I saw a cute cartoon which made me remember that semantics is a word that is often maligned, and has a bad connotation for many people. I forget this because semantics is to me the most central of all areas of inquiry. It is a bout how things mean what they do .. how humans interact with their world and each other.
I was looking through my pictures and found this .. I stayed at a hotel called the “Hotel Gutenbergs” in Riga, Latvia, a couple of years ago. In the foyer there were these Gutenberg bibles on stands and in a glass case. I asked the guy behind the counter if they were real? I suddenly thought of my mother who always asks the butcher if the meat is fresh …
He really started something, I guess.
A friend of mine took this picture in Trondheim, where I used to live. You can’t take anything for granted, I suppose!
Well, I guess everyone knows by now. Yahoo! is safe from the grubby hands of Mickeysoft, for now, anyway. So I am sticking with you!!! Well done Jerry Yang and co ….
Here is an interesting quote:
"``Unbelievable,'' said Laura Martin, an analyst at New York- based
Soleil Securities Corp. ``This is management putting its employees and its
job security ahead of current Yahoo shareholders' interest.''
Er … am I missing something? Since when has it become BAD to put your employees ahead of a bunch of people who don’t care about anything except the expansion of their purses????
I hope it is not to be, but I have already found a new web hosting company to replace Yahoo! hosting, who run this blog …. should the unthinkable buyout from Mickeysoft go ahead.
I have also kind of found a replacement for Flickr …. del.icio.us will be hard to replace
So PLEASE let sanity prevail and don’t let share market greed win this one!!
I have Yahoo! email, business email, Flickr accounts, and even this blog is hosted on Yahoo!
I even applied for a job with Yahoo!, and at one time I thought about heading to Yahoo! research in Barcelona.
The thing is I hate Microsoft.
How will I replace all these services if Microsoft buys you out???
So what do you make of this?
This picture shows a number of tags that have been grouped according to high level linguistic analysis of the terms. I will not explain the specific semantic abstraction in this post, because I want to see if people (if there are any out there watching my poor blog!) can make any sense of it? That is, do the terms in each branch seem to belong to the same “kind”?
Enough for now.
There a story in the Wall Street Journal that Microsoft is planning to buy into Facebook. I saw several bloggers pick this story up, commenting on the Microsoft catchup aspect of the story.
But no one seemed to have picked up this ironic fact: Facebook runs on Linux (and Apache). So Microsoft wants to use innovative new products built on superior technologies to prop up its boring, aging, and second rate technology.
How sad it was to read the news on Jem’s web site. For those of you who don’t know, Jem is a brilliantly original Welsh singer/songwriter whose first album “Finally Woken” was stunning!
Unfortunately (?) it was also somewhat successful and now she is in Los Angeles recording her second album with hip hop producer Jeff Bass who worked with Eminem, 50 Cent and so on. Now even though I like some of Eminem, who IN THEIR RIGHT MIND would EVER think of mixing Jem’s unique style with some cardboard cutout hip hopster? Then if this wasn’t enough, it turns out that she is also working with Lester Mendez, who was the idiot that RUINED one of my other favorite creative singers, Nelly Furtado. Why, oh why must creativity end in such horribly mundane and boring ways these days, gravitating to a stale predictable yawn? Money I suppose is the answer?
“I’m sorry .. so sorry .. I’m sorry it’s like this …”
Prophetic words, Jem ….
This has nothing to do with folksonomy … or does it? I was loking for pictures of Bergen in Norway .. and somehow this picture showed up as a main result. It is in Austria. Still, an awesome picture! Guess tagging really works 
