Hackpacker

One of the best justifications for using metadata is that it is “a love letter to the future”. It means planning for metadata will give your content a chance to be found.* But I can't find who coined this phrase by Googling it or hours of browsing. It should show up under keyword searches like "metadata" or "love letters", but because a friend told me it's hard to track down the origin. If only conversations were tagged. Library Confusion 23/12/1952 by Sam Hood (courtesy of State Library of NSW) In the blur of the web, losing information is becoming more common. If you want your content to be found, tag it. As the web gets busier all those keywords, topics or subjects just get more important. Apps like Zite or services like paper.li create newspapers for users just by pulling this descriptive metadata. On a bigger web presence, metadata creates dynamic feeds that allow the robots to do the curating. While it's fallen out of favour with search e

A little known dadvocate is unearthed in Darth Vader and Son , an important fathering text by Jeffrey Brown It’s not enough to just raise your kids to not eat their own snot – today the parent is the political as dadvocates push for ward the case for active fathering . Author Jeff Sass reckons iPads are bested by iDads as the latter has better battery life though memory decreases in older units . Not to mention the danger of their dad jokes going viral. But you don’t have to be male to wear the mantel . A uthor of parenting bible What to Expect When You’re Expecting , Heidi Murkoff calls herself a dadvocate and included a whole chapter in the latest edition dedicated to proactive papas. One day dadvocates may even dream of having a book of their own. In Other Words is a regular on the Big Issue 's Ointment page. 

When asked about the worst words of 2013, The Atlantic ’s Richard Lawson responded that he hated the usage of curation. His objection to the word was that it has shifted far from its original high-art meaning: "It's a reappropriated term that used to mean something good - putting lovely and interesting things in a museum! - but now denotes a technique of cobbling together preexisting web content and sharing it with readers/followers/whomever. In other words, linking to things.” And he’s got a point. Social media means we’re all curators now. Anyone who signs up for a Twitter account is curating a stream of links and cat videos for their followers and friends.  But personalised curation is a response to the information overblown that the web has created. Social media has given many users a way to make sense of this by looking to trusted curators: their friends. Learnist is a good example of social media curating lessons as users learn from their friends about

In the corporate jungle there are few things as dangerous as the slow-moving HiPPO. The meeting is going fine until everyone turns and listens out for the confused charge of the Highest Paid Person’s Opinion (or HiPPO).  After absently fidgeting with their Blackberry for most of the presentation, HiPPOs will typically yawn, “Yeah, we’re not doing any of that. What about building a MySpace page? Kids love that don’t they?” This is answered by howls of approval from the corporate hyenas. HiPPO decision making is becoming extinct as businesses are placing an emphasis on marketing research and what their customers actually want. In Hollywood, however, amphibious animals are still calling the shots with the announcement this month of – hold onto your balls - HungryHungry Hippos: The Movie . In Other Words is a regular on the Big Issue 's Ointment page. 

There's been a lot of death knells sounded for the bookshop. And a few of the big chains have been in strife - Borders, Angus and Robertson were the big news. But an interesting rumination on the future of bookshops from the Association of University Presses got me thinking about how they could thrive. Rather than being defensive about online bookshops stealing business, the article suggests stealing clicks and mortar's ideas like showrooming. Bookshops are becoming the place where buyers encounter books but sneak home to buy them cheaply (or increasingly do it in store on their phones). Last Christmas in the US Amazon paid shoppers to report prices on their mobiles by promising discounts or cash then undercut physical bookstores on. There's no avoiding clicks and mortar in the physical world. So the article suggests bookshops are evolving into a "book place" offering book rental, secondhand options or membership models. It might even be possible to get a qu