Language is a city to the building of which every human being brought a stone. —Mark Twain

For me, words are a form of action, capable of influencing change. —Ingrid Bengis

To add:

browse (TBL/Yahoo)—>search(AV/Google)—>browse?(tagging—delicious/Flickr, ?feeds?)

Names in general

A ubiquitous pattern in language in general, and in computers in particular, is name and content. A word generally references a physical or virtual thing, or qualities of or relationships among those things. Words matter to us, so much that we argue about what the "content" (meaning) of a given word is, and which word is right to use in a given situation. People may change their names when they get married (and may argue about what to change it to). We sometimes forget that the map (the word) is not the territory (tha actual thing), though we can also forget or deny the power that words have ("oh, you're just being PC").

Naming has been a topic of particular interest in wiki from the very beginning, both in naming patterns (the purpose of the orginal wiki was to develop a pattern language of programming), and in general.

http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?CategoryNaming :

"There seems to be something almost magical about giving something the 'right' name"

Ward example/story on naming meeting pages.

http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?ChoosingWikiNames :

"phrases which are easy to use in sentences" — (remember when semi-arbitrary words being links seemed kind of weird?)

WikiCase vs. [[]] — WikiCase excited a lot of early wiki folk, because they gave the sense of a new kind of multi-word name. Bit it's not really anything new. A bunch of words strung together are still a name.

Names in computing

In computers, names can also be powerful labels for things.

"If everything that machines need to talk about has a corresponding URL, you’ve created the machine equivalent of a noun." —Ryan Tomayko, "How I Explained REST to My Wife"

Analogously to the way that verbs in natural language can represent actions, names in computing can also represent actions. But they do more than that — if you say them to the right thing (another piece of code, or in the case of machine code, the actual hardware), they can actually produce action. E.g. the "wiki" in c2.com/cgi/wiki

Programmers are used to this, and URLs opened it up to a much broader array of people. See Jon Udell's Website API discovery and The power of the URL-line

• URLs should be meaningful — Humans see them, and should be able to construct them after seeing a few (like snailmail addresses) = "intuitive" to reverse-engineer
• URLs should be short (without losing too much meaning) — less typing, and it's easier to take in more at once and therefore figure out what a long URL points to.
• (This is why URL shorteners, and opaque web app URLs are bad.)

Example: http://eugene.craigslist.org/cta/ —> http://portland.craigslist.org/cta/

Namespaces

...in natural language

...within a website (e.g. Wikipedia's disambiguation)

...among sites: DNS

Wagn

Plus cards are regular cards, named as two other cards "plussed" together - anycard+anothercard

All the "+" says is a little bit about how these three cards are related:

anycard

anothercard

anycard+anothercard

The "+" is different from a space, or the non-space in WikiCase, or the / in file systems & URLs.

One typical of plus cards is to implement flatfile-like functionality:

http://www.wagn.org/wagn/John_Abbe+phone has my phone number

Not on the User form now, would be easy to add it back: http://wagn.org/John_Abbe

http://www.wagn.org/wagn/phone+*right+by_name has all phone numbers, sorted by name

http://www.wagn.org/wagn/phone+*right+by_create has all phone numbers, sorted by date created

Works because of

http://www.wagn.org/wagn/*right+*right+*content (recursion!)

http://www.wagn.org/wagn/by_name+*right+*content

Can even user services from other websites — e.g., connectipedia.org used to show maps and data about the county/city card you were on.

So, non-coders can do code-ish things by "programming" the name, in just the way that Jon Udell talks about programming the URL-line.

Now we can talk about Wagn's plus cards and natural language

Nonviolent Communication+Eugene or Eugene+Nonviolent Communication ?

Could mean something different or not. In Wagn, we always treat them as separate.

Standard order among people, places, things, datetimes?