Inspired by Bukowski’s- the man with the beautiful eyes…

Take #1

with beautiful eyes
and childlike innocence you
cannot see darkness

Take #2

with St Lucy’s eyes
held in your palms - together
you weep in despair

cc flickr http://www.flickr.com/photos/legominose/50033327/sizes/s/

Today I am off to get a new tattoo and I started thinking about the reasons we get inked. For me there is a long tradition of tattooing in my culture (NZ Maori). Both my brothers and I have tattoos.

For me tattoos capture a time, head-space and place and I am really happy with each tattoo I have added. I am really looking forward to the new one which celebrates my love of teapots and birds!

Haiku

as the needle bites -
your love will last a lifetime
inked into my skin…

Haiku #1 22/7/08

a box for goodwill
each piece of chipped china
a memory of you…

On another note if you want to want to read some truely beautiful haiku check out Joe’s Ruminations

Scot posted another challenge and this is my response….

Bukowski’s The man with the beautiful eyes made me think about what men with beautiful eyes can get away with in this world…

your beautiful eyes

when you first hit me
aurora borealis
eyes filled with fire…

those beautiful eyes
mesmerised me and the pain
became bearable

noone else saw it…
too frightened to say - I struggled to walk away

Lucky last 23 thing for the year…. the Semantic Web. Standards, code, tags oh no… I am WSWIG kinda person and talk of codes and standards tend make me go green.

I believe it would enhance the the internet or web experience if computers/search engines could understand what was in the web pages that it harvests but could they really give meaning? It is so subjective. Can a machine really “understand” the way we humans think? Can codes, standards and tags infer meaning? Look what happened to HAL in Space Odyssey 2001. He went mad.

In the readwriteweb can content creators be relied onto to code their content so it could be understood by machines? Will it ever be a seamless, simple process?

My experience of blogging is that it took me a while to bother with tagging. I am a compulsive tagger now but I wasn’t at all interested in the extra work thinking about what tags to use as it took time and effort and I just wanted to publish.

According to Wikipedia the skeptics wonder if the vision of a semantic web is possible outside specialist communities (2008, Wikipedia). I can see that there would be a role for librarians/information managers in the semantic web as we work with metadata (or some of us do). I will keep an eye on the discussions around semantic web but I think it is definitely some way off yet.

The first thing I needed to do was get the name right… Voyage is a RSS feed reader not a starship in the Star Trek fleet. Initially I had  trouble adding my feeds however, under manage your feeds just click the add feed link and paste in the URL of the desired RSS feeds.

Next I had to figure out how to find the feed once they were added. For me it wasn’t intuitive - once I discovered that you can use the bars on the time-line to change the dates or your mouse wheel (it does say this on the start page but I didn’t read it) it was quite simple to find archived and recent posts.

It was easier to understand the functionality once I deleted all the default feeds and just worked with the ones I wanted.

The site looks great and I like the way the feeds wiz around. Again I think it warrants more play to work out what I like and don’t. I currently use Google Reader which is very simple and intuitive so I will reserve judgment for now.

Of course I added my own blog and the with the design and font used by Voyage my haiku look really impressive.

So far the issues I have are:

1. It takes a while to load
2. Not intuitive to use
3. Couldn’t find any help menu

KartOO a visual meta search engine that provides a traditional search interface with a single Google like search box but the difference is in how the results are displayed. With funky little icons and animations KartOO looks great.

My search “Doctor Who blogs” yielded over 4 million results. It ranks by the size of the page. To see the rest of the results you select next map. It also came up with 14 topics which were useful such as video, photos etc…

I do like the visual mapping of the topics/results and the design and layout look terrific. However, I am such a Google user it would take a giant leap of faith for me to stop Googling. It is so pervasive. I am going to bookmark it and use it over the next 6 months and see if my views change.

haiku #1

come into my arms,
fly above the clouds into the heavens…

haiku #2

delightful kisses
bind me to you… and time stops
in your warm embrace

haiku #3

early daffodils
bow their sweet heads as birds sing
and spring approaches

cc flickr http://www.flickr.com/photos/shanissinha_/

Bike lockers made me wonder about lockers to leave your heart in…

keep your heart safe in a heart locker - keys available at counter…

love in the time of Web 2.0

love tokens….
email
text messages
status changes
song lyrics and haiku

a simple love letter - to tell you how deep, how wide my universe is now….

haiku #1

in your arms tonight…
learning to love again
chasing away doubt

haiku #2

mascara running -
eyes filled with unwanted tears
swallowing the pain…

I watched the Nick Cave video yesterday it is so moving and the lyrics make my heart sore. These haiku are inspired by Dr Nick Cave.