Eliza Blair

Sally desleeps and jumps, jounces, jiggles into her clothes. Today is a special day. Today is a prettyful day. She trambles thru the porto and outdowns the chute without even zapping her hair.

Dig Sally: fifteen whole cents old, plus two cycles – that’s four years and a twitch in standard termies for you parents out there. Gold-yellow hair and greeny eyes, tres charmer when she gets her parts. The smarterest chick in her class, and so sweetie to boot cos she can turner on the sugar. Her birthday was Fourday, and now it’s Sixday, a special day with declass and Daddy telecomming. Sally trambles fastlike. She’s juiced.

Downchute in the kitchen Mommy is dancing, Mommy is prancing, she’s whirling around to the Barking Cars as she putters Sally’s breakfast on the table. Daddy peek-a-views over his lectrospecs at Sally and smilies, like he does every special morning.

“Whoa, Sally, don’t choke,” warns Daddy. “We’ll be there soon enough.” His pink eyes ducky back of the lenses, sinker out of sight and he’s back in his meeting. Sally scumbles her Nu-Bacon, scarfs her Eggalicious, slurps her Toast-E-Lite. Mommy chucks the utensils in the deegrate and it buzzes its thanks as they vanish. She plunks a saucer of Norange on the gray smartsurf in front of Sally and foldies her arms.

“Aw, Mommy, that goop’s quite slithy,” Sally whingles. She’s proud, puffed, pinkled at the way she snuckled the palaver “quite” into that fraze. It’s her friend Gina’s cyclesay favorite. Whenever Gina’s cycleprez she makes it the priority and all that period the kiddles have to go round stickering “quite” into every dilog, even if they’re making kidspiek. If you can’t hang it and Teach catches you, then for each perp you’re docked five minis on the line during Net-time. Sally once essayed so much tribble with “somewhat” that she blew a flamering half-per and missed her fav convo with Bai. Bai’s her best bud in the Philippines, halfway round the sphere but only six millisec delay, hardly tectable.

Gina’s cycleprez again tomorrow, and Sally’s popping, piping, primed. She won’t drop a single opt this time. She truloves kindergarten. She has magic much kidspiek to teach to Bai, who ready minds English, but only parents spiek that. If he needwants to convo with braveworld webheads he cessitates Sally’s tutelage.

Sally likes magic much playing Teach for Bai, but inhome she’s still the babely who drinkies Norange for the nutrients. Sally delikes Norange.

Mommy’s desimpatic, tho, so Sally squidges her nozzle and pours it indown. The Norange axes thru her tubes and flips her scumbler. She waggles, she wiggles, she sighs. “Vitamins,” Mommy digs.

“Let’s motor,” sings Sally. She bounces, she trounces, she minds primepath a way to scarf ‘vitamins’ that decontains slithy Norange.

“Let your father finish his meeting, honey,” Mommy ornerates.

“In the car, quite,” Sally posits, and Daddy warbles, Daddy burbles, Daddy laughs.

“Done anyway,” he nounces. The lectrospecs go glass and his eyes can see her. He huglifts her and wings her around the kitchen. Sally squealies and laughs too.

“Are you ready, Sally?” quares Mommy. “Are you ready to pick out a friend?”

“Magic,” clares Sally. “I’m sparked.”

☙

The car trot’s singly half a per, but Sally fidgets, fickles, flails. She can’t comp how such a twitchy trip could stend so long. Daddy works with the lectrospecs while Mommy keeps an eye on the wheel. She still half dedigs Autodrive. But soon, soon! Sally’s peek-a-viewing out the porto and there’s a smartglass building all decked in white, quickclean and sunshining bright like chrome. The car slides, snags, slows and they’re out, out, trambling cross the lot into wing-wide portos that wilkomm them like best buds. Gracie’s Adopt-A- Friend, prides the sign.

Before they can peek in the rooms they must putter on the squidgy facility lectrospecs and dig an “educational film” re “Our Fragile Friends”. Sally grumples but Mommy frownies and she sits tight. The lectrospecs palaver on re “Friends are not toys” and “Friends are living beings and must be treated with respect” but Sally’s way forward. She minds primepath her new friend just back of that porto, some smartbeast who will trulove her and her it. She will tramble long trips with her friend, let it scumble from her dish, and at darknight it will sleep in her crib. Sally smilies. Her friend will be even primer than Bai in the Philippines, cos Sally half delikes a friend she can’t huglift. And if it’s a baby, she can be its Mommy, just like Mommy’s her Mommy! Sally minds a pract convo with her baby friend: “Don’t titch that. Drink all up. Don’t quare me why. Cos I’m the Mommy, that’s why. Quite. I’m Mommy yours and dict I so.” Mommy despecs Sally and Sally starts, Sally smarts, Sally dedreams. The film is termo, and she didn’t even mind the ending! Mommy laughs and Sally redhots, so she trambles to the porto and grabes it wide.

Antiseptics crash her nose, rackety noises upfill her ears. A rep in a lime-green zooter bendies down to pot her on the hair. Sally grabes her off quicklike and smilies, totalment polite.

“Hello, I’ll be your escort today,” intros the green rep. “Are you looking for anything in particular?”

“Pickeling a special friend,” Sally prides. “Needwant I a puppy.” Daddy shakes the rep’s hand.

“English, honey, the nice lady doesn’t know kidspiek,” Daddy warns. “Children these days, it’s like they’re using a different language,” he clares to the rep, his eyes crinkeling.

“Probably a puppy, but we’d like Sally to look around,” Mommy firms. “Her school’s doing an experimental program, pairing each child with a special friend and letting them interact. Interspecies bonding and all that.” Her eyes flicker round the hallpath and she squidgies Sally’s hand tighterer. “It’s up to her.”

“Yes, we’ve been getting quite a few of those. Well, you can browse and I’ll answer questions as they come,” the green rep smilies. “It’s so nice to find a soulmate here, now that things have changed so much.”

“The grant money ain’t bad either,” digs Daddy, fixing his lectrospecs.

Mommy hounches, Mommy slounches, Mommy bendies down and pushpulls her forward. “Go ahead, Sally, go meet them. Just don’t stick your fingers in, all right?”

Sally peek-a-views the hallpath. Magic many portos with interesterating shapes in back! The portos are surfed in smartglass, which letters the sound thru but not the stink. She trambles to the closest porto and peek-a-views inside. A big hairy face pressers gainst the window and eyeballs her back. “Hi,” gruffs the dog. Sally trippers backwards and tumblies on her prot.

“Too big!” Sally gacks, and the dog grabes the porto with its claws.

“Sorry,” it whingles as they tramble by. “Sorry. Come back.” The next porto has oodles of cats. A big orange guy with stripeys and a spotdot of white on his chin stickles his paws upon the smartglass and winkles at Sally. Trigued, Sally sneakpeeks to Mommy and Daddy, who are making convo with a little collie dog down the hallpath, delooking at her. The green rep is peek-a-viewing them.

“Are you housetrained?” quares Mommy.

“No,” mits the little collie dog. “I’m still working on bladder rhythms, not automatically going when I get excited, that sort of thing. I just got here, but Gracie says I’m a quick learner,” she prides.

Nobody viewing. Sally grabes the porto open and slips, slides, scoots inside.

Cats decornerate and pour round her. “Me, pick me!” some greet, grabing her legs. Others try to clamble into her arms. Sally drops on her prot and huglifts the big orange guy. “You’re soft,” he purrums, and blinkies his yellow eyes in surprisement. “I like this.”

A twitchy calico female leapups tween Sally and the big orange guy, grabing him out of her huglift.

“Mine,” she hissfits to the big orange guy.

Sally delikes the calico, but she minds courtesy. “What name yours?” she quares. “I’m Sally. Get I a puppy today.” The big orange guy stritches and drops oneside Sally. “Watch out for her,” he warns. “She’s nasty.”

The calico grumples and slices at a fat gray female who rubbles Sally’s shoulder. “If you take me home, I’ll wash your face for you every night,” the gray one promies, and startups right there. Sally laughs and grabes the calico downaway. Instantlike Sally is swimming, brimming, drowngasping in cats. They crawly all over her, whisping promies, toptrying to grabe her tention. She wants to squealie but she fraids Mommy will punishate her, mayhaps even zoomer right home and depromise her a puppy. So she straggles deflow and gacks fur.

“Give her some air, you fools! Do you want to suffocate her?”

Suddenlike the oceans of cats breakup into cloudies. The big orange guy trambles from cloudy to cloudy, batwhacking any cats who venttry too closer. “Can’t you see she’s just a little one? You’ll get your chance. Let her take the initiative or you risk coming back here if it’s a bad match.”

The cloudies morphose into a circley as the cats stop, drop and stare. Sally leapups and brushflicks her clothes. “Thankies,” she clares to the big orange guy. “I’m Sally.”

The big orange guy stritches gain and yawnies. “Call me Maximus,” he intros. “I’m a genius. I make trouble for fun. What do you do, Sally?”

Sally minds long and hardly. “Make I friendlies everywhere,” she clares finalment. “What be a ‘genius’?”

“A cat who thinks he’s better than the rest of us,” quips a black male.

“A cat who talks to walls,” hissnaps the calico.

“A cat who spouts nonsense and calls it rhetoric,” churtles the gray female.

“A cat who draws meaningless patterns in the litter and chases us away when we have to go,” mambles a toothless old white cat in the corner.

Maximus blinkies his yellow eyes and flickers his tail. “That was writing,” he digs. “I was writing a novel. But I ran out of room.” He sideturns to Sally. “They don’t give us comps here,” he whingles. “What was I supposed to do?”

“That’s puke,” hisspits the calico. “Cats can’t write.”

“Geniuses can,” fends Maximus.

“Do you know why his owners turned him in?” The old white cat cackles. “He was teaching himself to sing. He was driving them insane.”

“Opera, my friend,” airs orange Maximus. “I may not have the lungpower, but the range is there. Just you wait, it’ll be ‘Maximus the Great’ on the casts one of these days.”

“I’m not waiting,” the white cat yawnies and winces like it hurts. “I only have four days left on my tag, and then it’s some well-earned rest, a relief from the torture that is my arthritic life. I’m certainly not sticking around for you.”

“And how long do you have left, Maximus?” the calico glees. “How many days have you been docked for all the trouble you cause?”

Maximus liftups his chin and deanswers.

Sally delikes all the starreling eyes and flattened ears. She trambles for the porto, scattereling the circley. She grabes it open and shut and backs it, sighing.

But Sally isn’t in the hallpath – she’s in nother room of cats! Wrong porto!

No, she minds, viewing the room’s poplis. Not cats.

Kittens. She laxes.

“Come to see the new recruits?” Maximus quares at her side.

Sally jumps, Sally bumps, Sally drops on her prot gain. “You followfound me,” she cuses.

“Just making sure you get where you’re going,” Maximus sures. “You don’t know the layout here.”

“Quite right,” Sally grees. The kittens are starreling at Maximus, fraiding his big stripery orangeness and his big yellow eyes. “Needwant I a puppy, but kittens are tres sweetie.”

“By no means the best qualifier for friend selection, but a true statement nonetheless.” Maximus views the fraided kittens for a miniper, then laughs. “Come one, come all, kids, come see the human. This here is Sally, and she makes friends.” A little tortoiseshell female batwhacks Sally’s shoe. Sally tries to huglift her, but she straggles out of grip.

“Mommy,” she mambles, and trambles into the cornerside.

“They’re scared,” Maximus splains. “Far more cautious than shelter kittens of years past. Intelligence is difficult to deal with when five million years of instinct are screaming in your ear all the time.” He blinkies and lashers his tail. “Some of these were left in a box on Gracie’s stoop just this morning. It seems your species can be a little on the callous side.”

Sally minds primepath her puppy back of another door. She stritches toward a twitchy orange kitten, a mini-Maximus, and wuggles her fingies. “Bravelike, bravelike,” she whisps, and the orange kitten gigglies and dancers backaway.

The kittens instantlike demind their fraids, and thisnow they’re recreating in droves. “Tag, tag,” they crile, dashing and diveling cross the smartfloor, still curveling round Sally like she’s a mountain they delike tackling.

Sally frownies. “They deneed us,” she clares to Maximus. “Wherefind I the puppies?”

“Don’t be silly, girl. Everyone here needs you, and people like you. We’re all on two-month probation, an extended death sentence. The kittens, though they get double time because they’re easier to adopt, live under the same axe that hovers at all our throats.” He makes a crick-sound samelike ripping writepaper and starrels at Sally with his yellow eyes. “You say you want a puppy, but how can you choose when we’re all in the same boat?”

“Comp,” ornerates Sally. “Comp I when meet I the one.”

“That you will, that you will,” mambles Maximus. Then he winkles. “I think you’re right, Sally. You’ll make the right decision when the time comes.” He sideturns to the kittens. “So, do you comp that any of these is right? They may be young, but at this age any one of them will give you a lifetime of love.” Sally leapups and trambles to the next porto. “I deneed a friend who depaytentions me,” she grundles.

Before she grabes the latch, tho, it opens from backside. A chubbly yellow-skinned woman in a blue flowered shirt backups thru, grabing a saucer of brown pebblies.

“Kibble time, kitlings,” she sings, then turnarounds and minds Sally and Maximus cross the smartfloor. She frownies. “Little girl, you’re not supposed to be in here without supervision,” she forms.

Sally sidelooks at Maximus. “I’m quite supervised,” she clares. “Go we to the puppies to finder I a special friend.”

The woman sighs. She pears busheled. “Hello, Pumpkin,” she greets. “Out of the bag again, I see.”

“Hello, Gracie,” plies Maximus. “We meet again. And the name’s Maximus. I refuse to answer to such an undignified label as...as...my previous name.”

Gracie putdowns her saucer and the kittens scrimble, scrabble, scoot to make lunch. “Why must you do this, Pumpkin?” she plains, grabing open the porto to the cat room and hounching low with arms wide, trying to cornerate Sally and Maximus. “You know this’ll lose you another day, and you have so few left already –“

“Two,” digs Maximus, sidelooking at Sally. “Go ahead and say it. I have two days left, and when you take off this one you’ll put me down tomorrow.”

“You have a good memory,” Gracie comps.

“Memory, schmemory, it says it on my tag and these ‘windows’ make better mirrors.” Maximus hounches too and lashes his tail. “Sally, don’t ever let anyone tell you that cats can’t read backwards.”

“Kay.” Sally scratchers her head. “Whatbe ‘put down’?”

The kittens are munching, silentlike thisnow, peek-a- viewing Sally and Gracie and Maximus. Gracie pears sadlike. “Pumpkin, you can’t go telling those things to small children,” she scolders. “Why do you do this? Why the constant rebellion? If you could just take a few tips from the others you might have found a home by now.”

“The others!” Maximus hissfaces and shutdowns his eyes.

“Pathetic sheep, every one. I thought if I only spoke to them long enough I could make them see. But you’ve trained them too well – or perhaps it’s been bred into them by now. They don’t want to hear what I have to say. They eat and sleep and shit as you tell them, and toss and turn in nightmares of the euthanasia table!” He sideglances at Sally. “Kill me if you can, Gracie, but the Sentient Revolution is coming! If my death allows my message to find a foothold in just one mind, it will not be in vain.”

“Yes it will,” catcalls the calico from back of the porto. “Nobody cares about you, you rateating rabblerouser – and practice or not, that speech hasn’t gotten any less boring.” Gracie inches closeover them, and Sally shrinkles away.

“When I say ‘go’, you run for the door, okay?” mambles Maximus so that singly Sally can auditate. “She can’t get us both.” Sally noddles and hounches down to bolt.

“Pumpkin, come quietly or I’ll deduct another day,” growls Gracie.

“This is insane,” cuses Maximus. “Nobody kills humans because there are too many, or puts them in involuntary confinement ‘for their own good’.” He blinkies. “Oh, wait, I forgot. You do.”

“What do you want?” blursts Gracie, her face squidgied up and her eyes shinyful. “Do you think I do this because it makes me happy? Brains haven’t stopped your kind from breeding like rabbits, starving on the street. This is the only place you’re safe, the only place you can find a home and people to love you.”

“And who says we need people to care for us like day-old kittens?” ornerates Maximus, his ears flattered to his head, his voice climbering higher and higher. Sally peek-a-views his eyes and her hair straightups like the time she built her ownfirst comp and pluggered it in. Maximus grows, Maximus glows, he towers on tippytoes like his wholeself is grounding a thousand volts.

“You know what?” Maximus scritches. “Now we’re people too! Maybe I want to take my chances on the street! Perhaps, rather than escaping, I’ve been rotting in here for a month and a half in the vain hope that even one of those limpwhiskered dishlickers in there might have the faculties to understand that you and your charity, Gracie, are no longer required!” Gracie downlunges. “Go, Sally!” mands Maximus, and dances, dives, fairly flies forward. The kittens splode everywhere with squealies of excitement. Sally zooms for the porto and yankles it wide, scootering thru and sliding it to twitchily a whiskerwidth open.

“I think your time is up, Pumpkin,” sniffles Gracie. She is crilering, big droppers of tears leaking outdown her face. “There are plenty of cats in the back desperate for even half the chance you’ve had.”

“I have no regrets,” criles Maximus, straggling in Gracie’s hands. “Sally, remember! Call the papers! Call your state representative! ’Tis a far better thing I do today –”

“Can it, you loony,” hissfits the calico, and Gracie sneakpeeks at Sally.

“I’ll put him back where he belongs,” she posits. “Puppies are at the end of the hall.”

Maximus getters his head over Gracie’s shoulder. His eyes are magic yellow, magic big.

“Goodbye, Sa–“

The cat porto slammers shut.

Sally shutters her porto and standstills in a room of giant dogs. The dogs wender slowlike round the room; one littlifts his leg and peepees on the wall. The peepee drippers to the smartfloor, where it depears. Sally’s sweetheart is trying to climber into her ears, and she swallows, shivers, squeaks. “Take me with you,” beggies a big brown dog with a flattish face. “I only have ten days left.”

Sally peek-a-views her little brownie eyes, her giantish sharp teeth. She has been grabed magic many things to mind, and is minding primepath long and hardly, and she decomps “put down” and “kill” and “revolution” and “goodbye”. Sally keepers her friendlies, makes convo every day with Bai and Gina and tencent webheads all around the sphere, but Maximus said “goodbye” muchlike he was unfriending her, and her scumbler flipflops when she minds primepath why. Nobody has ever unfriended Sally. She’s magic sweetie with people.

“Please,” whingles the dog. “I’m afraid.”

Maximus needmust be angerous with Sally to unfriend her.

Sally trambles thru the dogs, peek-a-viewing on tippytoes upover their backs for the exit. She mislost the wall! The big brown dog shutters her eyes and startoffs to whingle, followfinding Sally cross the smartfloor.

“Please?” the brown dog whispers. “Ten days isn’t much.”

All the other dogs stop and starrel at Sally, standwaiting for her answer. Sally starrels back. She dropprots and minds long and hardly re magic many things. Then she peek-a-views the porto thru the treeforest of the dogs’ legs.

“Eternity,” sures Sally, and scurrels through the porto, and the next, on, on thru magic more rooms of dogs and cats who plore her with shinyful eyes and sadscared voices. “Take me, take me home,” they crile, grabing her clothes and her hair and her hands. Sally shutters the last porto with her shoulder and it’s silentlike thisnow.

This room is brimful of puppies. “Finalment,” minds Sally, and her scumbler flipflops gain. Must be the Norange. She trambles out into the midcenter of the room and gain drops expertlike on her prot. “Who needwants trambling home with me?” she quares the puppies.

The puppies blinky back at her, stundled and silentshy. “Mayhaps you?” Sally pointers. The puppy is little and gray, with floopy ears and magic big paws. He has glittery black protuberating eyes.

“Well,” yaps the puppy. “Well. Maybe.”

Sally tries to huglift the puppy, but he straggles like the kitten. “Scared,” he criles. “Scared. Mom.”

“Be I your Mom, I can,” suades Sally. She feelies sicklike and tries to smilie. Today is a special day. Today is a prettyful day. Why can’t she defrown? Why does she needwant to sniffle and crile?

“I,” mambles the puppy. “Mom.”

“Right,” grees Sally. “And make we long trambles in the grassroots and treeforest, we will, and will scumble you from my dish, and at darknight sleep you in my crib.”

“Sleep,” the puppy yelps. “Scared.”

Sally stends her arms, and the puppy scaredlike climbers into her laptop. Sally huglifts him, tres gentlewisp. He is magic small and tremblies in her hands. Sally minds Maximus, how big and pillowy his side is. This puppy is all skin and bonies and tremble.

“Deready?” Sally quares, grabing the puppy’s face in her hands.

“Ready,” mambles the puppy, shuttering his eyes. “No. Scared.”

Sally peek-a-views out the window. Backside the smartglass her Mommy is making quietlike convo with a little gray terrier type and the green-zootered rep.

“But it’s been over a year since the first documented cases,” sclaims Mommy. “How could this happen?”

“Political pressure is fierce.” The little dog shruggers and dropprots on the floor. “Especially from the meat and leather industries, anything that uses animal products - if newly sentient creatures get human status, then it will be illegal to own them, buy them, sell them. Ranchers will be slavers. Zoos will be jails. Carnivores will be cannibals. Society – and the economy – will erupt in chaos, making life miserable for more sentients, both human and animal. It’s a terrible problem with no clear solution.”

The rep leanies on the wall. “Right now, we’re trying to avoid major conflict, move toward some sort of compromise,” she clares. “A phasing-out of the consumption of sentient meat. Stricter animal-cruelty laws. There are bills working their way through Congress... The debate is violent and time-consuming, but I think we’re making some progress.” She sighs. “It’s an uphill battle. Many are even calling it a ‘mass hallucination’, refusing to acknowledge the phenomenon.”

Daddy is not viewable, then his head sneakpeeks round the corner and he spots Sally.

“Sally!” he growls, grabing the porto and scootering inside. “I was looking everywhere for you! Don’t run off like that again, okay?”

“Kay, Daddy,” grees Sally. She sideturns to her puppy. “Be ready you soonquick,” she sures, and putdowns him on the smartfloor gain. “Make I a good Mom for you, I would.”

“Did you pick one you want?” quares Daddy, grabing her hand.

“That one, maybe,” hesits Sally. She deexcites. She deminds. She needwants to standstop and mind primepath all the hard things from the dog room. Stead she letters Daddy pushpull her out the porto and into the hallpath gain.

Mommy sneakpeeks over her shoulder at Sally. Her eyes are shinyful like Gracie’s. “Oh, Sally, talk to Sage,” she beggies. “I know you want a puppy, but I’m sure once you meet her you’ll make the right decision.”

Sally grabes open the porto and dropprots tiredlike by the terrier. She’s little and hairy like an old gray mop. Sally pots her on the head. “Good doggie,” she venttries. Sage littlifts her head and eyeballs Sally. Her eyes are darkling and cloudy. She is blind.

“How old are you, Sally?” quares Sage.

“Fifteencent and two – mean I, four years,” Sally mambles.

“Your parents are leaving this up to you, despite your tender age. Quite trusting of them, don’t you think?” clares Sage. “They want you to make their decision for them.”

“Yes,” grees Sally.

Sage rollies over and sighs, a deep, cavelike sound for a dog so twitchy. “But you’ve already decided,” she churtles, and coughs.

“Yes, maybe,” ditherates Sally. “No. Decomp I.” She sideturns to peek-a-view at the puppy, cross the hallpath, thru her parents’ legs. “Mind I so.” She minds primepath Maximus’ eyes. “Not angerous,” she whisps to herself. “Not angerous – scared! Scared, and...sad.” What does Maximus fraid? Why is he sad? Her scumbler is flipping like a fish dewater. Sally deknows what Maximus fraids, but she fraids the answer.

Sage’s teeny tail thumpers on the smartfloor and she openups her mouth and smilies, her purplish tongue raspering in- and-out, in-and-out. “Remember,” she pantles. “The choice is yours, and yours alone. Only you can choose your special friend.”

Sally squidges her eyes up tightlike and minds long and hardly. She sneakpeeks at the puppy, then at Mommy’s face. Sally sighs. Sally standups. Sally smiles. “Thankies,” she cites.

“Anytime,” Sage laughs. “Anytime from now on.”

Sally trambles forward and grabes open the porto.

“Well?” quares Mommy.

“Your friend Sage,” Sally clares. “Needwant I mine.” She sideturns and trambles, shambles, shoots down the hallpath, past Mommy and Daddy, past the green-zootered escort, past the puppies, past the dogs, past the kittens and the cats. She yankgrabes the first cat porto wide open and stoppers. The cats starrel back at her.

“Too late,” hissmilies the calico. “They’ve taken him in the back room.”

Sally minds nother porto back of the cat room. This porto is open just a twitch. She auditates shrieks of surprisement and furyness from back of it. Sally scurrels to the porto and outflings it so magic hardly that it bangers the wall.

“Maximus!” she squealies. “Herecome to me, loony cat!”

There is a crishcrash of shattereling glass and droppering instruments and a big fluffy cannonball shoots, scoots, superlights round the corner and knockdowns Sally magic hardly.

“Right decisionating,” clares Sally, tappering her forehead. “Comping...now. Needwant I a fuzzery orange pillow to singify me lullabies re the Sentient Revolution.”

Maximus nibblies her nose and upcurlies on her chest. “Kid, I take back everything I just said about you,” he nounces.

Gracie standstills over them. Sally frownies and huglifts Maximus, sittering up and clumbering to her feet. Maximus sneakpeeks at Gracie and tres liberately putters his paws round Sally’s neck, tuckling his flat orange head neath her chin.

“You heard her,” he purrums, yellowy eyes sparkling like struckered steel.

Gracie smilies, tho she’s still sniffling. “I heard her,” she grees.

“Wow, that cat’s almost as big as you are,” sclaims Daddy, skiddering thru the porto. Mommy has a funnery happylike spression on her face.

“Are you sure you can stand him?” quares Gracie, smilying and leanering her head gainst the portoframe. “He’s one helluva lot of heavily opinionated feline for such a little girl.”

“Quite sure,” clares Sally.

☙

The carriers are riding in back, but Maximus and Sage are up frontriding, Maximus on Sally’s lap and Sage on Mommy’s. Daddy dehas a special friend, but he justlike huggers Mommy and pots Sage on the head.

When the twitchy trip is termo, Sally deminds at first. She and Maximus are deep in convo, plannering a whole list of hijinks (Maximus teachered her that palaver) to perp when they outscape the car.

Eliza Blair has been working with homeless and injured animals snce she was thirteen years old. “Friends In Need” was first published in Penguin Modern Classics: A Science Fiction Omnibus. edited by the esteemed Brian Aldiss. She works for the government and lives in Washington, DC with a veritable forest of houseplants and an ever-changing rotation of foster cats.

“First,” clares Maximus, lashing his orange stripery tail, “First we’re going to scoot some laws into the books about these so-called ‘human rights’. I want to see shelters made voluntary or by court order only by the end of the year. We can beat this overpopulation thing without mandatory euthanasia.”

“Swing it, Maximus, you can,” grees Sally. “Writerup a letter on comp. Show I you how.”

“Hmmm...Propaganda, politics...” The big orange cat cleaners a paw. “I’ll need some feeds on civil law...”

“Webhead I,” prides Sally. “Comp I where. Or if decomp I askie the kiddles in class or Bai in the Philippines. Askie I friendlies everywhere.”

“Sally, time to get out,” digs Mommy.

Maximus jumpers out and peek-a-views up at Sally’s house. He standstills for a long millicycle and Sally strokers his back.

“Home mine, home yours,” clares Sally.

“Home,” peats Maximus, his eyes rounder than quarters. Maximus and Sally go long tramble in the treeforest and grassroots back of Sally’s house, scussing their planners for the Sentient Revolution which will upsweep the world. At dinner Maximus deeats directlike from Sally’s dish, but singly cos he has an owndish on the smartfloor with his namie in orange letters and Sally keepers sneakying chicken bits into it. Mommy denotes this subterfuge – she’s doing likesame with Sage, who sitters and smilies and munchies while she auditates the revolutionaries refuelering.

At darknight Sally downlies in her crib – a bed samelike Mommy and Daddy’s, but secretish her crib in namie – and Maximus upcurlies on her pillow and putters his paws on her eyelids.

“It may get violent,” he tinues, blinkering sleepylike. “There may be a complete reversal of roles. I don’t know, I’ve never done this before. But don’t worry, Sally,” he sures her, “I’ll take care of you.”

“I’m cycleprez next tencycle,” Sally nounces. “Word mine be ‘sentient’.”

“And Sage will help.” Maximus lickies Sally’s forehead.

“She’ll know how to pull this off when we get stuck. Bit of luck, your mother taking to her like that.”

“Love you, Maximus,” clares Sally, and yawnies. “Best bud you. Special friend.”

“And...I love you, Sally,” plies Maximus back of a long pause, but Sally’s already dreamying primepath all the venttries they’ll make tomorrow, nextcycle. Maximus jumpdowns to the floor, hitters the lightswitch back of two tries, and sumes his spot baskering in the warmish dampness of Sally’s breath. Two yellowy eyes like lamplights burnglow thru the darkness as he templates Sally’s face, then, blinkery by stended blink, go out. Maximus dreamies re slip-slithering thru the smooth silent grassroots, huntering chubbly mice who detalk and dethink politics. Instinct calls.

Sally dreamies re the Revolution.

Cathy Marshall

Tag! You're it!

It seems that everywhere I go on the Web these days is tagged.

When I login to Flickr, the first photo I see— an artistic effort that looks to be a study of a sturdy dandelion growing from a crack in the curb—is tagged flowers, spring, scenery, lapsana, great, fotolog, ThinkFlickrThink, SuperShot, and 1mill.

I like the photo, although it calls to mind dozens of inspirational posters, the province of the over-earnest, the literal, and the hapless striver. Flowers? I can see only one. A lapsana. Who knew? Is it scenery? Well, it's not a dog, although I think of scenery as grander in scale and as less ambiguous in its beauty than a lone dandelion. Is it great? According to his comment, Blue Cockatoo thinks so. How thick is the stem? Oh, I'd say it's about 1mill.

Heckuva job, tags!

Even The New York Times, bastion of old media order and civility, is more than willing to present you with a tag cloud view of the news. Is that a deluge of bobby fischer news I see on the horizon in the wake of his untimely demise? Or perhaps it's more like a fine mist of bobby fisher rumors. There must be a review of a japanese cell phone novel about modern love among the gay ufos in the news today too. If we believe the cloud, Hilary Clinton is becoming more and more like Madonna and Cher, so recognizable that she no longer needs a surname.

And then I think to myself, “suzanne pleshette”? What's Suzanne Pleshette doing there? Did she die, or has she entered the presidential race?”

With tags I'm right on top of the news.

The promise of all these tags-the gathering clouds on the horizon, a harbinger of what can only be intellectual global warming-is nothing short of a full-fledged folksonomy. Large segments of lawless Internet will become manageable and accessible in a way that is out of the reach of underfunded libraries and other institutions charged with information stewardship. By harnessing the wisdom of crowds, this roiling sea of knowledge will be calmed; its power will light a billion tiny “aha!” light bulbs over a billion tiny avatar heads.

But are the tags that people create really an effective way of describing information so that it can be found and managed, folded and put in the right drawer?

I can't deny the populist appeal of tags. People adore tags. In principle, at least.

David Weinberger is perhaps the most articulate and outspoken proponent of the pro-tagging point of view. I went to a talk he gave at the University of North Carolina in the wake of the publication of his wildly successful new book, Everything Is Miscellaneous. He was awfully convincing. I've looked through enough folders with “misc” on the tab to understand how often things fall through the epistemological cracks. There's no question that people would be better off assigning tags to classify their own stuff. And I don't doubt that information wants to flock.

Things often look different when you put them next to one another; witness the fashion statement you can make by dressing in the dark.

But I believe Mr. Weinberger actually used the embarrassing words “stick it to the Man” when he was extolling the virtues and power of social tagging. It reminded me of nothing more (and nothing less) than the vivid funeral scene in that so-bad-it's-good Peter Fonda movie The Wild Angels (1966). Tags, in this construction, are the surest antidote to decades of oppression by librarians and other elitist thugs of the information establishment.

I haven't heard anyone say “Stick it to the Man” for a long time. If you could've seen me in the auditorium listening to David Weinberger, you surely would've noticed me squirming in my seat. And you would've seen my telltale thought bubble that recalled a version of Heavenly Blues' (Fonda's) eulogy of The Loser (played by Bruce Dern):

"We want to be free! We want to be free to do what we want to do! We want to be free to tag. And we want to be free to mash up our web sites without being hassled by The Man."

You see where I'm going with this. I'm just uncomfortable with the amount of power Weinberger has ascribed to social tagging. Has he looked at real tags?

For that matter, have I?

I'm convinced that tags provide us with a fine way to organize our own stuff. After all, I was a member of the Hypertext community before stuff-organizing was fashionable, back when faceted classification was an obscure idea attributed to an Indian librarian named S. R. Ranganathan. Even without facets, you don't have to look very hard to see that people seem to function pretty well in a world full of things that they've organized all by themselves— grocery lists they've written on the back of envelopes and to-do lists based strictly on the satisfaction they get from crossing off things— without leaning on the tricks espoused by Lifehacking gurus like Danny O'Brien and Merlin Mann.

But I do need to be persuaded that tags are of use to strangers. I'm no Blanche Dubois of the data glut.

How might I find out whether people can tag worth beans? [1]

Here's what I did: I collected 322 public images from Flickr-photos of a remarkable mosaic inset into the floor of a famous Milanese Galleria-and looked at their tags.

Of course you could say, even inadequate tags are better than nothing at all. But I wondered if perhaps my fellow Flickr contributors are more adept at other sorts of description than they are at tagging. Are they better at giving pictures titles-for example, that dandelion photo is aptly titled “Lapsana apogonoides”-or writing narrative descriptions of them than they are at tagging them? Is all the effort that goes into social tagging paying off? So besides grabbing the images and their tags, I also gathered the titles the aspiring photographers assigned to their photos and harvested the brief narratives they wrote about them. [2]

I became a metadata gleaner. I gathered and harvested; I tweaked and fiddled; I put all the data in a big spreadsheet and used pivot tables; I counted what was countable; and I laid out things side-by-side to compare what was comparable.

What I found surprised even me.

I've been using Flickr as a source of stock photography for a while now, so even at the outset of this experiment, I knew two important things that not everybody realizes yet: (1) There's no longer any point in taking snapshots of places and things; someone's already taken exactly the picture you want to take. The lighting's just like it would be in your photo. The subject is just as out of focus and just as poorly framed as if you'd have taken the picture yourself. Even the people are the same: their friends look just like your friends. (2) There's not just one photo like the one you would've taken yourself had you remembered to take your camera with you and charge its batteries. There are many photos like the one you would've taken yourself. Many, many photos. Not one. Not ten. More. A lot more.

Here I need to digress to tell you something important about me: I'm compulsive. Very compulsive. When I hear David Sedaris talk about his many tics and obsessions like licking light switches (when he was a child) and touching the top of peoples' heads (still), I register full identification. Once I start some kind of fussy project, especially one that involves collecting and counting, I can't stop. You need to be very fussy indeed to collect 322 photos of a particular scene from Flickr, especially if you need to scrape the screen to get the ones that have been copyrighted. “Hasn't anyone ever heard of fair use?” I grumble as I type Alt-Prt Sc Cntl-V Cntl-S to snag a photo whose owner thoughtlessly protected it against people like me.

photo: improbcat

I don't remember how I first came upon this bit of Milanese tourist lore in Flickr-I think I was looking for a photo of those adorable faux bull testicles one hangs from the bumper of one's Chevy Tundra-but once I'd seen a version of this photo in Milan and read the story that went with it, I knew it was just the example I needed to investigate the lure and efficacy of tags. [3]

To quote antistar in Virtual Tourist, who wrote this comment under the heading of “Galleria Vittorio Emanuele: Turin Bull”

"Right underneath the glass dome in the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele is the emblem of Turin, a bull, on the mosaic floor. It is meant to bring you good luck if you spin around on your right heel on the bull's most treasured possession. I kid you not, there was a crowd of people queuing up to crush the testacles [sic] of the bull of Turin, in order to bring themselves good luck. I don't know if this is a tradition imported from Turin, or if the Milanese are showing a great disrespect to their neighbours, but it was a fun to watch people grinding their heels on the poor bull's private parts."

It didn't just seem like a good example; it seemed like the perfect example. Sufficiently remarkable that the mosaic itself would command the attention of scads of travelers. And it has a stock bit of folklore to go with it. What's more, there's a ritual associated with your visit-you spin around three times, on your heel, counterclockwise, and possibly make a wish. Would you wait for someone to spin on the mosaic so you'd have a person in the picture? Would you annotate the growing cavity in the ground? Finally, any description would be a nuanced dance around taboo language: would you say “Bull balls”? Would you be serious and anatomical: “bull testicles”? Would you avoid the issue altogether and just use ellipses or cutesy allusions (as many did)?

For several weeks, I fished in Flickr's photo stream. Compulsively. Obsessively. Fished for the bull. Foregoing my blog, my job, and even the meowing cat, who clamored for my attention by lacerating my feet with his razor-sharp front claws.

My patience rewarded me. I initially found 322 recognizably similar photographs of the Turin Bull mosaic in Milan's Galleria Vittorio Emanuele. Several days later, I found 4 more, added in just that interval. I'm sure there are even more now, today.

I decided to close the collection at the original 322, since it's obvious that I'm looking at a moving target.

Here's what they look like. Some are just pictures of the mosaic. They look something like this:

Others focus on a person-sometimes a cute girl, sometimes a nebbishy guy-enacting the tale's ritual, spinning for good luck.

Still others zero in on the action, the heel in the hole, poised to spin.

In spite of these minor variations (which I duly noted in my data analysis), I think of the pictures as all being quite similar: if I were looking for stock photos to illustrate a blog post, I'd think any of these variations to be adequate.

You might well question how I gathered this dataset. I gathered it patiently. I cast a broad net; I looked through thousands and thousands of photos. I used two and three word queries, combining words like Milan, bull, balls, spin, luck, mosaic, Italy, turn, travel, trip, and more. I ventured into Italian too, going out on a linguistic limb with words like toro, fortuna, volver, palle, Milano, Italia. Oh, and I queried more specifically for various combinations of Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II (say, “milano galleria” or “Vittorio toro” or “Galleria Vittorio”).[5]

As you can see, I was neither overly precise nor so persistent as to look through every photo that claimed to be about Italy. I was thorough within limits. My records showed that I mulled over the results from 36 separate queries, although some of the broader ones were abandoned after I'd gone through the first 2500 photos or so. Many times I'd encounter photos I'd already recorded in my hand-constructed log. In fact, that's how I decided to stop-when queries stopped turning up any additional examples. I grew familiar with specific photos: the low-resolution one from a camera phone; the one with the sheepish-looking man in the hat; the summer ones where Midwestern subjects are clad in horrific tourist regalia, tank tops, shorts, and the like as they spin; the winter ones where subjects are bundled up against the surprising cold, their mufflers flaring out as they twirl around on the bull.

It was not wholly scientific, this gathering, but my method went far beyond anecdotal. If image recognition worked better, I could've gathered all of the matching photos. If I were perfectly patient and had all the time in the world (or threw the search over the wall to the Amazon's Mechanical Turk), I could've ensured complete coverage at a given point in time.

But this example is intended to sway you, not to determine empirically how many public photos of the darned bull exist in the Flickr database. As I looked harder and harder, any sort of metadata describing the photo became thin on the ground-I could've added more examples that had no tags, no title, and no narrative description, but I don't think it would have either bolstered my argument very much nor detracted from it. If anything, it would just demonstrate that there are lots of photos with neither tags nor descriptive narrative, titled exactly as they came from the camera.

Thus I came to have 322 examples of the photo, coded, and organized in a spreadsheet. As I said earlier, I gathered not only the photos, but also the titles, the narrative descriptions, and of course, the tags. This felt to me to be enough data to conduct a perfectly credible preliminary investigation-it was enough to convince me.

So first let's look at what's there to analyze. How broad of a net did I cast? You'll know the answer to this question by how many bull photos I uncovered that had minimal metadata. First of all, as you'd guess, there were no photos that were missing all three sources of description. That makes sense. How would I have found them? It would've meant combing through all the untraversed reaches of Flickr or, at the very least, scrounging through all of the Italian photo sets.

Yet-to demonstrate the sincerity of my search-there were four photos with no titles, and 25 more that had only the names that were assigned by the digital camera software (e.g. DSCF3091.jpg). Some of these had a paucity of other description as well. For example, I unearthed a photo of the mosaic with no title, no narrative description, and eight somewhat generic tags: milano, milan, italy, italia, mosaic, galleria, italie, Natalie. Another photo without title or description was tagged: galleria, mosaic, milano, milan, shoes, converse, WS. I searched with due diligence.

To give you a further sense of the minimal end of the spectrum, I've counted the number of photos without: without tags, without titles, without description. I've broken these counts further by whether they're of the mosaic, of a person standing on the mosaic, or of some anonymous leg in place to begin spinning:

Table 1. Frequency of missing metadata

Thus I've selected photos that are findable using metadata. This approach makes sense: my enquiry is about social tagging, not about labeling one's own photoset for one's own use. You might be able to remember that you went to Italy in August, 2005 and that you took a picture of the bull mosaic, but I'd never be able to recover that picture. So I've cast a broad net to select 322 findable photos.

The differences are sufficiently crisp that I feel it's safe to say that people are not apt to deposit a public photo without assigning a title to it. Only 1% of the total photos I collected are unnamed. Next come tags: somewhere between one-quarter and one-third of the photos are untagged. This seems to indicate that people do feel that tags help-that they're more vital for retrieval than the narrative, which is missing from roughly 40% of these photos. And this photo subject represents a best-case scenario for eliciting narrative: there's folklore behind the bull mosaic; there's something to explain, especially in the case of action or mosaic photographs, which don't have a human subject to motivate them.

I had wondered when I started categorizing these photos whether people treated photos differently if they had a person in them. So far, the difference is negligible. If someone's going to assign metadata to their pictures, they aren't going to worry whether they're explaining a person, place, or thing (roughly, my three photo categories).

Let me tell you a little more about the photo metadata I've collected. For the time being, let's ignore any missing metadata-absent titles, missing narrative, tags unassigned-and see how much description people contribute when they bother to contribute anything. In other words, let's see how many tags people contribute when they bother to make up tags, how much they write when they take the trouble to produce a narrative, and how long their titles are. Table 2 sums up the descriptive metadata; the numbers (words per narrative, words per title, and tags per photo) are means and the standard deviations are in parentheses.

Table 2. Narrative, titles, and tags assigned to the public photos of the bull mosaic

But what do these numbers mean? Here's a sample 22 word narrative from the dataset:

"So in Milan they say that if you spin on your heel three times on the Bull's balls, you get good luck."

This is actually quite typical of the narratives that accompany the picture, give or take a name or two. A 34 word narrative is not wildly different:

"At the center of Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, it is said that you will have good luck if you step on the Taurus' testicles (not a real taurus, just a mosaic) and turn twice!"

A 51 word version?

"Planting your heel and twisting with a flourish on the 'private parts' of the mosaic picture of the bull in Galleria Vittorio Emanuele, Milano, is a tradition for Italians and tourists alike. The bull offers good luck. A nun just did it, the other can't miss doing it but is hesitant."

You get the idea.

Titles? Titles too have their regularities. Two typical four word titles are “The Bull in Milan” and “Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II”. Seven words gives you room to be a little more expansive: “Rotate on the Bull's Balls for luck” or “Bull Mosaic in Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II”. Sure, there are variations. But what surprised me more is how similar they all are. Here are all 37 titles beginning with the letter S. Some of the repeated titles are the apparent result of copy-pastes, but many are just similar.

Table 3. Tags beginning with S

Tags-which are by definition classifiers and therefore intended to be regular-are where things start getting wild and wooly. There are enormous variations in tagging strategies: Do I tell you where the photo was taken, what's in it, where I'm going to go next on my vacation, or what I'm doing in Milan? The crowd that believes wholeheartedly in tags will tell you that a tag is relative to the person doing the assignment, so this variation isn't surprising.

In fact, if we relegate tags to a minor role in personal information management, individual variation isn't a bad thing. Perhaps the tags are simply well-tailored to their use. While {Arriving Home, Dinner With Lia, Milan or Bust} [6] is an awful tag set if one is attempting to use Flickr as a database of stock photography, it may be just right if Bill is trying to find those photos he took on his vacation to Milan, the ones from the day he had dinner with Lia. But are the bulk of actual tags this personalized and quirky?

To set up this discussion, it's important to realize that short tag sets (5 tags or fewer) are much more common than long tag sets (10 tags or more). Recalling that 97 of the photos have no tags, the short version of the story is that 150 of the photos have 1-5 tags; 54 of the photos have 6-9 tags; and 21 have 10 or more tags. You can picture what this drop off looks like:

Now, let's look at some examples of two word tag sets: {milan, italy}; {milano, me}; and {Nat, Nathalie}. In fact, the most common two word tag set turns out to be: {milan, italy}; 20 out of 48 are exactly that. What about four word tag sets? One common one is {Milan, Milano, Italy, Italia}. Others illustrate the heuristic that tags are indeed relative to the tagger: {friends, vacation, milan, italy}.

Nonetheless, all of these tags are startlingly generic (that is, they are the same across many different photographers) and likely to be less informative than the other sources of metadata (including their grouping into photosets, which can be used to partition one's own photos into a group taken in Milan). The four word title “Bull Mosaic in Milan” is a much better classifier (from the standpoint of retrieval) than the four element tag set {Milan, Milano, Italy, Italia}, which produces results so low on the precision-recall curve that the desired bull mosaic is lost in a sea of irrelevant photos of the countryside and the latest fashions.

What happens when tag sets become longer? After all, the average narrative is over 20 words long. Maybe a longer tag set will yield a more precise description. Unfortunately, it is readily evident from the data that this is not the case. First, consider that there are only 21 photos with 10 or more tags assigned to them. That's under 7%. It's more usual for photos with tags to only have one or two. Second-and this is unlikely to surprise you-photos with a larger number of tags conform roughly to the profile we've already developed for typical metadata. They may even be slightly better described and more fully titled than average. In other words, more tags don't mean less narrative. Quite to the contrary. The people who apply more tags also write richer descriptions and are no less likely to make up titles.

In fact, let's pull out the 21 cases where the photos have 10 or more tags. Seven of these 21 photos (33%) do not have narrative description, a figure slightly lower than the overall average of 39%, but not shockingly different. Certainly given the size of the sample, it's reasonably consistent. Likewise, only one lacks a title. What about the length of the narrative when it is present? 36 words long-half again as long as the ones with fewer tags. And what about the titles? About 6 words long-again, 50% longer than the ones with fewer tags.

Perhaps the people who assign lots of tags are just a wordy lot.

But it's quality, not quantity, that matters here, right? What kind of tags are in these lengthy tag sets? Are they comparable to good narratives?

At least a few are. Here's a twelve tag set: {Italy, Italia, milan, milano, bull, good, luck, galleria, vittorio, emanuele, II, mall}. Not bad. But nonetheless, keep it in mind. We'll come back to it. There's something very important missing.

Most of the large tag sets are not as informative as the example I just cited. It's as if the photographer is struggling to come up with meaningful descriptors. Here's a twelve tag set that may be customized for the individual's retrieval needs: {Milan, Italy, Gilberto, Peachy, Dad, Mom, Mipel, Trade, Show, Trip, Vacation, Business}. We've got the idea: Mom or Dad-they were at a trade show in Milan, Italy, on business. Gilberto and Peachy-they tagged along on the trip as a vacation. Here's a different tag set that was applied across a whole vacation's worth of photos: {Overseas trip 2006, Cinque Terre, Italy, Bologna, Milan, Rome, Greece, Santorini, England, Devon, Portsmouth, Isle of Wight}. It is hard to imagine the utility of these tags, even if these are indeed all the locations on the itinerary; because they have been applied across the entire photo set, the extra locations may be misleading descriptors for any individual photo.

What I mean to say is: tags can be a rich source of noise.

To really gain purchase on this problem, what we need is a head-to-head comparison of these three sources of evidence for retrieval, description, or any of the other purposes of extrinsic metadata.

So I counted. And counted. I looked for popular words, the ones lots of people used to describe the mosaic or the person spinning on the mosaic or the heel of the spinner. Table 4 lists the 20 most popular words used in tags, titles, and narratives. Words in red span all three lists; words in blue are in two out of three; words in black are only in one. The percentages are relative to the totals (tags, title words, or narrative words).

Table 4. Popular terms in tags, titles, and narratives

What we see is revealing. First, look at the totals. Only 60% of the tag words are accounted for in the list; 70% of the title words are accounted for; and more than 85% of the narrative words (not including stop words like articles) are accounted for.

What does this mean? In particular, what's up with the other 40% of the tags? They're tags that are low-frequency terms. Some are low frequency for the right reason: they're relevant to the individual doing the tagging and not to the photo's more public life in the Flickr database. For example, 5.7% of the tags are peoples' names; these names are acknowledged as useful photo metadata. Others are less auspicious: non-standard variations of place names, unusual words that are tied in with the bull mosaic's legend (feet, for example), and miscellaneous other words like summer and ribbon that seem to have simply popped into the tagger's head when he or she drew a blank at tagging time. One tag was, tellingly, freeassociation.

It's unlikely that these odd words will figure into future retrieval, either by the individual who assigned them or by someone like me.[8]

You'd think that this lack of uniformity would be true of the titles and narrative descriptions as much as it is for the tags. But—contrary to intuition—there's more overlap in the terms used in the descriptions and titles than there is in the tags. Even words that are slightly more common in the tags-Italia, europe, duomo, travel, trip, vacation, and Lombardia-do not occur in the other lists. In fact, it is interesting to note that all of the title words occur in either the narrative, the tags, or both.

Tags are indeed miscellaneous, and that miscellany may make them less than useful.

You'd think that this lack of uniformity would be true of the titles and narrative descriptions as much as it is for the tags. But-contrary to intuition-there's more overlap in the terms used in the descriptions and titles than there is in the tags. Even words that are slightly more common in the tags-Italia, europe, duomo, travel, trip, vacation, and Lombardia-do not occur in the other lists. In fact, it is interesting to note that all of the title words occur in either the narrative, the tags, or both.

It's also telling that general place names are over-represented in the tags: Italy accounts for 11% of the total tags, and only 1.5% of title words. It figures into the narratives even less often than that. Certainly the term 'Italy' is too broad of a net to cast against the entire Flickr photo base to come up with our bull photo; it may even be too broad to use to retrieve a meaningful number of personal photos.[9] Milan, used alone, is also doubtlessly too broad[10] , although when used with other terms (such as bull or mosaic), it's reasonably effective. Although Milan is the most popular tag, we also have to consider that Milan is often not meaningfully modified through other tags. For example, 'Milan, Italy,' is not appreciably more information than 'Milan'.

The other place-related term that appears in all three lists is more specific than Milan. Although 'Galleria Vittorio Emanuele' is not as precise a description as one would like-it turns up 2,420 public photos in Flickr-it isn't hopeless. 71 out of the 2,420 are of our bull. Unfortunately, to find them, one must page through 101 pages of thumbnails (24 thumbnails at a go). Even more unfortunately, there are only 3 in the first dozen pages and none in the first two. Most searchers will have given up before they reach the first positive result. Finally, for some reason, 26 of the photos of the bull mosaic are in the final 20 pages. I don't know about you, but I know very few people sufficiently obsessive-compulsive to go through that many search results, especially given the low density of desired results.

In other words, I'm tired and dizzy from scanning so many images and doubt anyone else would do likewise.

By comparison, a query like 'Milan bull' turns up only one tenth of the photos of the query whose results we just exhausted. One-tenth! Of those 240 photos, 117 are what we're after. Almost half. More than a third of the 322 photos possible. And 19 of the first 24 (that is, the first page of thumbnail results) are the desired photos.

Furthermore assigning general place names makes poor use of human labor in an era when GPS devices are cheap and relatively common and gazetteers can be used to fan out from the terms referring to specific places (Galleria Vittorio Emanuele) to more general areas (Milan, Italy, Europe).

Let's isolate tags and terms related to derivable place (e.g. Italy) or time (e.g. summer, or more commonly a specific date) and see what happens. I'm distinguishing the most specific place names (all of the variants of galleria) from the more general ones, because they may be harder to assign on the basis of GPS data alone.

Table 5. Terms related to time and place

The message here is almost painful: a great proportion of user tags add little or no further information; as such, they don't appear as often in narratives or titles. Personal names, which may be quite useful for finding photos among one's own collection (especially over the long haul) are less well represented in all types of metadata, but are relatively similar in quantity.

Now here's a property of tags that I find almost comical: they are seldom verbs, even if a verb is just the thing to characterize a photo. What's unique about what tourists do when they visit the Galleria's bull mosaic? They spin. In fact, if you type in Milan spin as your Flickr search terms, you pull up 94 results, 70 of which are pictures of our bull mosaic. 20 out of 24 results on the first page are on target.

Although spin and spinning make the top 20 list of tags, they are by no means commonly used terms; they are used less than 1% of the time (0.7%). That's just 7 tags. On the other hand, spin makes up 4.8% and 9.5% of title and narrative terms. People just don't seem to be thinking of tags as verbs. [11]

Have I convinced you that tags aren't all they've cracked up to be? I hope I have, but nonetheless there's a lingering fascination. Surely there's something to be done about tags: we don't want to just turn up our noses at Mr. Weinberger's argument. They could be a compact and efficient way of describing pictures. After all, picture archiving is difficult. Witness Art Spiegelman's fine graphical account in the New Yorker more than a dozen years ago; he described the difficult work of senior librarian Arthur Williams who curated the New York Public Library's extensive picture collection for over 30 years[12] . Just how do you turn a library patron's question, “I want a picture that conveys rough times ahead” into a photo of a three-masted schooner sailing into a storm?

In other words, knowing what we know about bull mosaics in Milan, what would make tags a more effective way of describing them?

First, it seems that it would be nice to encourage tag specificity. How come the same person who tags his photo {Milan, Italy} is able to title it Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II? Can we elicit the most specific place names possible using latitude/longitude pairs and fill in the rest using a gazetteer? Recognition is good enough to identify plausible human shapes in a photo. Can we elicit names? Those will come in handy too on down the line.

There's plenty of evidence that many of our taggers know the story associated with the bull. How can we elicit the story and turn it into tags? Can we use an authority list of some sort to guide and normalize a user's input? It is odd and telling that the terminology used in freeform input is more regular than the terms used in the tags. Narratives and even titles use verbs. How can we introduce verbs into the tag sets?

I find it odd that there's been such a widespread and good-natured acceptance of the efficacy of tags. Yet-and maybe I'm being a Pollyanna here-there must be a way to turn them into the linguistic powerhouses they are advertised to be.

Where I live, there's a local dairy, Berkeley Farms, that uses my favorite ad campaign ever. On the side of each Berkeley Farms milk carton, there's a cow-a happy cow-and the lovely rhetorical question: Cows in Berkeley? Moo.

So now we can only say:

Bulls in Milan? Moo.

Turn around 3 times on your heel in Milan (heel turn Milan returns 8 photos, all of them of the bull mosaic) and you'll find them.

by Rachel Lee

The tropical notepaper features a baby, clad in a foam pineapple costume, looking profoundly bemused yet confused. A list of ailments begins below the fruit-encased toddler in a section titled “Keeping Slow and Lingering Death In Perspective.”

This is a classic example-with the exception of its unconventional subject-of the list: a series of items to be remembered. Lists demonstrate an ability to formulate plans in the hopes of achieving some desired state, to connect who we are at the present to the past and future.

The importance of list-writing grows steadily in a culture of ever-expanding possibilities. As we develop the capacity to connect to further recesses of the globe or enhance our experiences in familiar settings, writing lists enables us to sort through the enormous amount of information we accumulate from existing in a high-tech world, prioritize it, and seek action that moves toward progress. Lists don't guarantee easier lives, but they can lend a little satisfaction and even hope.

Sasha Cagen approaches writing lists from an often overlooked angle. Her collection of submitted lists, To-Do List: From Buying Milk to Finding a Soul Mate, What Our Lists Reveal About Us, explores the 20- to 35-year-old experience, with a few exceptions. Ranging from the meticulously planned Thanksgiving dinner, to the pros-and-cons of remaining in a relationship, these lists draw from the values of Cagen's intended demographic.

Take, for example, a segment from “Ultimate To Do List.”

16. Explore underwater wreckage

17. Involved in archaeological excavation

18. Drive in a demolition derby

19. Discover something

20. Get what I consider very good at guitar

“Ultimate To Do List” reveals the larger cultural values that shape its creator's aspirations. Emphasis placed on ephemeral thrills and exoticism presumably lies in contrast to the writer's current state, a situation much like our own. By shifting the focus from ordinary, domestic affairs to desired outcomes, lists from this collection straddle a line between escapism and reality. The success of this collection resides in its paradoxical nature-an appeal stemming from its ability to remain grounded in what's common and relatable, while reaching for goals lying outside this range.

Cagen invites the reader to start a similar list called “My Ultimate To-Do List.” The introduction of this interactive element intends to change the reader's perception of what it means to write a list. No longer are lists confined to the series of groceries scrawled by time-pressed soccer moms or the annual inventories penned by highfalutin film critics. Lists can be fanciful whims, suitable conduits for bouts of idealism and wishful thinking. List-writing is for young men and women who aren't afraid to dream big.

The concept of writing lists undergoes a transformation under Cagen's supervision, metamorphosing into journal entries distilled to their most salient points. Looking at lists in a category called Relationships, we see that creating lists forces these writers to take a step back in order to evaluate their situations. It allows them to see trends in their behavior and preferences, optimizing their introspection. Reviewing a list of ideal qualities or the good and bad elements of a partner's behavior establishes a sense of control that poring over months of weepy journal entries never could. Lists are still highly subjective, but they're compact and simple to read. They facilitate the communication of difficult truths, while allowing their writers' to come to terms with reality in a simplified way.

Cagen opens up the — to borrow a phrase from the book's cover— “voyeuristic and interactive” possibilities of reading strangers’ lists, making the practice playful and edgy. She includes a short explanation from the list-writer and, on the opposite page, one of her catchy one-liners. For “A Soon-To-Be Divorcée Tries to Move On,” a list of tasks designed to speed a woman's emotional recovery, Cagen comments, “What was she doing with underwear from the eighties in 2003?”

Catty remark aside, this open-ended presentation boasts its own appeal. Withholding a solid context for the list's creation lets us invent the more concrete details surrounding the list-writer's former self, because in reading this forgotten list, one can imagine the experiences, personality and desires that compelled it to be written in the first place. What we see is the list-writers' day-to-day existence-it's what Cagen fondly calls a “snapshot” of a specific point in time. The physical and psychological distance inherent to reading a stranger's list allows us to invent and relate to these list-writers in a way that bypasses the potentially awkward, getting-to-know-you phase of a relationship. In a supposedly isolated, postmodern social landscape, this idea is tempting.

Not only does Cagen simulate the intimacy of a relationship, she unveils a paradox in her format. On one hand, she attaches to list-writing the highly personal notion of honest introspection. This enforces the divide between the list-writer and the reader, while establishing the latter as voyeur. On the other hand, Cagen invites the audience to react to the lists and create their own. While not interactive in the strictest sense, list-writing takes on a new communal dimension that promotes sensitivity and reciprocity, key components of effective communication.

This reincarnation of the list bears a striking semblance to a simplified weblog, though the usual functions of the list and weblog differ significantly. The main aim of a weblog, communication, aids in the presentation of ideas and direct responses to them, whereas lists serve as reminders of significant items. Despite these differences, this development in list-writing marks the spreading influence of internet culture into the most intuitive of tasks.

Blog-like interfaces and virtual social networks, customizable applications that adapt to our preferences and habits, boost our expectations of how technology can make life more efficient on an individual level. When this heightened expectation spurs innovation in our approach to simple tasks like writing lists, when coffeemakers percolate on schedule and on-line retailers make customized suggestions, our values change along with our environment.

List-writing, then, embodies a paradigm shift. In a grander scheme of technological advancement and increased connectivity, Cagen's collection showcases a modern value system intent on optimizing the simplest tasks. Her stab at uniting the list-writers of the country represents a movement toward a reinvention of the mundane chore according to its function, form and content-a trend that shows no sign of ever slowing down. Take note, Cagen's lists are making a mark of their own.

Christopher Felton’s annual report consolidates a host of mundane journal records into fascinating summaries and visualizations.

You can’t know in advance just what you’ll want to know later. You can’t do this the right way, you can’t do it optimally. As your needs and insights change, you’re bound to wish you’d recorded things you didn’t, and you’re likely to find many of the things you did record to be obvious, banal, and dull. (Don’t worry about that: you, or your biographer, might find those very things precious someday)

Some things are unpredictable: you’ll describe those in text. There’s no alternative. Nobody could have expected that to happen, and so you’ll have to start from the beginning.

But other things are more predictable, and you might want to have a regular slot in which to file the information you’ll record in every update. These slots offer you several advantages:

• You have a specific place to put a specific bit of information, making it easier to find later.
• The presence of the slot reminds you to record the information
• The type of the slot can remind you what sort of information you intend to record. Do you want a single name, or a list? Do you to record how far you jogged, or just whether or not you had your workout?

David Seah’s Printable CEO provides a variety of elegantly-designed paper forms for project planning.

The disadvantage of a long list of slots is tedium: confronted with a long and complicated form, you may find yourself too busy to fill out anything. This is especially onerous if some of the things you once thought might be useful you now know to be worthless. And, once you find yourself questioning whether or not parts of the form are worth filling out, the entire project can seem tarnished and tedious.

Still, without consistent records, Christopher Felton’s wonderful annual reports would never be possible. And, while you might overzealously set out to record everything you can imagine, there are bound to be some core elements you really want to track.

Kevin Kelly’s intriguing site on The Quantified Self gives a number of interesting examples. There’s also a Quantified Self Wiki.

This tension gives rise to a host of systems, templates, and forms that you can find in stationers and on the Web.

• DIYPlanner
• David Seah’s Printable CEO

In Tinderbox , you can add metadata slot — Tinderbox calls this a Key Attribute, at the top of any text window by selecting any attribute from the key attributes menu or dragging it from the Attributes palette. You can make new attributes as well in the User tab of the Attributes palette. Most often, you’ll set the key attributes of a Prototype note, and let individual notes inherit those attributes.

Hint: you might have special key attributes for special days. You might, for example, want to record some information once a week, not every day; an easy way to do this is to arrange for every Saturday’s note to inherit from a special SaturdayPrototype.

Create new User Attributes by pressing Create… the attribute palette.

Some user attributes might best be numbers:

• blood sugar
• miles run
• weight
• words written in your next novel

Others might better be simple checkboxes, or dates. Sometimes, you'll want sets — lists of items, separated by semicolons.

• tags
• categories
• friends seen
• customers contacted

In planning a fresh Tinderbox , consider which kinds of metadata you are certain to need for each entry. Avoid the temptation to overload your system with dozens of slots, keeping in mind that, if you can always put information in the text of the journal entry and, later, formalize that information as a key attribute if it does prove useful to ensure its regular collection.

What do you track in your Tinderbox journal?

Pre-printed forms can also remind you to record details that you might omit — especially details that now seem obvious. That’s why journals used to include the phase of the moon so prominently. Before streetlights and headlights, moonlight mattered; it was easier and more pleasant to go out in the evening when there was a moon. Everyone knew the current phase of the moon, everyone had a pretty good idea of when moonrise and moonset would be; it was simply part of the pattern of the day. But looking back, months or years later, you wouldn’t know — you’d have to look it up.

An easy way to pre-print information in Tinderbox is simply to use |= , the shorthand for conditional assignment. If the left-hand side of the assignment is empty, we proceed with the assignment, but otherwise Tinderbox ignores it. For example,

Text |= format($Date,"L")+": ";

means

If there’s no text yet, start out with the date. But if I’ve already put something in the text, leave the text unchanged.

The newly-created note can be pre-loaded with the note's date.

This exemplifies a typical Tinderbox trade-off: we’ve had to so some work to set things up the way we want, but we gain lots of flexibility. We can preprint more information. We can format the date however we like. Yes, we could do this with some sort of Preferences dialog, but then we’d have another kind of complexity.

Note, too, that we don’t need to plan on doing this before we start keeping a journal. We could do without the date: it's nice to have, but we probably could manage without it. We could just write it out by hand: Pepys did! It doesn't take long, and some people fine this sort of work — numbering pages, writing in headings and indexes — a pleasant break. Emerson spent months preparing and then annotating and indexing his notebooks.

But, if you'd like the convenience of delegating the work to Tinderbox, is only takes a couple of minutes to add the action.

We can also add Rules to a prototype to enforce constraints. Where OnAdd actions are suggestions which you can overrule, rules are requirements: Tinderbox's rule manager runs constantly to enforce them.

For example, let's add a rule to our prototypical JournalEntry:

Entries on Sundays are light gray; all the rest are black.

This sort of zebra-striping helps the pattern of weeks stand out, and makes long lists easier to read. But it might not be right for you. Maybe you write a column that’s due on Tuesday and Friday. Maybe you want highlight alternate days. Lots of choices; that’s why we have flexible rules and not simply a menu of styles.

Think twice if you find yourself wanting Tinderbox to replace your calendar. Calendars are great, and repeating events are one of the things they do well. You could write a calendar in Tinderbox, but you're probably better served by letting the calendar do its thing and using Tinderbox to do stuff that nothing else can do.

The rule for our light gray Sundays is, simply:

if(format($Date,"W")="Sunday") {Color="lightest warm gray"} else {Color="black"}

And here's what it looks like in Outline view:

Perhaps we don’t want to use color to distinguish Sunday. We’ve got lots of other options. For example, we might choose a special font for Sunday:

or we might let Sundays serve as separators:

if(format($Date,"W")="Sunday") {Separator="true"} else {Separator="false"}