j’s scratchpad

Here’s some humor about del.icio.us and social bookmarking in general via Jason Kottke.

Developing large taxonomies is a balance between the content in the taxonomy and figuring out how users will try to use the taxonomy or find the content. Two discussions about creating large taxonomies from scratch have my head humming. A large part of my jobs over the last nine years has been dealing with taxonomies. […]

Nancy Hafkin is today’s Berkman Luncheon Series guest. She’s speaking about gender issues and technology and how women can be empowered in the knowledge society.
Hafkin suggests a cyberella has many characteristics, including someone who is more than just a user of technology. She’s someone who uses it in many aspects of her life and introduces […]

The Intelligent Agent weblog publishes some bits from an interview with Technorati’s David Sifry that will appear in the December Information Advisor.

According to a bit on LISNews and The Washington Post, H. Donald Wilson, the first president of Mead Data Central, died November 12. During Wilson’s presidency, the company launched LexisNexis to news libraries and law firms.
From the Post:
"Mr. Wilson started by developing a business plan for an engineer’s invention of how to better search text […]

Maybe we news librarians can learn a bit from this video on YouTube about virtual reference, which is giving reference services to people at a distance often using newer Internet-based technology.
from LIS News

The ResourceShelf has instructions for posting a real time news feed from Yahoo! News on a site.

One of the many things I’m thankful for this year is your support and readership (skimmership) of and contributions to j’s scratchpad and its community. Thank you!

Permabit and Forrester Research are having a free webcast about what’s involved in having a 100-year digital archive. Registration is required.
(On the way to Peterborough {where I encountered more Elm and Pine Street confusion} last night, I realized I forgot to make this post live.)

Speaking of nifty videos of presentations …
The ResourceShelf links to video of Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple Computers, speaking at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.