten Boehner is talking about 'Advancing Ambiguity' Ambiguity is 'the admitting of multiple interpretation' (Gaver, 2003).

Generally more information and awareness reduces ambiguity, but sometimes there are exceptions. 'If you have one clock, you always know the time. If you have two clocks, you never know the time.'

Wendy March talked about 'Girls, Technology and Privacy: Is My Mother Listening?' Question: do you make phone calls sitting in your closet? It turns out that lots of teenage girls do. (so their parents can't overhear)

Important learning: girls pay attention to 'location privacy' -- don't trust IM to be secret, just voice calls. But they don't feel like home is 'their place' and will take phone (cell or cordless) somewhere that they can have a private conversation. Will only use computer for private conversations if they can physically move it somewhere private.

I'm in the 'alt.chi' session, which is a collection of papers that are very interesting projects but for one reason or another would not compete well against traditional research papers to make it into the conference programs.

First project: incorporating digital technologies into a playground.  Their first prototype was a mat (looks sort of like two sets of train tracks, side by side) that kids could step or run on, and hitting pressure mats would activate motors. In their second iteration, they got the kids involved in making spinners to put on the motors. Then they observed how kids used it and experimented with it, including inventing their own games.  Their big goal: use technologies toaugment playground equipment without compromising the nature of unstructired play?

Second project: Tokyo Youth at Leisure, supporting the design of new meida to support leisure planning and practice. A user study of young adults aged 18-25 (the only age group that actually has free time) to see how they plan and participate in their leisure outings. Relaxation and companionship were the most important leisure qualities; finding new romance was the least. People and TV were the top resources for planning outings, mobile device was very low (though distinguish planning from coordination, where mobile and PC are used extensively).  'downtime' is essential; they often spend it alone, but hyper-connected (via email and mobile phone). For group outings, you choose the set of people you want to be with first, then decide what to do. Planning a meeting place for a specific activity is the process of minimizing the commute and maximizing opportuinities for other serendipitous activities. One interesting take-away: lots of cultural hype of mobile phones' hyperuse as distinctly Japanese, but the PC was used a lot more than was expected; people liked the large screen for viewing information and planning activities.

Third project: RoomBugs. simulating insect infestations in elementary school classrooms.  Kids use computers to run a simulation over several days of insects in the classroom, as a science experiment where they need to quantify can classify the infestation. PC's act as stations around the room and show the virtual equivalent of a 'sand trap' where they see insect tracks as virtual insects walk voer them. Kids were able to correctly count and identify 94% of over 1500 insect tracks that they were exposed to over a 2-week period. Yow!

Fourth project: Orbital Browser. How to connect up components in a ubiquitous computing environment.

Fifth project: Quill: a narrative-based interface for personal document retrieval.

Globaled has had a make over. Initially, Emma and I organized globaled for a small workshop for a dozen teachers and educators at Branksome Hall in August of 2005. Our intent was to demonstrate how internet communication technologies are transforming education. We also believed that for educators involved in global education, ICT is bringing new methods for reaching students, creating learning experiences and enabling learners to network with other learners across the globe. The global education workshop at Branksome Hall has given us a better idea how to organize our globaled blog and we will continue to re-organize globaled as our experience and understanding of ICT and global education grows. 

We hope that globaled will serve as a gathering and networking point for educators, students and youth interested in global education. By reviewing & posting resources, articles, blogs and sites from the web and organizing them on globaled we and contributors from around the world can contribute to global education.

We are inviting reader/writers to recommend any global education resources, links or articles that they are familiar with on the Resource Portal page. The sub categories are broken down into the primary, junior and senior and all ages levels. 

For those not familiar with blogging, using globaled may give readers/writers an immediate feel for applying a blog and possibly other internet communication technologies in your global education curriculuum. 

I'm in the CHI panel on 'Why Taggigng systems work.'

This is really frustrating to watch. There are representatives from Yahoo/Flickr, Google, and various research institutions on this panel, all trying to define tagging, but REALLY trying to define tagging in a way where it's more important and signficant than just metadata. In essence, they're trying to define the 'tagging phenomenon' while skirting around the fact that they all have a vested interest in tagging being an important phenomenon with long-term staying power.

The one useful point raised is that in contrast to prior metadata efforts that were really designed around archiving and re-dscovery, tagging is largely focused on distribution (though certainly has an IR use too).

Out of this has grown Luis von Ahn's work on cooperative community tagging (and how to use games to do this). I'm a big fan of Luis's work at CMU.

Interesting observation/question from the audience: it seems like you need to be a 'tag devotee' and pretty religiously do it to get a lot of value out of it. (panel answer: there's a fair amount of value just as a consumer for others' tags, e.g. Wikipedia)

'man on the street' video, surveying people on their own filing/searching habits. What would get people to spend 30 minutes a day tagging web sites? Two most common answers: money (i.e. getting paid to do it) or 'nothing.'

Interesting insight from George Furnas, University of Michigan: people overestimate their own ability to tag items accurately, and underestimate a group's ability to come up with a good diverse set that represents the object well.

Furnas is definitely the star of this panel: he has a great historical perspective and a thoughtful approach that goes beyond the obvious memes of the tagging community (something the other panel members are having trouble with).

Good audience question: will tagging make it outside of the community? Will out mothers ever tag things? (the moderator punted; he wants to come back to it at the end of the session)

A panel member cited a UC Berkeley study that showed that tags are very similar to dialects: well-connected groups of people quickly converge on common sets of tags.

When asked where tagging will go, really no clear ideas. Except fr one panel member who thinks we'll end up tagging (and thereby judging) people.

An audience emember brought up that amazon added tagging to product pages a couple of months ago and it was a total disaster. A panelist said that it's Amazon's fault because the page is too busy. (another member jumped in and also blamed the UI) A third panelist is suggesting that the implementation was too eglaitarian -- not only could everyone tag, but everyone could define new tags.

Question from a panelist: does tagging scale up to large, heterogeneous groups? the panelists seem to say 'no' and I would suggest that this might be a more general indictment of social software systems: they almost never scale to large-scale, heterogeneous groups.

recurring point that relates to this: one universal, flat terrain for tags probably doesn't work. You need to think about clusters of tags (potentially overlapping) and hierarchies. In other words, in classing Internet form, the tagging community has just rediscovered IR, taxonomies, and semantic hierarchies.

Audience question: how many tags to people associate with an item? On delicious, the average is two (not surprisingly, that's the same as the number of words people type into a search box on MSN Search or Google).

• 
  Link Troll Catapults Original Pyro to World-Wide Fame.
  
  
  So admits the original Pyro himself! Actually, he would have got there eventually, even without my help!!
  
  (tags: blogspotting pyromaniacs warnie)
  




• 'The tithing issue is the pressing one as I work on my money study. Israel did it (although it looks like it was more like 23% than 10%). Should Christians be tithing?
  
  
  The bluefish is drawing a lot of traffic regarding his current posts on money and giving . . . join the fun!
  
  (tags: tithing)




• 
  'In a sinful and broken world—a world that really does suck for lots of people—a missional worldview invites Jesus followers to bring Jesus to redeem and heal and invite people into a life of shalom.'
  
  
  Anthony Bradley posts an article with the title 'Life is not supposed to suck.'
  
  (tags: missional)
  




• 'Here in China,' said the student, 'we have a hard time getting people to do what they ought to do. If I understand you correctly, the Gospel of Jesus Christ makes people want to do what they ought to do. Is that right?'
  
  
  The Heart of Christian Ethics: Over at Resurgence, there's a great post on legalism versus grace and the power of the true Gospel to bring about obedience.
  (tags: gospel grace legalism)




• 
  ' . . . the question isn’t whether my children should listen to rap or country or jazz. Rather, it’s whether or not my children distrust their hearts and desire to make choices that honor the Savior who bought them with his own blood.'
  
  
  Bob Kauflin provides four guidelines in helping parents facing the question of whether they should allow their children to listen to Christian rap, or for that matter, any type of musical genre.
  
  (tags: legalism music worship)

In the summer of 2001, commercial air travel was incredibly painful. Lots of delays, passengers were treated like cattle, every plane was packed, schedules sucked -- it was just plain a rotten way to spend any significant amount of time at all. Then 9/11 happened and lots of people stopped flying.

Well, we're back to the way things were pre- 9/11. Air travel is just miserable. All the old complaints are once again true, with new additions.

1. Food, or lack thereof. A bag of peanuts is a luxury. Airlines want you to bring your own food on board, or to pay them extraordinary amounts for things disguising themselves as food.

2. Code-shares. You no longer know what airline you're flying when you buy a ticket, or whether you're getting the best price. Code-sharing is a huge scam, and the customers are the suckers. How this officially works is that one airline buys a set of seats on another airline then re-sells them under their own brand at whatever price they want. Go do a search on Expedia, and more likely than not you'll see the exact smae flight offered by two different airlines are radically different prices. What's worse, in most cases when you get to the airport the airlines won't have anything to do with each other -- you get a rude awakening when they send you down to another ticket counter to chek in. Here's what happened to me Friday:  I was originally booked on an Alaska Airlines flight to Chicago, connecting to an Alaska code-share flight to Montreal that was really run by American Airlines. But between the time that I booked the flight and Friday, my connecting flight was removed from the schedule and replaced by another one that was NOT a code-share flight. So my reservation went into airline purgatory and my travel agent wasn't notified. Neither Alaska nor American took responsibility for re-booking me on another flight, and when I tried to check in Alaska no longer had a record of a connecting flight for me. In fact, it's worse: the Alaska agent checked me in for the Chicago flight and told me I needed to go to the American ticket counter to check in for the connecting flight in Chicago, but neglected to tell me that she had only checked my bag through to Chicago. I caught this as I walked away fromt he counter and my bag was disappearing into the back on the converyor belt. I grabbed the attention of the supervisor, who was very nice and called down to the baggage handlers to grab my bag off the belt while she called over to American Airlines to sort out my conencting flight. Fifteen minutes later, I had a reservation on a connecting American flight and a promise that the Alaska baggage handlers would re-tag my bag to get it to Montreal. The good news is that my bag did in fact show up in Montreal, but I had to spend all day wondering if that particular miracle would happen.

3. Airline staff who care, or lack thereof. The supervisor at the Alaska counter was the rare exception. My best guess is that airline personnel are so worried about their company going bankrupt and being out of a job, or the courts invalidating their union contract, that their thoughts are just elsewhere. I'm sure they're well-meaning, and that they have their own struggles with the state of air travel today, but they sure do seem checked out.

4. Security checkpoints. As if everything else wasn't enough of a pain in the butt, you literally have to run the gauntlet. Jacket off. Zip-up sweatshirt off. Shoes off. Belt off. Watch off. Cell phone, keys, change out of pockets. Laptop out of carry-on bag. Fight other harried passengers for enough grey buckets to put all this stuff in. Remember to keep boarding pass with you. Hope you don't get randomly spot-checked. Then on the other side, as carryons and buckets accumulate and run into each other, struggle to put your shoes back on, sweater and jacket, belt, watch, put the laptop back in the carryon, make sure you didn't forget your boarding pass (which you had to set down to re-dress and pack up everything again). Then get out of the way fast. On days I'm travelling, I find myself dressing for the sole purpose of speeding my trip through the security line.

Whil in general I'm not living my life to accumulate large quantities of money, I find myself increasingly wanting to get rich just so I can afford to buy a private plane and get a pilot's license, and/or fly executive jets, just to avoid commercial air travel whenever possible. It would be money well spent.