Tagging. From del.icio.us it has spread like a worm. “Don’t bother with folders or albums or categories, just tag everything.” It’s chaos.

And Zeldman doesn’t like it.

But wait a second– tagging works because it’s simple enough that people actually do it. It’s straightforward. On the class website I administer, the photo gallery is an absolute disaster area because no one knows how to file anything or even where it should go. So in a system that’s supposed to enforce organization, there’s no organization at all. Read on…

It amazes me that folks still publish documents in native Microsoft Office formats.

Of course, there’s been several high-profile embarassments resulting from unknown ‘previous drafts’ and other hidden information sailing out the door with the latest press release.

But we just had a similar case at the school.

The midterm marks for 120 students went online in an XLS file. Two columns, student number and grade.

But a quick ‘Unhide All’ reveals three other columns: Name, Email, and Program Year. With just a birthday, this is enough information to buy someone a mealplan!

After a thoughtful student alerted the TAs, the file was promptly removed, but who knows who’s got a copy of it?

Microsoft has acknowledged this problem, and provides a tool for scrubbing its files. But forget that. Just remember, kids: HTML if you can, PDF if you must. Never DOC or XLS. Ever.

Mike

Wikipedia is like the future and the past, all at once.

It’s the future of human information. Services like Technorati and Delicious already let you see what’s important to people… Wikipedia just amplifies the effect. What does it mean when the article for a band that doesn’t even exist is almost as long as the article on Ghandi? Read on…

A story has come up on CNN about a calculator recall in Virginia. Eleven thousand previously state-approved devices are being replaced with a slightly crippled model so that students don’t use one particular function to gain an advantage on standardized tests.

As I read the piece, I noticed that the feature was the ability of the calculator to convert most decimals to a reduced fraction. Read on…

Lewis’ book The Great Divorce is a compelling hypothesis on the nature of Hell. There’s really not much about the afterlife in the Bible, but it’s fun to speculate, at least in moderation.

I’d love to think that Heaven is like an enormous never-ending dinner-party. Read on…