Harnessing the power of and, part 1

I like how wide-open things feel on delicious. Because we’re limited only by our language when it comes to what we tag our bookmarks, there are as many tagging systems as there are users. For that reason, the tag search function should allow at least a few more Boolean options than a simple +.

For now, let’s focus on wringing all we can from the delicious search field or typing our search terms directly into the URL field at the top of your browser window. This is the first in an occasional series of posts sharing a few methods for getting the most out of combining tags in the URL. We’ll start out rudimentary; I’m hoping to get some comments explaining some more advanced methods and ideas.

Use a place or a place+time combination to anchor one or more other tags:

London+2009+event

NYC+event

Berlin+event

Or simply browse the recent tag for event or events. Combine these with general adjectives commonly used to describe events you might like to attend:

art+event

conference+event

design+event

When you see a bookmark you like, make sure you click through to some of the users who have saved it; at least one of those people is bound to have saved a few more links that might interest you.

Pattern Recognition reviews

For a class he’s teaching, Daily Clique member jbushnell has been gathering reviews of William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition in prominent media outlets.

For more, see delicious bookmarks tagged patternrecognition and williamgibson.

Nielsen's posts tagged Science2.0

For a while now, Daily Clique member nielsen [his blog is here] has been bookmarking articles and blogs devoted to the Science 2.0 movement—basically, massively multicollaborator online problem solving. Here are some of his recent bookmarks tagged Science2.0:

Questions of procedure from Gowers’s Weblog: Timothy Gowers updates the rules to his massively collaborative mathematics experiment. He posted the first project for this experiment a few days ago and has already received 145 comments.

Williams Math/Stat blog: The blog of the Williams College mathematics and statistics department.

For communicating ideas in the mathematics and statistics communities, the common media have been conference talks and journal articles. Neither of these options provides the freedom given by a blog.

Snark Attack: UCLA Research Dissing Technology Bombs: Clay Burell smartly dismisses a study from the latest issue of Science, which claims “multi-tasking and the use of computers, the Internet, and video games” have led to declines in our critical thinking and analytic abilities.

Creating an opposition between “critical thinking” and “reading and discussing,” on the one hand, and electronic/social media on the other, is a logical false disjunctive (in plain talk, a false either/or). Any competent teacher can use the new literacy tools to create new possibilities in critical thinking, reading, discussing, and more, that were only dreamt of in pre-Internet philosophies.

Poincaré’s legacies: pages from year two of a mathematical blog
from Terry Tao’s blog: Tao announces a blog book based on all his mathematical posts from the past year.

E. Kowalski’s blog: I’ve never been good at math but I know a dedicated blogger when I see one.

The purpose of The Daily Clique, part one

I began The Daily Clique a few days ago after spending a month thinking not just about the purpose of the blog but also about how to clarify that purpose for visitors, many of whom might never have heard of delicious.com. I also assumed that most of the visitors who have heard of delicious either don’t use it or use it sporadically. That’s okay: I’m not here to evangelize for a social bookmarking site; I’m here to share great links and sources.

But I’m also here to find delicious users who are unknown to me and share some of my interests. The 21 usernames in the list to the right constitute the current Clique. To qualify a user doesn’t necessarily need ten bookmarks per day going back to 2003; she just routinely needs to share interesting links that I would not ordinarily have found.

Sure, I prefer articles and websites somehow related to my chief interests—urbanism, transportation, planning, mapping and pragmatist philosophy—but I’m more concerned that the Clique provides me with a rich set of sources and online experiences.

I hold some members of the Clique as sacred and virtually above replacement (TomC, for example) but I’m very open to your suggestions of new delicious users to replace anybody in the current 21. The idea is that by making incremental changes to the makeup of the Clique, I’ll iterate towards a richer collection of links from which to cull the few that I share each day.