Grandpa Woodstock

Grandpa Woodstock As portrait
and as poster, long since tagged over

And on the road on his hog in Bisbee Arizona where most people seem to love him (in the category of persistent, deeply weird but our weird, lovable local characters), though some don't. And for some people he is part of a larger cause, or movement symbol. The rippling meanings of this guy, whom I just found on one of my flickr contacts flickr feeds this morning, is pretty amazing. I don't know the flickr person, but i either liked some of their stuff they posted on one of the visualization lists, or they liked some of mine and asked to be a contact. there's been no other contact since then and i don't look at their stuff much, but they posted one picture today i liked and it led me to the picture of grandpawoodstock.. so a long diversion turns into a design exercise.


The flickr tag Grandpawoodstock as one word produced these pictures, which oddly enough didn't include the ones above. And it didn't include this picture which was titled Grandpa Woodstock but not tagged that way. But searching for grandpa Woodstock separated by a space produced a lot of noise, too. So if I wanted to include all the grandpa woodstocks I could include without tags it would be too hard. In this process, I tagged one of my pictures I found as grandpawoodstock and it got corralled by the tag machine and shows up under that easy search on tags, rather than this cumbersome, multiple step process i'm having to do to make sense of all the ways i could find information that added meaning on grandpa woodstock. so making information capture with tags is a key to our design going forward.

you only resort to structured data when you are going to be doing it habitually enough that it saves time vs. the freeform of tagging. when it's a path you will be going down a lot. zone one or two, in permaculture design speak; places you go half a dozen times a day are zone one. places you go a couple of times a day are zone two. we need to build a permaculture influenced piece of software and process. Permaculture is related to pattern language.

And i've made a bisbee" map of that might work this time. (On a blog you can start a paragraph with and because it's really often a series of strung together thoughts cum interruptions.

It's all an exercise in rapid, itterative, intuitive mapping that i started thinking about this morning.
Some people do it by scanning 3x5 cards and get a huge following. i have ordered a scanner and so has Mark Beam. We are trying to figure out how to collaborate at high speed with a minimum of painful coordination and process but still keep each other in the loop as we go through our walkabout.