Musings on education, techology, and life..
First, categories and tags are not the same things at all.
Second– ahh, forget it. I’m coming to believe that Dave Winer is just a lot like me… he doesn’t like ideas that aren’t his own… At least not at first.
Mr. Sifry:
While I too found the sign in the photo Rebecca Blood objected to distasteful, it certainly DID belong in the MLK tag stream. It’s clear that the person who posted it wasn’t trying to game the system. It is related to the tag MLK, coming from a protest that explicitly invoked his name. The POINT of the social tagging network is not to reinforce groupthink about what is appropriate a priori, but to reflect on what real people make appropriate through the connections they draw in these systems.
It’s almost unpardonably na�¯ve for people to engage with folksonomy, wring their hands about cultural misappropriation, representation, and outright imperialism, and then call for the censorship of information that doesn’t conform to their particular socio-cultural constructions.
I hope Technorati will avoid getting into that business even as it investigates new way to deal with the very real potential problems of gaming inherent in any of these systems.
To really make the nofollow idea work properly is going to demand that the plugins and tools to work with links inside comments and contributions work on the same level as plugins which right now work with the comments themselves.
In other words, I’m not going to start using nofollow until I can control– easily– which links they are applied to. While I agree with most of what Alex has to say about the naysayers, there is one point with which I firmly disagree. Alex writes, in response to the contention that this attribute will hurt linking between sites:
No, it helps the connections between websites by making them more than simply binary. In the end, people may be more willing to allow outside linking if they know it won’t add to a page’s standing in Google.
The problem is, the reason PageRank works is because those links have a qualitative value. They enrich the entire information ecology, and if a comment contains a good link (or the commenters own link is a good thing), that link deserves to be “recommended” through PageRank. I don’t know about everyone else, but I’ve discovered a multitude of useful information and websites that I now follow through the links in comments and the push that those linked sites received in the Google rankings.
So nofollow is a good idea if selectively applied, and none of the management interfaces work at that level (and, indeed, it seems a lot harder to write something to do so).
I’m a big fan of Jack Shafer’s writings in Slate, and for the most part he gets it. In Blog Overkill he gets a lot right about blogging, particularly some bloggers underestimation of the power (and adaptability, and cluefulness) of major media outlets.
But despite all that, he still misses the most important point. The portable camera couldn’t revolutionize media the way some predicted they would because recording something isn’t the same as broadcasting that recording. Blogs aren’t a new kind of recording device– they are a socially connected broadcasting tool. The camcorder captures information, blogs amplify them. The comparison is such an apples and oranges kind of thing that I’m astounded Shafer bothered with it. The paper notebook, the cassette recorder, and the digital recorder never had the potential to revolutionize media either.
Shafer’s sarcasm (while earning his coin from a web publication) is more unforgivable than his final bit of cluelesness. The latter is a matter of experience and opinion… but the former exemplifies a childish disrespect that Shafer should be above regardless of the behavior of his antagonists.
As it turns out, not many people are good at predicting the future of media or technology. I suspect that in this case both extreme ends of the spectrum have it wrong (as usual). What we’re likely to see over the next two decades will be a strange kind of convergence possible only through the divergence afforded by technology. Blogs– and the Internet– allow for great range and divergence from the established mainstream, while the plumbing underneath mines that information for ways to create an ever denser network bringing the participants closer together. Whether this is something we can’t wait for or something we should fear is anyone’s guess.
“No, I am done with Anger. When he never called, I wrote some very scathing poetry.”
“Poetry?”
“Yeah, and a vicious haiku that I posted on my blog.”
Found this trying out the new Google Video Search Fascinating search tool in a vague, pop-culture kind of way.
The same search revealed this memorable poem from the Seinfeld episode “The Library”:
“Pressed chest, fleshed out West, might be the savior– or a Garden Pest.”
What will I do with all this information?