Danny Ayers comments about my previous post and David Sifry comment:

Another angle is that apart from tags being something you have to
apply statistics on to discover relationships, there's also the
potential for describing relationships in a formal fashion to work
with the data in a more directory-like manner but still keeping the
tagger flexibility.

Check out tinky.org, notes at:
http://internetalchemy.org/2005/05/tinky-and-skos

There's some similar stuff in Piggy Bank:
http://simile.mit.edu/piggy-bank/index.html
notes on tags at:
http://www.betaversion.org/~stefano/linotype/news/85/

Personally I think the whole tag thing needs personalizing a load
more, so I can talk about http://dannyayers.com/me/cats, which may or
may not be the same as http://flickr.com/tags/cats

David Sifry is reporting that Technorati has now indexed one million distinct tags, found in 14 million blog posts. It looks like at least some people likes to tag what they write and to contribute to the building of a meaningful web.

I must admit I am still not completely sold on tags.

It's not that I'm not fascinated with the whole concept of a bottom-up, social driven, taxonomy: it's quite similar to what we used for K-collector, what leaves me a little cold is the lack of coordination tools and rules. Are my posts about my computers supposed to be using the "Mac", the "MacOS" or the "Macintosh" tag?

Last week I went to a conference in Florence, took some pictures and posted them on Flickr using the name of the event: Nuovo e Utile. Later I discovered that other people were posting pictures under the name of the sub-event we were all participating: Neuweb. It's obvious how we could have gotten in synch by other means, and partially we did: I did found out about the second tagging and added to my pictures, but not everybody did, and this is leaving both tags incomplete.

I might be a little frustrated because when we went trough this stage first, a couple of years ago, we decided that it was broken and tried to fix it adding tag sharing and tag gardening tools.

While today everybody seems to be enthusiast I keep going to the main tags page on Technorati and thinking that none of those tags would be helpful to find information in a sea of 14 million posts, simply because these are the most popular tags and consequently they are not very helpful. Until some time ago the most used tag by far was "General", now it's not there anymore, somebody has removed it, it think it was a good idea but who did it? Using which tool? How was the decision taken?

A few days ago I visited for the first time CC Mixter, because I was thinking about a similar service (music track sharing). I visited their tags page in order to get an idea about the content and, again, to me the page looks totally useless: the most used tags are "MP3" and "Stereo" which is hardly of any interest if you are looking for a song title. Imho in this case a good old directory based on Artists and Songs would be the better way to navigate in this database.

Every time I mention adding some rules to these systems I get one of those "he's not a true believer" stares.

But look at Wikipedia: it's a totally bottom-up project which has some very simple but strict policies and guidelines about how it should be developing. Writers are respecting these rules, finding new ways to enforce them and the whole system is blooming beautifully.

The RSS feed from InfoWorld contains a post about Google enterprise search tool.

The item also contains an ad... from Google.

Doh!

Dave: [...] And a reminder that it wasn't that long ago that you couldn't take your entire music collection with you where ever you go. Someday I'm going to meet someone who won't understand how we could live that way, but we did, didn't we?

I hope that that person won't understand how we could live without having instant and ubiquitous access to all music (and video, and text, and everything else) ever created.

While Technorati has counted the 10.000.000th blog, Suw is wondering if blogging has become mainstream.

Ten million is a lot of blogs. That makes blogging a mainstream activity. The only trouble is, it doesn't look mainstream unless you're slap bang in the middle of it, and even then the disconnection and contradiction between the simultaneously solitary and social nature of blogging obscures understanding of our position within both the blogosphere and the world at large. In reality, blogging is mainstream, but it still feels fringe.

I have been thinking about the same issue recently. I have spent the last week driving back and forth Northern Italy, meeting people, making presentations, speaking at conferences and going to parties and, as usual, my topic is blogging and social software.

My feeling is that, sometimes incredibly, blogging is not mainstream, at least not here.

I have been talking with PR people, politicians, programmers, enterpreneurs, all people who should not only know about but already be blogging because it would have a major impact on their activities. Still, most of them hardly knew what a weblog is, most simply think that it's about personal web sites and cats pictures.

There is still a lot of evangelization to do, and the articles that from time to time slip on the mainstream media are not doing much to make people aware of what is going on.

Maybe it's simply a critical mass issue: there are not enough bloggers yet. Most people (I mean regular people) don't know any blogger, they do read about blogs from time to time but they have no reason to care.

10 milion is a lot but not enough. Most probably when we will reach 100 million the world will be a different place. And it will not take that much time to get there.

Joi Ito: ...Getting beyond the language (consumer vs user/customer, buzz vs conversation, etc.) I think that trying to understand how conversations work and at what point something becomes "creepy" is a really important discussing. Is it creepy when I blog about a restaurant which gave me extra soup because I said I would blog about them? Is it creepy that the link to Seth's book above is a Amazon link that has an affiliate code to a non-profit that I'm associated with? Is it creepy that someone is is wearing a Creative Commons T-shirt to be "cool" even though he doesn't understand the licenses? My feeling is that if you have transparency and if things like Amazon links are providing value to the conversation rather than detracting from it, it's NOT creepy.

+1

Loic: I was curious to get your ideas about a question a Le Monde journalist asked me two days ago: "is there a blog culture"?

I agree with the list of characteristics that Loic and his French readers wrote in order to describe the "blog culture".

Stowe Boyd has posted an interesting True Voice show about spreading blog antihype. Stowe recorded interviews during Les Blogs and I'm in the show with Darren Barefoot, Doc Searls and Lee Bryant. Interesting stuff.

As you might have heard last Sunday an Italian blogger, Gianluca Neri, managed to expose some information which had been blackened out on a report issued by the US Military. The report was about the killing by US troops of the Italian intelligence agent Nicola Calipari, which happened at a check point on the way to the Baghdad airport during an Italian operation to liberate a journalist who had been kidnapped.

The 'declassified' parts of the report (you can get the here, apparently the original document has been pulled from the Pentagon site) contain names of US and Italian personnel involved in the incident but also some interesting bits about the engagement rules and some stats. For example we learn that:

From 1 November 2004 to 12 March 2005 there were a total of 3306 attacks in the Baghdad area. Of these, 2400 were directed against Coalition Forces.

It means an average of 25 attacks per day, wasn't this information interesting for the public (especially the American one)?

Part of the Italian blogosphere is now debating about the credibility of the recovered information: can the Pentagon really be so clueless? Or maybe they are "seeding" this information knowing that somebody would have found out that blackening some text in a pdf file is not enough to remove it?

Anyway, we have had our first blogger hitting a big scoop, congratulations. :-)

I'm on the go today, so here's a quick link from my cell phone. Happy Birthday Dave! :-)