Begin Life Lesson: If you have a beer, but no beer opener, never worry. There are multiple ways to open a beer. If you have a corked bottle of wine… make sure you have more than a electric drill and a multitool. End Life Lesson
So there aren’t that many things for me to talk about. Well, there are but only some that are pressing to be recorded for eternity. Let’s start with the Web 2.0. You’ll likely have noticed tags being used at sites like flickr, last.fm, youtube, wikipedia, etc. The basic idea is that for an object (song, photo, video), users associate a tag to it. Multiple tags are eventually placed by users. For example, a photo of a hairy ass could be tagged as: gross, hairy, body part, gluteus maximus, what_happens_at_the_carnival_stays_at_the_carnival, etc. Then what happens is that if a user is searching for gross pictures, this particular picture will come up in the search. The humans are teaching the machine.
So how does this apply to your life? It likely doesn’t. But, (and that’s a big but) if you’ve ever been using a music streaming service and were playing music similar to a certain band or a particular music genre, you may have noticed some discrepancies in the expected output. In my case, I was playing music similar to Ben Harper. Then this unwanted music infiltrates my speakers, and I start checkin’ why. Turns out he was tagged under ‘bands heard live’ which means that now there’s a chance any band tagged similarly could be included. So the web benefits from the collectivism of the whole tagging activity, but the individual suffers. Another term for tags would be ‘meta information’ which is what Windows products utilize.
On a different note, I had the absolute worst experience at Subway the other day. Longest wait, worst service, worst interactions, worst customer-in-front-of-me. The sandwich was pretty good, though.
Ok, maybe I should’ve waited longer before blogging. Not sure that edified anyone. But comment if you got the title.