Tonight at the Berkman Thursday Blog Meeting I'll be facilitating a discussion about tagging. Tagging is the hot phenomenon of user-supplied labels, used on popular sites like del.icio.us and flickr, and on my own frassle. Why is tagging so popular? What makes it interesting? And is it an innovation or just a short-lived fad that will soon be destroyed by confusion and spam?

Berkman Thursday blog meetings are free, public weekly meetings for people interested in weblogs. We discuss technology along with its social effects and influences, and it's also a chance to complement your online community with some face-to-face meetings, learn the latest tricks, and ask questions—there is no expertise requirement. The meetings, Thursdays at 7pm at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, are also streamed online and have an IRC (chat) channel for participants who can't come to Cambridge, MA. More information is available on our weblog.

Here's the plan for tonight's tagging discussion:

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Hope to see you there! I expect the group to provide some very interesting discussion and debate.

Looking for directions between my house and the Boston airport shows a
surprising degree of variation between map services. Check this out:

Route	Google Maps	Yahoo Maps	Mapquest
home to BOS	7.6mi, 12min	7.5mi, 16min	10.5mi, 19min
verdict	optimal route, timing should be ~15min	same route as Google, fewere pointless "continue on" directions	ridiculous, and "avoid highways" option does not help
BOS to home	10mi, 16min	8.6mi, 19min	10.3mi, 18min
verdict	possibly silly use of highway	slow, stoplight-ridden trek through Cambridge	optimal until entering Somerville, then just as ridiculous

This is a tricky example. As the crow flies, the Boston airport is rather
close to my house— probably 6 miles. The airport is in East Boston,
which is accessible via underwater tunnels from downtown Boston (there is a
bridge from Chelsea but that's far out of the way). There are at least two
different possible tunnels to East Boston, each of which connects to a
different highway out of downtown (I-93 or I-90), neither of which is
especially convenient to my place. There is also the option of exiting the
tunnels onto a fast non-interstate road (Storrow Dr.), which is scenic but
not direct, or to drive on city streets, which is geographically direct but
involves slower traffic and more stoplights. On top of this, while I'm
fairly confident the Yahoo/Google route to the airport is optimal,
I'm not sure how reversible this route is because the tunnel away
from the airport is not exactly adjacent to the one coming in.

In other words, the mapping services disagree on the return path, but so
do I— I've taken at least 3 different, reasonable paths home as well
as getting lost a few times. Times have ranged from 18 minutes to over 30
(with a jaunt through the industrial areas of Medford; whoops).

I wonder, is the route to my house from Logan Airport just a damned
tricky route to optimize? Or are the different services needlessly stupid
and divergent?

A friend of mine who is getting married asked for some advice about changing (or not changing) her name. Here is my take on it, with names changed to protect the innocent. The couple shall herein be known as Emilia Gambino and Lucas Gustaffson.

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As interbreeding becomes the norm, we should expect family names to increasingly lose their ethnic significance. In a couple of generations, people will find it so much harder to pin their family tree to a specific country, and there will probably be redheaded brown-skinned people named Gambino (who knows?). So, at least on a theoretical level, I think we should bite the bullet now and give up on the historical/ethnic significance of last names.

Given that, what good is a last name?

• helps to uniquely identify a person
• identifies membership in a family group
• very frequently associated with an individual bearing it

In other words, your last name is a huge branding opportunity. As it is used for identification, frequently associated with the people it includes, and denotes group membership, it is not at all unlike a company name. I am not kidding.

What does one want in a company name? Well, it has to be unique. You'd never call a new company or a new family "Smith". Second, you have to be able to register a sensible domain name; that's why my Rura is so convenient, because it's short and phonetically reasonable, yet unusual enough to have been available in y2k. Your name should be easy to say and spell (perhaps easier than "Rura", but I'm still thankful family names pass partilineally and I don't have an 8:2 consonant:vowel ratio in my last name). Finally, it can be used to communicate part of the mission or culture of the group (e.g. Microsoft, New Balance) but it needn't do so (e.g. GoDaddy, Nike). This last exception is especially important in the case of something as long-lasting and non-goal-specific as a family name.

Note also that in family names, there is a small, probably temporary incentive to use certain traditional-sounding names if you live in the United States or Canada and desire admission for your children to elite colleges. If your child's last name is distinctly Hispanic, it may trigger poorly calibrated affirmative action features in the college admissions process. For this reason, you should consider changing your names to "Emilia Rodriguez" or "Lucas Hernandez". However, a child named LaKeysha Rodriguez-Hernandez might be unduly scrutinized for her uncanny combination of affirmative-action-triggering name archetypes with the characteristically yuppie hyphen, so beware.

Short-term admissions strategizing aside, I recommend that you invent a new family name and use it for yourselves and your children. You might consider something that blends "Gustaffson" and "Gambino", such as "Gambison" or "Gusbino". However, if you are serious about achieving a lasting brand for your family, it may be worth bringing in a full-fledged naming/branding agency. While these guys mostly sit around thinking of names like "Verizon", there is no reason they couldn't expand into family names. In fact, the idea may be novel enough that an agency might be happy to donate their services if you let them write a few press releases about it. Just imagine the envy of the "Joneses" when their Tommy has his first play date with your young Mr. Campione or the way boys will melt for the on-demand attractiveness of Ms. SeducTiVo.

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This blog post by Dave Winer is a gem. Often when people say something like that it's a thinly veiled euphemism for "Dave is a caustic asshole", but not here. As soon as I read this I knew it would be one of my favorite blog posts ever, by anyone.

Why? It just perfectly sums up my favorite parts of Dave's personality. It's funny, creative, and highlights Dave's incredible courage and competence to fuck with things that need to be fucked with. It's well written, personal, and historical. It made me smile and it made me think.

Intimacy is being seen and known as the person you truly are.
— Amy Bloom

At a discussion led by David Weinberger a few months ago, I realized that I find social software appealing because, like many structures and conventions in offline discourse, it fosters development of a certain honest closeness between people. The word to describe this is intimacy, and one of my favorite things about online discussion is the diversity of ways that intimacy arises.

In meatspace, intimacy comes from family relations, friendship, working relationships, and romance. The patterns that establish intimacy are characterized by repeated interaction with increasing ability to reveal oneself without inhibition. In our most intimate relationships, we tend to be generous, forgiving, attentive, and considerate. We are rewarded for these efforts by partners who weild significant emotional and intellectual leverage over our selves, yet exercise this leverage with care that ensures help, not hurt.

By these definitions, a blog is obviously an intimacy engine. I openly share my opinions, values, joys, sorrows, etc.; and you respond with specific criticism, forgive my occassional idiocy or inconsideration, and share in my happiness and my pain. Some bloggers and blog readers have become friends and colleagues, but all take part in a process of intimacy development at a novel, wonderful pace and scale.

I recently subscribed to the MIT Technology Review magazine. It promised to be something like Wired but smarter, thanks to its long history and university affiliation.

While it's certainly an improvement over Wired, it doesn't go quite far enough. The April Tech Review is an amorphous stack of short, shallow articles, with only two stories over 4 pages long (there is also a series of one-page articles on technology in various countries, each written by a different author). Most of the content consists of single-page or sub-single-page vignettes, many of which smell like products of the PR machine. I wonder if they'd do better publishing "emerging technology" index cards so VPs can take them into meetings and quote buzzwords until their boss is sufficiently impressed.

Where is the reporting? As close as we get in April's issue is a story by Bryant Urstadt (apparently a freelancer) on oil drilling in the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge. It summarizes the cases for and against drilling, concluding that while the technology to drill cleanly exists, we shouldn't count on the oil industry to use it. This piece is under three pages long. As a short, topical report, it's fine, but I'd expect to see 5-10 of these short reports amid 4-7 serious stories.

Compare this with the New York Times Magazine. NYTM publishes a lot of junk too, but it is also a place for long, deep stories. Every once in a while they'll have a multi-part series that gives you remarkable perspective into e.g. what it's like to be an illegal immigrant or African refugee orphan. Couldn't we do something like this for technology? Rather than publish half-page overviews that amount to saying "Will Wright is working on an even bigger Sim" or "Mena Trott says blogging isn't just for would-be large-audience editorialists", why not do a longer interview? Sit down with Will Wright and have him comment on the state of the games industry. On developing and selling his company. On having the rare power to "propose crazy ideas" and pursue them. I've heard Will Wright speak, and he has plenty to say on all of these topics. It wouldn't even require much editing.

Or, taking the concept of embedded reporting closer to home, why not plant a journalist inside a university lab or corporate research division? Sure, there would be some confidentiality issues to negotiate, but I think many companies would welcome the opportunity to have their most interesting projects profiled in such a prestigious publication. Of course, the reporters would have to be insightfully critical as well, so that it doesn't just turn into an advertisement. Over time, reporters could develop their understanding of an industry segment, and use that to provide real insight about emerging trends.

If I had to boil it down to one request, it would be for longer stories. I'm not expecting a Believer Magazine for geeks, but some progress toward that end would be much appreciated.

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Wink looks like a very handy application for demonstrating usage of software. Unfortunately for would-be screencasters, it doesn't record audio, though it does have handy text bubbles. [via Lifehacker]

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Jeff Busgang, who writes an excellent blog on venture capital with an entrepreneur's perspective, has a surprisingly lucid explanation of how VCs get paid and how financial tensions and a firm's power structure can affect decisions.

It's hard to confront problems. Whether you need to honestly evaluate the status of a project, understand where someone has difficulty working with you, or just reflect on ways things could be better, it's hard to call out something as bad.

My favorite technique for working around this is to ask "if you had to change one thing, what would you change?" This makes it feel somehow more theoretical: you're under this hypothetical compulsion to call something out, without having to judge whether it's actually bad or just not quite as great. That is important in and of itself, because you want to think in terms of what alternatives and improvements may be available to you, not in absolute terms of good or bad.

So next time you want honest criticism, try asking this question. I'm especially fond of using it in job interviews and other judgment-focused situations to defuse the worry that honesty will offend.

Feel free to comment: if you could change one thing about yourself or your company, what would you change?

Yesterday we held the second dinner gathering of the Boston Genius Workshop. It was great! About 30 people showed up. I met a bunch of new people — and I organized the damn thing (with co-host Susan Kaup). I heard about a lot of cool things people are working on, and participated in some pretty interesting arguments. We had three big tables in a private room at Christopher's in Porter Square, which was an excellent setting. And the Salmon Fettucine I had was delicious.

The Genius Workshop has a pretentious-sounding name, and I've taken to explaining that genius is an aspiration, not some qualification we think we already have under our belts. Ingenious ideas arise when you get smart people talking to each other. Or at least they have fun. This is just one attempt to smush together a few of the smarties I know.

One thing we did differently this time around was tell everyone we invited to suggest some new attendees. This worked wonderfully; at least a third of our attendees were people Susan and I hadn't met before. And it's safe to say that nobody went the whole evening without talking to someone they'd never before met. A nice complement to that was a couple of folks who were acquainted, but hadn't seen each other in 3 years until last night.

Here's something I'm puzzled about: should we open up Genius Workshop gatherings? So far, we've been trying to grow through existing social networks rather than public advertising. On one hand, this troubles the geek in me, who would have found this exclusivity intimidating just a year or two ago. On the other hand, I want a core of the group to be recognizable and intimate. Genius Workshop attendees: what do you think? Non-attendees: would you be more interested if it were an open event, or if you received an invitation from someone you knew? Note that in either case, if we are to have dinner gatherings at restaurants, we'll still need serious RSVPs so that we can make accurate reservations.

Update: photos from the 2 May dinner!

Coming soon: a mailing list for our attendees. And should we publish a roster (with short bios) on the web?