From what I’ve read, Matt would say that considering his aversion to using/building WordPress as a CMS. Posts and pages are the only content types he cares about. So chronological sorting and keyword hits is most important to him.

With greater occurrence of custom fields out of a) necessity and b) access via wp 3.0’s interface and plugins like Pods CMS, we’ll need to be able to fine-tune our searching to something much more specific than keywords/chronology.

In the meantime…. maybe check out “Search Engine” by one of the awesome Pods developers, Scott Kingsley Clark: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/search-engine/

~kyle~

http://twitter.com/TEDNews/statuses/8170451539

http://www.gatesfoundation.org/annual-le6ter/2010/Pages/agricultural-development-farmers-seeds.aspx

Though it's covered in a very good P/R sort of way.;

I use the excellent Relevanssi search plugin on mine. It does fulltext, and I believe boolean, searches – and sorts by relevance rather than date. woohoo.

http://www.mikkosaari.fi/relevanssi/

No need to rely on Google (or anyone else) to search your own database.

As for advocating for CSE in the classroom, this is something I push for in the presentations I’ve done on search. I propose that teachers need to become better at search so they can model and train their students to be effective at sourcing and analyzing information. I see a google CSE as a perfect way to achieve this.

I have come up with a workflow for CSE if you are hosting one on your own site. This is the best way to achieve this as you can link it with Analytics to see the keywords your students are using. This allows you to provide a feedback and/or remediation on keyword selection to improve search results. http://www.flickr.com/photos/chris_bell/4355361906/

so yeah, blah blah blah.

http://twitter.com/TEDNews/statuses/8180451539

http://www.gatesfoundation.org/annual-letter/2010/Pages/agricultural-development-farmers-seeds.aspx

Though it’s covered in a very good P/R sort of way.

My contentions are on the question of riff-raff vs. chosen few. It matters to me who are considered the chosen few and for what reason? Is it for the qualification, is it for their wealth, is it for what they have been able to achieve, or is it because of their ideas as having merit in of itself. Since the conference is about ideas in the general sense, I think it makes sense that the ideas are considered in of themselves without attaching the bias of wealth, qualification, or achievement as a halo to them in order legitimizing them and potentially make them more viral.

I have been thinking that TED videos can be basically analysed for their content and compared to the running discourse about the subject as such. Since they are readily available, they are readily open to criticism, and as such perhaps someone should take on that task — however unpopular that might be… as I can see a lot of hissing on D’Arcy’s post there are a lot of people who passionately defend TED.

Another issue is the whole echo chamber discussion. I don’t know whether the echo chamber is the correct definition in the case where like-minded people with the same qualifications, socio-economic status, industry and so on get together. On the internet, a few years ago, someone would say something and then it would be repeated word for word with a line or two of comment — that was the echo-chamber — that effect has largely disappeared. In general the whole idea about preaching the choir or preaching to the preacher has a very specific sort of context within the church where the message is limited and is accepted as a function of faith rather than of reason backed up by debate. I find that when people who actually have ideas to say discuss, debate, or criticize ideas at length it adds to the understanding of the ideas, at least it does in my mind, if not the ideas themselves but how they are perceived and how they fit in a given ideology. In some ways, because of this, I feel that being impolite at times is necessary as it forces the other person to defend their ideas instead of just reiterating them without backing them up.

One final angle to consider this thing is from the nature of how TEDx is used to legitimize TED’s discourse. TEDx events really have nothing to do with TED, and yet the process through which they operate is decided at least in part by TED. As people popularize TEDx events, they popularize TED’s discourse while at the same time having no impact whatsoever on that discourse. Perhaps I can concede that some impact may be had, if the videos are put online for anyone to view. So the legitimate discourse (done by people who don’t have agendas to acquire more capital or power) is mixed with the illegitimate discourse (done by people and imaginary people to acquire more power or money or maintain the status quo even if it is unjust) and certain ideas like Bill Gates’ foundations’ latest support for Monsanto as a way to fight poverty and world hunger gets mixed with Lessig’s ideas about free culture and so on. So it becomes harder to question and maintain public opinion about certain issues that are no-brainier otherwise.

It just seems like the people who accumulated the capital have decided to do some good, and that good may involve a good component and another component of increasing the level of control over the system and curtailing freedom. Eventually this control leads to issues of using that control to generate profits, which then leads to other social problems.

I am also all TED’d out.

What is the difference between

* me sitting in an audience at TEDxNYED listening to David Wiley in person speak as I also tap out my reflections on twitter….
* me sitting at home in Strawberry Arizona listening to a live video a stream of David Wiley speaking as I also tap out my reflections on twitter….

’cause that is the bulk of the event.

There is participation in the moment and what I think is more important- participation *after* the moment. There is more to participating than just being in the physical space.