Saturday, May 20, 2006

The Basics of Copywriting

Friday, May 19, 2006

Google and tagging

Michael Arrington is less than impressed with the newly-launched Google Notebook. One criticism he makes about it, in comparison to del.icio.us, is that it doesn't support tagging.
Del.icio.us would have been a perfect acquisition for Google, right down to the user interface which is very Google-like. For whatever reason they let it go to Yahoo. I suspect that over time they’ll regret that decision.
Off the top of my head, I can't think of tagging being much used in any of Google's services.

There are labels in Gmail which amount to much the same thing, but the Gmail help doesn't really push these. I started out using them, but found that I didn't rely on the labels much. I just archive everything and place my trust in the search facility to find it again when I need it. And this has rarely, if ever, let me down. So my hunch is that Google are not heavily into providing or promoting tagging within their services. Their main business is search. If they get that right, then tagging is not needed.

I do miss not being able to categorise my posts on this blog by tag. I expected the Google-owned Blogger to have introduced tags by now. But at a stretch, maybe the lack of tags is not an accident, and is simply part of Google strategy. We should just throw our contect up there on the web and trust Google to find it.

Tuesday, May 02, 2006

Two quotes from the Iliad

10.65 - 69 Naming in Homer (my italics):
Then in turn the lord of Agamemnon spoke to him:
'Better wait here, so there will be no way we can miss one another
as we come and go. There are many paths up and down the encampment.
Call out wherever you go, and waken each man to give him
your orders, naming him by descent with the name of his father.
Give each man due respect.
Let not your spirit be haughty,
but let it be you and I ourselves who do the work, seeing
that Zeus cast on us as we were born this burden of evil.'
11.155 - 162 Homeric simile leading into a devastating payoff:
As when obliterating fire comes down on the timbered forest
and the roll of the wind carries it everywhere, and bushes
leaning under the force of the fire's rush tumble uprooted,
so before Atreus' son Agamemnon went down the high heads
of the running Trojans, and in many places the strong-necked horses
rattled their empty chariots along the causeways of battle,
and longed for their haughty charioteers, who were lying
along the ground, to delight no longer their wives, but the vultures.

From Richmond Lattimore's translation