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.

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