Tag Archives: Blog

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Tagging and Searching: Search Retrieval Effectiveness of Folkonsomies on the World Wide Web

To complete my MS in Information Architecture and Knowledge Management at Kent State I did some research on folksonomies and how the can support information retrieval.  I compared social bookmarking systems with search engines and directories.  I’m hoping to see the results published in an academic journal.   In the mean time, you can see a pre-publication copy of my results:

Tagging and searching [pdf, 989K]

Minor update to Procrastato, download version 0.6.1

Ben FranklinI’ve made a very small update to Procrastato, the only Firefox extension that will get you back on track when you are procrastinating. Really I just cleaned up some extra files that didn’t need to be included in the install.

Please head to the main project page to download and install the latest version.

As always, any comments or questions you have are welcome.

Automated online backup with Mozy – the key word is automated

Mozy LogoMozy is a backup-service that will automatically back up your files on their server on a day-to-day basis when your computer is idle. I just signed up for it about a week ago.

This post is not really a product review. I haven’t used Mozy enough to fully recommend it yet and there are other similar services like Carbonite that I have no experience with. The important concept here is the automation, specifically the automation of tasks that I don’t really enjoy and normally take up big chunks of time.

Over the past year or so I have been trying to keep in mind the concept of opportunity cost–specifically, the cost of my time when I choose to spend it doing one thing and not another. So, in the past I would manually make backups every few months on DVDs. This takes time, requires me to remember all the drives and folders where I put things that are worth backing up, etc.

So now I think to myself, “what is the cost of using those hours to do backups instead of doing something else?” I could probably do some consulting work, and let’s say I would gain $50 an hour on average, taking into account time it takes to find people who need some work done, etc. Or I could work on refinishing my kitchen, work I don’t get paid for but that does prevent me from having to pay someone else. Or I could spend time with my wife, which I put a large value on.

So by installing Mozy, I have the piece of mind and mitigation of risk I had before (actually more, since these are finer-grained, off-site backups), and the $5.00 per month cost is more than made up by not wasting hundred of dollars in time over the course of the year.

Thanks to ITPro in the UK for reminding me the name of the service.