Will the real [Me] please take one pace forward...

Who is the real Me ? Well, I wrote this blog post...

Or at least, the identity that is Me in the context of this personal blog.

Oh, and I sign in as a different [Me] to write a different "subject" blog to this one.

And that's different to the Me in the context of My Work. I sign in to the system at My Work as a different [Me].

That [Me] sometimes goes to conferences and puts on different clothes and cleans its fingernails and moderates its Lancashire accent... in which case appears to be another Instance of Me. That will me (Me)2 .

Then I get home, and relax after a beer or two... and become again the instance of Me that is (Me)1 (or it is (Me)3 ? )

So, which (Me)n is/are in my e-portfolio?

And which (Me)n is in charge of my e-portfolio?

Answers, on a postcard, to... (Me)0, devnull@gmail.com

Explaining Web 2.0 - in under 5 minutes!

Hard to do, but this excellent animation from Mike Wesch gives a very powerful overview of the concept of what the shift to Web 2.0 technologies is all about, and the capacity it enables for changing the way we work with the internet. I never thought I'd utter the word "Awesome" in this sort of context, but right now, I'm tempted!

Reality, Truth and Convenience

A clever chap, Harry Beck. He came up with a different way of representing the London Underground on a map that was less about reality and more about convenience. He gave us the "traditional" tube map as we know it.

Is it Art? I don't pretend to know, but it's certainly a clever design.

Simon Patterson took Mr Beck's idea and made his own version of it, as "art"... clever, off-beat, and one of the 50 original prints did sell at auction for £14,950, and it did hang in the Tate Gallery for a while. But you couldn't usefully navigate London with it.

And at some point someone had a go at creating this gem, titled the "If England had lost the war" tube map. The translation looks a bit dodgy, and there's clearly an element of irreverent humour at play... but you could actually navigate with it.

Which sort of brings me to my question. If I create a taxonomy, a sort of artifical construction, a classification, that I believe will help people to find stuff that I have organised in some way, does it have to be "right"? Is is sufficient for it to be "convenient"?

If it's arrived at by some sort of consensus, and sort of works empirically, warts and all, in a given situation for a particular audience, then really it's just an instance of a folksonomy. And even if folksonomies are oftentimes dubbed "fauxonomies"... by their very nature, they are malleable, transient things that despite their rough and ready nature, do just work... most of the time.

Me, I'm quite happy to accept a trade-off between perfection and convenience. Sometimes it will mean we occasionally disembark at the wrong stop... but that's a whole new thing... Serendipity...