When I was 4 my sweet, dear brother pushed me into a marble table and I cracked my head open.

I had been sick for a few days, but, I was in the state where I had completely recovered, and was using my “sickness” to issue orders to my brother. “Get me some water” “I want saltines, now” “You have to do it I’m sick”.

He, being the cold-hearted nasty older brother that he was, couldn’t take it anymore. He pushed me very very hard off the couch, and WHACK that was it.

My mother, did, and still does, refuse to believe that he actually pushed me… she, in her “blame the poor victim” mentality, to this day, maintains that I simply “fell”. Uh Huh.

Now, my brother actually admits to doing it – however, he doesn’t take any responsibility for it being psychotic and mean. “You sort of deserved it” is his mantra. No responsibility. No culpability. No apology.

Thank god it’s not genetic – or, if it is, the DNA somehow missed me. Maybe it’s recessive.

Which leads me to this – I made this whole post about all the updates to the site – and, you know what, I got some things wrong. See, I’m a big person, I can admit it.

What, you may be asking, the heck am I talking about?

I’m talking about my use of the words “ratings’. I’m talking about my explanation of Tag Me Not.

The word “ratings” isn’t accurate – because they’re really tags. They are tags that we’ve given extra attention to and made it easy for people to tag as “green” or “not green”, “practical” or “not practical”, “cool” or “not cool”. And because they’re tags with emphasis, it’s very easy for us to make them something else. We’ve put these on the web site as a test of sorts – put them up, have people see what we’re trying to do, and lead us down the path of choosing tags that beta testers see as meaningful and meaty. Maybe we’ll hear from beta testers that what you’d really like as quick tag options are “recycled” or “I have this” or “this company uses sustainable practices”. I think by using the word “ratings” I put an emphasis on these that was not quite right. BUT the important thing to remember is that over the next weeks we’ll be finding some way to ask beta testers what would be valuable.

The next thing I sort of kind of okay I messed up on, is, Tag Me Not. I come from a family of fighters not lovers (as I illustrated in my beginning story…). Ethan pointed out to me today that I had framed Tag Me Not in a completely different way than he thought of it. And, frankly, his explanation is a much nicer, non-confrontational way. And I like it more.

So here it is, Tag Me Not by Ethan: “Tag Me Not gives you an important tool for sustainability – the ability to see what’s not there. In stores, fair trade coffee often comes with “Fair Trade” labels, but you never see any coffee labeled “not Fair Trade”. Same goes for “organic” and countless other labels. But both in stores and on the web, the absence of a label is not the same as the presence of a “not” label. For example, if a shirt on OsoEco doesn’t have an “Organic” tag, does that mean it isn’t Organic, or just that nobody’s tagged it yet? Tag Me Not helps us tell the difference between “not” and “don’t know”.

“With Tag Me Not, things like “Organic” and “not Organic” aren’t two different tags – they’re the flip side of the same tag. This means that tags now offer us spectrum! So now when we look at the Organic tag, we can see side by side all the items that we’ve determined are or are not Organic. The same goes for unappealing characteristics. Think “Toxic” and “not Toxic.” Sure, some times there will be contradictions between how different members tag things. For those cases, we tally the relative counts of Tag Me So’s and Tag Me Nots. Sometimes this kind of contradiction will be really fun, like in seeing who thinks a note should be tagged “funny” and who says “not funny.” But the point isn’t to highlight differences among our opinions, it’s to highlight differences among our options. Which might be a waste of time, since all of our options for addressing sustainability are really just the same old boring rigamarole. Not.”

Now doesn’t that sound a bit better than my version?….

Sigh. Well, I’m sorry about my, uh, miscommunication; and I’m sure I’ll be making many many more mistakes. But, hopefully, I won’t split any heads open….