corprewland

Originally uploaded by msim2006 (a friend of mine from one of the iSchool’s masters programs.)  It’s me (r) talking to Dave Winer (l) about something or other.  Eventually, someone’s going to do a ’1000 kung fu postures of Corprew’ given the way I move my hands around when I’m talking.

This is a photograph from one of the sessions at Mind Camp 2.0 that I participated a lot in, it was called ‘del.icio.us inside,’ which was a presentation about delicious-type stuff and its possible role in corporate intranets. The main talkers there were dave winer, some ms guys, a msim guy, and myself. It was an interesting time and I learned a lot. Apparently, though, my tendency to ask difficult questions that derail conversations and agendas continues.

The second was called ‘a penguin is a bad bird,’ and was about Lakoff and basic-level categories (I picked the name, which seems to be a generic example of prototype effects.) It was at 9:00 AM in the morning, so I warmed up the largely comatose people who came with a category theory-based comedy routine. I think saying ‘category theory-based comedy routine’ is pretty much admitting you have a problem, but the people who were crazy enough to be there seemed to have enjoyed it. It was originally going to be ‘a penguin is a bad example of a bird,’ but there wasn’t enough space on the schedule.

Overheard (as reported to me):
guy1: “What is this penguin one?”
guy2: “Someone said that guy is awesome but has an weird sense of humor and it would probably be worth going to if it wasn’t sunday morning.”

So, it went pretty well. There was something I wanted to go to at 66% of the sessions, and the other sessions I just hung around and hung out with my friendsnetworked with colleagues. I had a lot of fun, and I’m getting the hang of this self-organizing conference thing. I’m also having better luck at choosing information science topics to talk about in that sort of combo presentation/rap session format. The next mindcamp is scheduled for November and I’m going to try to be more involved in that one — this one had too much grad school work in big piles around it for anything to happen other than just attending and gibbering. Ran into people from Hackers, BM, Stronghold, and various other things.

IMG_0048Originally uploaded by albill. (not me)

I thought it would be interesting to give a presentation about some of the ideas (Prototypes, Basic Categories) in Lakoff’s Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things at MindCamp 2.0 in Seattle.

A penguin being a bad example of a bird is sort of a running theme in almost every presentation on prototype categories I’ve run into. It’s clearly a bird, but it doesn’t have all the attributes that most people would think of if you asked them to describe a bird.

Also amusingly, I was clearly in the low-rent porn and love district when I gave this presentation (which was on Sunday morning at 9am.)  I’d like to thank the people who actually came out for it, it was a good time.