Joho the Blog
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February 17, 2005
Marco Montemagno has an idea to help people aggregate blogs that express opinions: Tag your post with "opinionradar" and the topic. He explains it here. He asked me via email what I think, and I responded. He's generously posted my response on his site. Here's what I said: I think the general idea is good and that something like it will succeed, but I think it's more likely to come from some huge player, especially Google. I'm very interested in seeing how tagging becomes a differentiated space instead of the flat space it is now. Already people are suggesting using prefixes as de facto category tags. E.g., Global Visions, a Berkman Center project, suggests that you tag blogs that give insight into their countries with a "gv:" tag, as in "gv:ghana." As these prefixes proliferate, we're going to have the same problem as with the DNS: What happens when Gelber Vistavision (or some other company) starts tagging its stuff "gv:"? So, I think it's a huge issue, and I suspect it will be addressed definitively by sites that have the clout to convince taggers to adopt their tag sets. Alternatively, it's possible that the grassroots will adopt a general purpose tag set before sites like Google do, but if we do, I suspect we'll adopt not a single tag here and there (gv or opinionradar) but a few of them all at once, in relation to one another, e.g., "dc-author:" and "dc-language:". (I say "dc" because the Dublin Core would love for us all to adopt its categories.) That's what I think at the moment, fwiw. [Technorati tags: tags taxonomy folksonomy] Posted
by D. Weinberger at February 17, 2005 10:59 AM
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Comments
Hey, David --
One of the problems is that many (most?) taxonomies are somebody's private intellectual property.
I noticed with interest your insightful and funny article on the Dewey Decimal System in a previous edition of your 'zine. The thing is, DDC is the private property of OCLC.
I actually use DDC as my category system on my weblog, and have had a little back and forth with them about making this legal, though it hasn't come to fruition yet.
What I'd love to see is either DDC or Library of Congress have a noncommercial use license.
(BTW, I get around the retro-to-the-point-of-discrimination aspect of the DDC by only using the top level categories; so entries on Islam and Christianity just all get filed under 200. Not a long term solution but perfectly sufficient for my general-purpose weblog. I think tags would be an interesting way to lend granularity to the categories, a way of "putting a little English on the ball.")
PS tonight's Berkman Bloggers' meeting is going to be..um...interesting. Check out the weblog.
Posted by: Lisa Williams | February 17, 2005 01:00 PM
Hi David, I had done the similar ideas before. The ideas was tagging "10placesofmycity" to let bloggers show off their 10 favorate places in their city. Over 150 Chinese bloggers get involved so far. :-)
http://wen-xin.net/archives/2005/01/25/10_places_of_my_city_chinese_blogging_social_movement.php
BTW, will you be in this year's SXSW conference? Hope to see you again there.
Posted by: Kevin Wen | February 18, 2005 03:54 AM
Lisa, I've been talking with the OCLC, too. I suspect I'm not their favorite person at the moment. BTW, you were fantastic at last night's weird-a-thon at the Berkman Center. I look forward to seeing your comments on Nightline.
Kevin: Good point. Also: D'oh! I posted about 10places also a few weeks ago.
I'm not going to sxsw this year because it conflicts with O'Reilly Emerging Tech. I'll miss the attendees there. Say hello for me, and have fun.
Posted by: David Weinberger | February 18, 2005 08:25 AM