Labels Tags, and Friday afternoons!

It perhaps was a mistake to try and cover Thing 8 on a Friday afternoon. I've quickly read Clay Shirky's essay, ontology is overrated but I was struggling to keep going! (more coffee is needed I think).

I can see some of the problems of a static system, whereby one person, or a group of people decide how to classify, or categorise an item (and I agree that with the web one can have a multiplicity of links to the same item), but I still feel that at some stage whichever system you use, it has to come down to "best guess" on the part of the searcher. An organic system whereby others can add tags may increase the success rate, but does not guarantee that the searcher will choose a label someone has given it. Similarly a system which searches all the words in an article, could cover a greater range of possible search terms, but cannot help if that term is not contained within the article...even though the reader could tell that that was what it was about.

Time I think to try and put some more tags on my previous entries...and  refill my mug before I re-read the article.

Google Calendar

This 'Thing' was easy, in that I already use Google Calendar.  (You can see from the sea of colour on the screenshot how heavily it is used!) However as I played with, following through the instructions, and tried to find out "how to..." for a fellow Cam23 participant I did make some discoveries. Thanks to Cam23 therefore I have an even better set-up than before.

First discovery when playing with the settings was that I could put the default to a month view - brilliant - much more useful to me. I could also have the week starting on Monday not Sunday. Again this is more how I view the world. I've also played around with the colours, so that now 'my' events and interests are in shades of blue and green, and the rest of the family, outside events are in oranges and reds. I have also discovered the 'agenda' setting, interesting but I think I prefer the calendar view. Putting the calendar into iGoogle seems a good idea, although again I would prefer this to be in a calendar view rather than as a list.

For me the ability to share calendars is where Google Calendars comes into its own. My family seem to lead busy lives - and it makes it so much easier when planning to be able to see all events at a glance. I can see that in a library setting this would also come into its own - though i suspect there might be a period of 'playing' before all had sorted out exactly what went on the calendar and how to share (i.e. which events in one's calendar are personal and therefore of no interest to those you share with and those you need them to know)