It seems you're using an old browser...

The first social network I joined was LiveJournal back in 2001. At the time, I thought of it purely as an online journaling system. I didn't understand how the friending mechanism worked, nor the deceptive name applied to the feature (something that has thankfully been replaced with "following" on other sites). I often wrote entries there expecting no one to ever read them. It often felt like writing letters to no one in particular, then casting them upon the will of the four winds to whomever would find them.

The anonymity emboldened me. I wrote about things that were actually on my mind, instead of bottling them up as I had been raised. Frustration, fear, worry, depression, quixotism, fascination, and humor. Many say that the internet is where people put on masks; to me, it was the first place I was able to take mine off.

Things changed of course. LiveJournal became all the rage, creating a sprawling online community of people. I continued to write, but often with growing apprehension. I slowly began closing the loop and locking things down. No longer was it a wide open vista, but a room. The door was often open and the windows could be easily seen through, but there was a clearer separation between the Internet at large, and my little section.

Events occurred that forced me to close those openings completely. The windows were shuttered, the door was closed and locked. Little did I realize that the supply of fresh air was now also depleting. I ventured out rarely, and often only to lock things down all the more. Bars were installed. Boards nailed to the wall, cartoon-fashion.

Social networking often works the best for outgoing and open individuals that feel they have little to hide, or no one worth hiding from. My pessimism can't help but see that attitude as naive.

Today, the social networking scene has exploded across the entire world. MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Identi.ca, and the new contender, Google Buzz. It's hard not to feel overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of information one is required to read every day in order to say current. And lately, I often feel much like this:

Around December I went back to playing World of Warcraft, mainly because the people I played with decided to go back to it also. The group had branched out to another server to play Horde characters and because of various complications (me doing NaNoWriMo, my home net connection being throttled to dial-up speeds so that downloading the game patches took two weeks), by the time I got back into the game everyone else's characters were all levelled in the mid-20s or higher. So I created a tauren druid named Katacat to join them (and an undead mage named Antikata, and... )

The point is I spent a fair meanwhile playing her to catch up with the others, so they could group together. Playing on the Horde side felt distinctly uncomfortable relative to the Alliance side of last time. It put me in mind of race drag. The tauren feel very much like pop-cultural Native Americans and the trolls are seeming very much to be Rastafarian stereotypes (plus some Cannibal Islander in the mix). It bothers me. And the Horde side seems to have much more extreme sexual dimorphism, with the women often scarcely resembling the men beyond skin colour. When I was making an orc warlock it seemed like the female model could fit entirely inside the male model.

It is also quite jarring when Voodoo is referenced within the game (pertaining to trolls, of course... are they just all islanders of colour all at once?), such as when a character mentions sending an enemy's severed head to a troll friend because he 'knows he likes to use that sort of thing in his voodoo rituals'. Do the writers not realise this is an actual, specific real-world religion they are referencing? I think if the word 'Voodoo' there were replaced with 'Christian' I think many more people would recognise that as jarring, as pertaining to a specific set (of sets) of beliefs and rituals which have no place being explicitly referenced in a fictitious world which does not support their development. Likewise for shaman. These are specific, actual things, not generic terms which attach to nothing particular.

Conversely, I have been quite enjoying the wildlife of the Barrens. We stick European animals and plants in fantasy settings all the time, so it is a pleasant change to see some lions and zebras and hyenas and giraffes roaming about, although I mislike how much of a minority that zone is in compared with the rest of the world. It does make me think I would like to see some areas themed with Australian-based flora and fauna (perhaps the new island zones in the Cataclysm expansion? although I think that decision and work is already past and done by now). I suspect that ironically where that where 'voodoo' and 'shaman' pass often unnoticed and unremarked, including creatures derived from those inhabiting Australia would throw people out of suspended disbelief and perhaps lead to accusations of inappropriate inclusions. I say that because I believe the general 'we' is accustomed to seeing, frex, kangaroos as symbolising the specific place Australia, and that we are accustomed also to seeing the religions of people of colour as synonymous with dark magic and spirits so we don't notice the appropriation of those or see a problem with it. (the omnipresence of wolves and boars[1] and bears is also invisible, for different reasons) Then again, they have annual festivals based on Christmas and Valentines, so maybe not.

Speaking of the festivals, they have recently put me in mind that I would love to see global seasons implemented. I suppose the way the festivals are synced annually would be an impediment but still I would love to see changing seasons done on a scale shorter than a year (maybe over four months? one month per season, keeping the festivals always occurring in their proper season), and separated too north from south. It would be lovely to see how the zones change through the 'year'. Much of the game I have been finding quite beautiful even with the graphics necessarily turned far down; I wouldn't want to see them all given conventional spring, summer, etc., but something appropriate to existing themes could be quite breathtaking.

[1] Oh, boars! This game is the only time I have seen them depicted as peaceful, plentiful creatures rather than elusive, ornery animals it is unwise to stumble upon.

A while back the folks at LibraryThing started an Open Shelves Classification project (OSC, which makes me think of Orson Scott Card whenever I read it). There was even a round of beta testing in which LibraryThing members were invited to try and sort books into top level categories, to see how well the system was working.

Recently I have been spending more time at LibraryThing and Musicbrainz, having decided that 'now' is the time to ensure my collections are properly catalogued. I got curious about the state of the OSC project, having not heard much about it since the beginning of the year, so for the past couple of days I have been reading the Build the Open Shelves Classification group. I started from the bottom of the page and have been reading upward, trying to build a sense of context. So far I am still early on, reading the discussion threads on the initial round of testing that was the last I heard of the project and getting a bit frustrated with what I see going on in it although I do not know how things have progressed since.

The project as I understand it is to build a system for shelving works which is open source and easily usable by most for finding things, and to overcome the shortcomings of existing shelving systems. It is supposed to be a system for deciding how to organise material in a physical space and not some sort of abstract classification or cataloguing system, yet because this involves arranging things according to what they are deemed to most be 'about' I think it cannot help touching upon those territories.

My frustration comes from things like this: after reading several threads discussing matters like dividing items by audience (e.g. Children's, Young Adult), language, or format (e.g. prose, play, DVD) and what appeared to be a consensus that optional facets should be used, so a library that wanted to separate by format would be able to do so while one that did not wish to do so was not required to if they followed the system. So it was frustrating to then see in the first round of testing Comics & Graphic Novels as its own top-level category. This was precisely the situation that apparent consensus on optional facets was seemed suited for handling, and there seemed no clear consensus on whether graphic works should be separated out or interfiled. It seemed a lot like a crisis of disorganisation, although I suspect whatever was done with graphic works there would have been some sort of panic since they can include both fiction and non-fiction.

There were also some complaints that science was granted a single top-level category, while what are often called the social sciences (and other areas) were spread around. Despite initially being reserved about that, it does make sense to me since there are plenty of works about science generally, although I don't know this isn't true for other areas that were split up, and a place elsewhere could presumably be found elsewhere for them (philosophy->science ?).

The point was made at the start, which I agree with, that a shelf-organising project like this is foredoomed to failure somewhere as soon as it begins. Compromises will have to be made somewhere, there will be some number of works which don't fit easily into one category and not others, and how people sort the world is going to be culturally biased. The goal is to create a system which maximises ease of browsing, but I think even if the terms and codes can be translated themselves, it may in the end be better to create a new shelving system from almost scratch for different cultures than attempt to be human-universal.

What all these misgivings did accomplish was getting me to consider how I would go about devising a shelving system. So now you get to see my thoughts on that unless you are quick enough to scroll or close the page in time. As I said just a paragraph above, I think any such system is going to have significant points of failure, especially concerning multidisciplinary works or syntheses, and I have little idea if my thoughts on the matter would be any better or worse at avoiding such. Probably worse, since I have conducted no study to inform myself on the subject (I don't think my minor library qualification counts, since we were taught to use catalogues, not judge them).

So, top-level categories in my personal 'this seems like a good idea to me' system:

Reference

This is something I think of as not really a subject area itself, but a shelving area which is handy to have. I think of 'reference' as a sort of mini-library containing works which are useful to have readily available for referring to. Important to have in most cases, but should be handled by whoever is organising the library it occurs in. That, I suppose is to an extent bowing to 'how people are accustomed to finding things organised' and maybe it would be better to do without a reference section? Maybe in some ways it is better suited to a personal library, where the person who owns it can decide which books ey finds useful to keep in arm's reach.

Knowledge and ideas

I don't know what to call this category, but my idea behind it is 'knowledge about things'. If you want to know how something works, this is the appropriate section. Subsections include things like astronomy, psychology, mechanical engineering, history, religion, law. To a fair degree it approximates what we refer to as 'non fiction', but is not equivalent to that category. I am uncertain if it would be appropriate to separate 'how to' into a separate category, but for consistency with my ideas elsewhere, have not attempted to do so.

Games, sports and recreation

This includes subjects like cricket, World of Warcraft, whist or Dungeons & Dragons. Activities performed for leisure, for entertainment, or competitively. I suspect this is also a place for guides and (non-academic) information on practical activities like cooking, caring for pets, gardening, or sex.

Creative and critical works

This includes subjects like painting, poetry, sculpture, music, essays, films and prose fiction. Criticism, analysis and instructive materials go along with the works they are about. I think biographical works go here, since the material is not necessarily 'fiction', but I could see a case for it going with history in the knowledge section.

That's it. That's the whole listing of my current ideas on how I would organise a shelving and classifying system. My own if no one else's.

I was also talking with Tess about how to solve the 'one location per book' problem, so perhaps there will be a post later with (probably very impractical) ideas on that.

The preview of Wave I had requested access to did not arrive until late November, and I did not begin using it until early December as I was busy writing previously. I have made a point of using it often since then and so far I am liking it a lot.

Wave seems very useful for the purposes I have been wanting to put it to, working on collaborative fiction projects or for small editorial review of public writings like this one. So far this has been encouraging and I have been experimenting with new ways of organising my ideas, as well as being for me quite productive. So, pending the participation of other people, Wave is already succeeding at everything I wanted out of it, except that I have not yet been able to try it for role-playing gaming.

I do have some complaints or frustrations so far though. Right now I am using Chrome because the main wave I was editing was too jittery in Firefox for me to even get the cursor to where I wanted it or, when I finally managed that, to see what I was doing - with every character typed the view would jump to the bottom or the top of the wave or sometimes to actually show where I was working, though this was rare and seldom persistent.

Whenever I experience issues like that where a Google product has problems on Firefox but not on Chrome I tend to suspect Google of discreetly encouraging use of their browser over others especially if it used to work fine. But Wave at least is still in experimental stages and for others I have not ruled out some odd interaction with extensions in Firefox, something I should really test more thoroughly, so that could well be only a product of my regular cynicism toward business.

I would also like to be able to have more than one wave open at a time, since although I tend to give primary focus to one thing I am working on I tend to be inspired to make smaller tweaks to other projects at the same time. This is something I value about tabbed editors like Notepad++, although as a complaint it may have more to do with my connection speed being currently very slowed, making quick switches between documents online a hassle, although I do think I would rather not close something I am actively working on just to add a couple of lines to something else.

Otherwise I am quite happy with Wave so far. I think it does everything I was wanting out of it.

Since it is being promoted as an alternative communication tool to email, one that will be available to non-Google entities to provide in the future also, I am finding myself preferring to refer to it as Wave rather than Google Wave for now. They have already anyway assured themselves market dominance through this period of exclusivity I think.

I suspect Google is not going to be creating a desktop client since they would rather people use their browser, although someone else might make one, and I expect once out of preview there will be a Wave app added to Google apps.