XHTML & the memory tag

Christopher L. Filkins

I write this because I'm sure I'll have this problem again, and then Google will help me (hi idiot Meg from the future making the same mistakes again!) In the meantime, it may help you.

Been there done that! Much of what I write I consider to be simply vomit. You never know when I may need a tasty morsel though. So my blog serves as my own personal brain dump.

I can be extremely disorganized with my hobbies and fascinations so I store ideas, facts, quotations, moods, fears, angers, joys in my public writing so that I won't lose the reference. I can always use Google to find obscure pieces of my own personal library of obscurity. I too have written notes to myself in my posts fully intending them to be read at future dates and have had some catastrophic hard drive failures which resulted in some pieces of my records saved due to the Google cache.

Some posts are simply impulses. I'll likely never look at them again. Some are vitally important, cataloged in my mind as they are posted, and will be returned to again and again.

Is an obscure quote from Abraham Lincoln:

We may congratulate ourselves that this cruel war is nearing its end. It has cost a vast amount of treasure and blood. The best blood of the flower of American youth has been freely offered upon our country's alter that the nation might live. It has indeed been a trying hour for the Republic; but I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country.

As a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed. I feel at this moment more anxiety than ever before, even in the midst of war. God grant that my suspicions may prove groundless.

different from an obscure opinion about Lincoln when it comes to memory? I have been thinking an awful lot about this issue of how to structure posts in such a way that they are easily retrievable in the future while creating a context in which to understand them now. And yet assign them useful metadata which is readbale to others and their machines.

For instance, you not be aware of this, but the first 3-5 words in a post are of much important for the purposes of indexing in search engines like Google. Do you want to ensure that your posts are treated equitably by Google? When posting on subjects you are an authority on, with all things made equal, your posts will rise above (in the Google return rankings) someone elses, equally an authority, if you structure your posts as I described (and of course if your keyword density is in the proper range). In composition classes in grammar school we are taught to write punchy and cogent opening sentences of punchy and cogent opening paragraphs. Technology has now, at least temporarily, moved the emphasis from the first sentences to the first words of a piece of writing. This is structured data of a most unconscious type. Is there a way to be more specific about structure? Eventually our machines will categorize and apply metadata based on Bayseian like functionality tuned to each individual writer. We have a long way to go before such a thing.

Tom Coates posits, in reading Jason Kottke's recent excellent riff on metadata:

Because in fact it's not that there's too much metadata in the world, it's that we have incredibly primitive and vestigial mechanisms to help us transcribe it from world to idiot-savant computer companion. We're stuck in a middle-period between the emergence of useful computer processing power and the computer's upcoming ability to self-annotate, transcribe and create metadata simply, elegantly (and in vast amount) in the background all the time. In the meantime our transcription processes are tedious and long, our computers eager but clueless - and the amounts of metadata available for any given thing trivial compared to the richness of information and association you could get from a genuinely interested and knowledgeable person.

Jason's recent foray in re-design is a thing of beauty. Jason has made real stab at designing the flow through a blog in the same elegent fashion I have tried to build several times but have been thwarted by my tools & lack of time. It's great to see someone else make real what I have only imagined up to now.