That’s right, Apple introduces Mighty Mouse, a two-button mouse. What’ll they think of next?

Shirky has a great article, Ontology is Overrated–Categories, Links, and Tags which describes some of the advantages of tagging systems versus a typical hierarchical ontology. I love the Dewey Decimal System example categorization for religions of the world…

Dewey, 200: Religion
210 Natural theology
220 Bible
230 Christian theology
240 Christian moral & devotional theology
250 Christian orders & local church
260 Christian social theology
270 Christian church history
280 Christian sects & denominations
290 Other religions

No bias there, eh?

And a couple on the del.icio.us/flickr idea of tagging…

“…you can see there’s a tag “to_read”. A professional cataloguer would look at this tag in horror–“This is context-dependent and temporary.” Well, so was the category “East Germany.”

That’s funny. And this…

“The addition of a few simple labels hardly seems so momentous, but the surprise here, as so often with the Web, is the surprise of simplicity. Tags are important mainly for what they leave out. By forgoing formal classification, tags enable a huge amount of user-produced organizational value, at vanishingly small cost.”

“Mary’s Violet Eyes Makes John Stay Up Nights, Period.”

That’s how I used to remember the nine planets, in the correct order. Nine planets you say? Not any more. But I suppose the new mnemonic will have to wait until the planet is officially named.

Google Maps now offers a nifty “hybrid” view.

For those of you, like me, who find Gmail to be faster and easier to use than a standard GUI mail client, don’t miss out on the keyboard shortcuts. Makes using Gmail practically mouse-free.

Link

Someday, when I have an extra mountain of cash just sitting around, I’m going to buy a movie theater. A nice one, with just one screen. I’m going to keep everything clean and shiny and probably throw down some velvet. I’m going to show quality films that I think folks will enjoy. You’ll never see a single commercial and the films will always start on time. You’ll be able to buy popcorn and soda - cheap, because it really doesn’t cost $6.00 to make a bucket of the stuff.

Then I’m going to hire ex-convicts as ushers. Lots of em. They’ll carry clubs and not hesitate to use them on any asshole who talks at all during the movie. You don’t want to know what they’ll do to you if your phone rings - I don’t care if it was an accident.

You can see where the Apollo moon landings were by using the nifty Google Maps interface. Be sure to zoom all the way in.

Link

I poked a little fun at font nerds here a week or two ago, but that doesn’t mean I don’t think this looks like fun

The Django project looks like a really nice framework with much of the same goodness inspired by Ruby on Rails. Unfortunately, my heart already belongs to Rails. I’m sure the Python folks will love it, though.

I subscribe to a number of del.icio.us tags via RSS as a great way to keep tabs on things I’m interested in. I also notice some interesting meta data can be found by watching the list of subscriptions over time. For example, here some recent changes in my list…

In

• Flash

• Ruby

• Lifehacks

• Darcs

Out

• PHP

• CVS

• Linux