I picked a particularly wet winter to move here to the Bay Area, and I have to admit that I’ve been vaguely disheartened a couple of times during unbroken week-long onslaughts of rain. I thought I’d left this kind of thing in London!

The main reason that wet weather is disheartening here, though, is that California is truly breathtaking when the skies clear and the sun shines down.

London is kind of grimy like a well-worn, well-loved overcoat. I don’t think I could truly state my affection for the city without becoming near-pornographic, but after 8 years it was definitely time for a change. I’ve only come to believe that more strongly since I moved.

Tagging – it’s where the action is right now. At it’s heart, it’s like all great technology ideas; so simple that you wonder why it hasn’t been a mainstream concept for years.

If you’re new to it, tagging is nothing more than assigning keywords to a piece of content, usually at the point of publication. A good example is the photo site flickr. When I upload a photo to the site I choose some words which are appropriate to describe the picture. These usually take the form of place names, people or objects found in the photo.

This is all about simple yet rich metadata, and it’s suprisingly effective. On flickr, for example, it’s now trivial for me to go back and view all my photos of wood, or those depicting Half Dome in Yosemite.

Apply the concept across a diverse group of photographers, and you get a collaborative picture of Half Dome which is built from the combined micro-efforts of each photographer to apply the tag.

Tagging, of course, doesn’t just have to be about photos. delicious uses the same concept to categorise bookmarks, and we’re even starting to see blogging tools that allow users to apply tags to their posts.

As a descriptive mechanism and a search tool, tagging is incredibly powerful. It is not, however, a “folksonomy”. Here’s why.

I’m getting mellower in my old age. I mean, look at this place. Movable Type all over the place, photos and delicious links in the right-hand column… What is this, a blog or something?

Nuh-uh. You’re not even close. Still not a damn blog.

I guess that some people would probably accuse me of dabbling in mere semantics at this point, and I think, to be fair, they’d be correct. This site (particularly on the other side of the fence, where I write an irregular diary about relocating from London to Silicon Valley) has an awful lot in common with others which fall under the banner of “blogs”.

But the semantics of the issue are important to me.

Ever since I first wrote a short text titled “Not a Damn Blog” back in August 2002, I’ve been watching with some interest the emerging trends in internet technology, and the ways they’re being described, jargonised and lionised.

The good news, from an observer’s point of view, is that not a lot has changed. That’s the bad news too.

We’ve entered a new “tech bubble”, without anyone quite realising it. It’s still about hyperbole and over-valuation, but the action isn’t on Wall Street this time. Instead, it’s taking place in convoluted blog threads, and the commodity being shifted is buzzwords; a new one seemingly every month.

Will the bubble burst? I’m honestly not sure. The nature of language development suggests that we’ll see more of a deflation, the majority of buzz phrases fading into obscurity after a few short months or years of excitement.

I’ll tell you one thing, though: it’ll be an absolute hoot for cultural historians years from now.

So, I had my first Royal conversation on Saturday (by which I mean a conversation about, not with British royalty…) I wasn’t expecting it to take place in a “mildly famous blues bar”:http://www.sanfranciscoblues.net/GrantGreen/GG.html but hey, that’s life’s rich tapestry at work.

My co-conversationalist in all this was a woman in, I would guess, her late 40s. She was the Godmother of my friend’s flatmate, which is how I came to be talking with her. Unfortunately, it was all a bit awkward.

Today, dear friends, I want to touch upon a marvel of American engineering. Sadly, for all of us, I’m not here to eulogise the beauty of a Jeep Wrangler or the elegant engineering marvels of the Golden Gate Bridge.

No, I’m afraid this is nothing but potty talk.

If a truly horrendous entity ever wished to escape back into our reality from another chaotic dimension, it would almost certainly manifest itself at an international airport.

This is not because airports are particularly monstrous places, but because they’re places where reality is already slightly warped. They’re the locations where we ourselves pass into a subtly different reality, absorbing the myriad minor differences between one culture and another.

It was brought home to me the other week, when I travelled back up to SFO to meet Emma from her plane. You can feel the otherworldliness of airports even before you reach them, but something was different as I drove up 101 this time. San Francisco airport wasn’t what it had been when I stayed here for two weeks last July, or when I arrived in January.

If I believed everything I read then I’m almost certain to die of cancer after siring several three-headed mutants.

I say this because wherever I go; at almost every doorway, parking lot entrance, public building and so on, I’m confronted by these words:

bq. This area may contain chemicals known to the State of California to cause cancer, birth defects, or reproductive harm.

And no, before we get started, this is not a dylexically titled political rant regarding European feelings towards Mr President. Although, admittedly, the weak link was irresistible.

No, this is a post about an absolute fundamental of life. As Homer Simpson would say, Mmmmm. Beer.

So, I finally got an apartment, as noted previously, and since then I’ve been getting the facilities side of things together – telephone, broadband and a TV to watch DVDs on…

…with broadband finally in place, I had time to get some photos of the new place together, for those in London who are interested in what it looks like (or, er, not).

So, without further ado, I present my apartment

Enjoy…