Agnostic Tags - Part II
There are a lot of new developments going on in the tagging and microformat world. It's getting a little confusing trying to figure out what new directions things will take. I am excited because with all the new services, we'll eventually get to web 2.0 or 3.0.
What does it matter to us? Since Ideascape has open API's and heavy rss, which way we push/pull tags externally does not impact us much. In other words, these new developments are for external purposes and do not affect the way we handle tags your internal environment. On the flip side, what's getting talked about has an impact on the quality of tags/content we pull in, externally, from services such as technorati, icerocket, etc. I really do not see any of this affecting del.icio.us much at this time.
In my post yesterday, Agnostic Tags, I made ref to technorati having closed tags and Kevin commented I was confused. Yes, I am confused and I incorrectly stated the wrong time period for the problems we had with technorati.
Understanding true decentralisation - the microformat model, by Kevin Marks
Jeff Jarvis called for decentralised tags and restaurant reviews, and Stowe Boyd posted some ideas about how to achieve this.
Unfortunately, Stowe misunderstood how the existing open, decentralised tagging model works, and went off into a design dead-end because of this.
Kevin Marks on Tag Decentralization by Stowe Boyd
Stowe, Well, I haven't swallowed the microcontent kool-aid, either, but I concur with Mark on the thrust of his comments: this stuff is too important to leave it in the hands of the engineers and entrepreneurs. This has to be a solution that works for us, does what we need it to: the bloggers, the individuals, the hypothetical beneficiaries of this social architecture we are busy creating one tag at a time. If we leave it to others, however benevolent they may be individually, collectively their interests are not ours, their motives and needs are not ours, and we will get something other than what we want, especially when we aren't sure of what we want. And perhaps what is implemented will serve our needs, but perhaps it won't. And then, they may not turn out to be benevolent, and we may wind up with something that serves their needs, and ours not at all.
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