what would your nest look like?
I absolutely love this image, which I found on a snazzy blog called Bioephemera. (check it out!)
- Vireo bellii nest with newspaper, photograph by Rosamond Purcell
I came across the photo through my feedreader a few days ago, and it’s stayed in my mind, and I keep returning to it…I wonder, what would my nest look like, if I could make such a beautiful thing? What words, what scraps of which texts would I want to make my home with? What bits of language would I choose to keep me warm?
I don’t normally write retrospective essays at the close of one year, or my hopes and goals for the coming one. But my thoughts do keep returning to that image, and the blog title “Words to Nest By.” And given that we’ve just rung in 2009, maybe it’s appropriate to think about which words I’d want to keep from 2008, which ones I’d line my nest with…
Here’s just a few tidbits that warm me:
Yes We Can…the Iowa caucuses…”Democracy is not a state, it is an act. It is actions.”–Rep John Lewis…blue Indiana…
…we have a choice in this country. We can accept a politics that breeds division, and conflict, and cynicism. We can tackle race only as spectacle – as we did in the OJ trial – or in the wake of tragedy, as we did in the aftermath of Katrina – or as fodder for the nightly news. We can play Reverend Wright’s sermons on every channel, every day and talk about them from now until the election, and make the only question in this campaign whether or not the American people think that I somehow believe or sympathize with his most offensive words. We can pounce on some gaffe by a Hillary supporter as evidence that she’s playing the race card, or we can speculate on whether white men will all flock to John McCain in the general election regardless of his policies.
We can do that.
But if we do, I can tell you that in the next election, we’ll be talking about some other distraction. And then another one. And then another one. And nothing will change.
That is one option. Or, at this moment, in this election, we can come together and say, “Not this time.” Barack Obama, March 18, 2008
If I was a flower growing wild and free
All I’d want is you to be my sweet honey bee.
And if I was a tree growing tall and green
All I’d want is you to shade me and be my leaves
If you were a river in the mountains tall
The rumble of your water would be my call.
If you were the winter, I know I’d be the snow
Just as long as you were with me, when the cold winds blow.
If you were a wink, I’d be a nod
If you were a seed, well I’d be a pod.
If you were the floor, I’d wanna be the rug
And if you were a kiss, I know I’d be a hug
All I want is you, will you be my bride
Take me by the hand and stand by my side
All I want is you, will you stay with me?
Hold me in your arms and sway me like the sea.
—Barry Louis Polisar, “All I Want Is You” (Juno soundtrack, watch video)
And you? What would you line your nest with?
Tagging
What is tagging?
You may have heard folks talk about “tagging” or seen the word “tags” in connection to information on the web. Tagging is fast becoming a prevalent way to organize information–basically, it just means attaching an identifying keyword, concept, or category title to something, like a webpage, a file, or other piece of content. Tagging is a kind of filtering, or sorting.
If you’re looking at a webpage, and you see a bunch of words to the side of the page, they probably indicate “tag cloud” or a “tag index.” Here’s an example, from the home page of WordPress–it shows the top tags being used at this time:
Each of those words, and the size of the words, tells you about the content on that site. The tags tell you what topics people are writing about, and the size of the word tells you how many items are tagged with the same word. The bigger the word, the more items have been identified with that tag. This can be a helpful visual description of what a website focuses on, and can give you a quick sense of whether that site has the kind of information you are looking for.
In most cases, when you see a tag cloud, you can click on the word and it will then link you to a list of all the content that is tagged with that word. Sometimes the tag cloud is static, and is therefore only a descriptive device, not a navigational tool.
Using tags: navigating, organizing, and discovering
Tags can be used in at least three ways. First, if you are visiting a site, and want to see what’s there, you can click on words that interest you in the tag cloud, and access the content that way. You could think about that as “navigating through tags.”
Second, there is a way to use tags that you could think about as “organizing through tags.” This second way is more related to generating or organizing content, rather than looking to see how someone else has organized it.
Many blogging programs allow you to tag your posts, which are aggregated to create a tag cloud for your blog (see mine, in the upper right of this page). Another common way that people use tags to organize content is with web-based programs like Flickr (online photo albums) and Delicious (online bookmarking website). If I am surfing the web, and I have a Delicious account, I can bookmark webpages and tag them; if I collect hundreds of bookmarks, it’s easy for me to organize that content by using tags rather than putting bookmarks into lots of folders.
Say I’ve spent a few days looking at non-profit organizations focused on hunger issues, and I’ve also been trying to figure out what my taxes might be this year so I saved a bunch of websites about tax calculators and tips on deductions…and I also am weaning my household off of toxic chemicals and using all “green”, eco-friendly (and people friendly) cleaning products, so I’ve been finding some information about that and bookmarking that too. If I’ve been tagging each site as I save it with one or two keywords, then it’s easy for me to go back to my Delicious account and click on the right tag, and find which information I want, without scrolling through a long list, or having to put bookmarks into a system of folders. The other very cool thing about Delicious is that your account is on the web, not attached to a particular computer, so you can bookmark anything wherever you are, and access your bookmarks from any computer.
Finally, tagging can also be “social” (more on this in a future post), which means that many of these services allow you to share content with friends or the larger public, whichever you decide. This sharing capacity allows you to use tags to discover websites that other people have already found interesting, already bookmarked or tagged…it’s like Googling something, but pre-filtered because the content has already been sifted and sorted. If you are on Flickr, and you want to find a picture of tornado, you can type in “tornado” into the search box, and Flickr will pull up all the photos that have been tagged with “tornado.” If you are on Delicious, and search for everything that’s tagged “Ani DiFranco,” Delicious will pull up all the pages that have been bookmarked and tagged with that name.
An interesting neologism associated with social tagging is the notion of a “folksonomy”–like a taxonomy, or system of categorization, but a system that is emergent, created by masses of people. The categories themselves are generated by the people who are creating the content.
A more recent twist on tagging is something called “geotagging,” which is using a physical location, like longitude and latitude coordinates, as a tag. This can give you precise information about where something or someone might be, and can allow you to associate files or other data with specific locations. Google Earth allows you to post photos that are tagged with locations–creating an ever-growing, user-generated, photo enhancement of the satellite image of the world. Geotagging has interesting social applications–there are programs that can allow you to see what other people have written about a particular location when you are in that location, such as “Don’t eat at this place!” or “Amazing sculpture near the river!” People can “tag spaces” just the way that they can tag websites, and mobile access to the web can allow us to see this additional layer of information about the world around us. (Good read: William Gibson wrote about geotagging as an artistic practice in his latest book, Spook Country.)
RSS feed readers, and why to love them
Good friends of mine will remember, fondly or not so, my near-constant newsreading during the 2008 election. I was tethered to the computer, checking in with a range of websites, jumping from one to the other, scanning for updates, breaking news, smart analysis…I’d finish the circuit, and then start all over again.
Then I finally sat down to figure out this RSS reader thing I had heard about. And what a lovely thing it turned out to be! If you visit a bunch of websites that have content that is updated relatively frequently, you might find RSS a handy tool, as well.
So what is RSS?
RSS stands for “real simple syndication”. That still doesn’t tell you very much, unfortunately. Lots and lots of websites now have a symbol that looks like this: 
When you see this symbol on a website, it means you can “subscribe” to that site, and get a “feed” of the ongoing updates from that site. Those feeds are collected into something called a “reader.”
The good folks at CommonCraft have put together a 2 minute video overview of what a RSS reader is and does:
Clear enough?
Basically, RSS checks all your websites for you, grabs any new updates and sends them to one place, your “reader.” That way, you can just go to the reader, which is on the web and can be accessed from a computer or accessed through an application on a mobile phone or other device. So you go to the reader, and scroll through all the posts from those websites–and you’re all caught up lickety-split. All you have to do is choose a RSS reader, tell it which websites you want it to check for you, then…well, then all you have to do is read! And after you get a reader, any time you see that RSS symbol, you can click on it, and add that website to your list of feeds.
Why use RSS?
One reason why a RSS reader is useful is that it can save you a lot of time: you check the reader when it fits in with your schedule and you see all the posts that you haven’t read yet. You don’t have to visit a bunch of websites and scroll back to see if you missed anything. In addition, most RSS readers have an easy way for you to then flag/star a particular post so you can return to it later, and a way for you to email a link to that post to someone else.
Say you like sewing, and sailing, and cooking. You could subscribe to websites about those topics, and get good tips and learn new stuff about those topics. Or, maybe you are interested in the economy, and green products for the home. You could subscribe to websites about those things. It’s like tailoring the web just to your particular interests. And you don’t need to be someone who checks out websites all the time–you might look at your reader only once in awhile, whenever it’s convenient for you.
I know you’re asking yourself right now–”Can I subscribe to the Digital Hummingbird blog? I don’t see the RSS symbol on this very website!” That’s true, and you are very observant. It’s a design flaw in this blogging template that I haven’t yet figured out how to fix. But there is something up there in the right-hand column that says “Feeds.” If you click there, you can subscribe to this website easy peasy. I’ve been experimenting with a couple different readers since I got my iPhone in September, and am happy to report that there’s plenty of free, reliable options out there.
Examples of readers.
Here’s a quick overview of two of the readers I’ve tried and their pros/cons, in my experience.
Google Reader.
Google’s RSS reader is great. You can sign up for a Google reader without signing up for a Gmail account, so no worries there. It’s easy to add websites/feeds to your reader, to organize them and delete them. What’s cool about Google Reader is that, in addition to highlighting posts you think are interesting and want to keep, you can also easily email, tweet, and “share” posts with friends. So it’s a “social” technology, in the way that much of new media applications are shared with friends and other people.
Another cool aspect is that you can “tag” a post with identifying terms–say it’s an article about chocolate and it’s beneficial effects on the brain. You can tag that article with “food”, “health,” and “brain”–it’s like creating categories for the article. And if you save a lot of articles or posts and tag them, you’ll be able to sort those articles by their topical categories. This is a new way to organize content–which we need, given the explosion of information made available by the web. I’ll talk more indepth about social media and tagging in another post. The only drawback I’ve found with it is when I use it on the iPhone–on the iPhone, you access the Google Reader on the web, and there isn’t a way to browse through your feeds and read them if you aren’t connected to the internet.
Here’s what my reader looks like. 
On the left, you can see a list of all the websites I’ve subscribed to (and the folders and tags I’ve organized them with). On the right is the most recent post from one of the political websites, fivethirtyeight.com. At the bottom of that post, you can see what you can do with the post after you’ve read it, if you want: star, email, share, tag. If you use Firefox, you can also add an extension that integrates Twitter into your Google Reader, so you can directly tweet articles and postings as you read them.
NewsGator/NetNewsWire/FeedDemon
This is another very good option, and, unlike Google Reader, NetNewsWire downloads all the content to your mobile device for offline browsing. This set of applications are related, but it can be a little confusing. You access Newsgator on the web, you download FeedDemon to your computer, and you use NetNewsWire on mobile devices. If you like to read your feeds on a handheld, you can “clip” a post for later reference; these are then accessible when you’re on your computer, which is handy if you want to bookmark or blog content that you find.
In theory, one account is synchronized across all three platforms, but I did find that some changes I made in one platform were not automatically updated in the others. Also, it’s got fewer social features than Google, as you can see in the below image–at the bottom of the post, there are only options to “mark as read,” clip, tag, and email. NetNewsWire, as a mobile device reader, works well in most repects, but doesn’t allow you to add feeds–you have to go to NewsGator or FeedDemon to do that, which is limiting. Here’s my NewsGator reader:
Both Google and NewsGator are solid and versatile, and I don’t know how I’d keep up with all the things I want to learn about without them–but neither are perfect: I’d like one reader to incorporate everything: ease of adding, deleting and organizing feeds; ability to mark read/unread, star, email, tag, share and tweet posts; and an option to download all posts to the handheld, to read content offline. Actually, I’d like to be able to integrate WordPress with one of these readers, so I could just send links directly to my WordPress account, into some sort of drafting space…oh, one can only dream. Maybe something like that will come along, maybe even next week…
I also like Manifesto for the iPhone (thanks Andy Ihnatko!)–it’s easy to use, beautiful, and you can import feeds from your Google Reader. If it was two-way, that would be perfect. Until Google Reader gets offline capacity…which I don’t know if that’s even a goal…I think I’ll be stuck using two systems, one for the iPhone and one on the computer. If you sign up for a Google Reader, lemme know. I’d love to share with you. That means that you’d be able to see posts that I chose to share, and vice versa.
