b.cognosco
Where leaping to conclusions is my primary form of forward motion.
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Sunday, September 11, 2005
RSS Feed Format Updated
A query from Matt Mower has prompted me to correct some problems with my RSS feed. In the process I updated the format to RSS 2.0, adding support for pubDate, author, and categories. I also made some changes to the guid format that may cause your newsreader to forget which items have been read. My apologies for any inconvenience this causes.Saturday, September 10, 2005
terrywfrazier@gmail.com
I have added a gmail and google talk account to my ever-growing list internet communications addresses (I think it's up to a dozen now.) The number of comm points is getting silly. Thank goodness for Trillian, the all-in-one chat client for Windoze. Otherwise managing all these things would be even more difficult than it is.I've had a jabber account for a year or so, terrywfrazier@jabber.org, but the public Jabber network has never achieved the reach or stability that the bigger services like AIM and Y! have. I hope google talk will bring both. We'll see.
Terry Frazier at 8:22 PM
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Wednesday, August 24, 2005
Why Tagging is Like Sex
Or, its about context, Stupid.
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How many times have you seen this? I see it every time I go to Technorati, which isn't often anymore. This service - and this general idea of tagging everything, everywhere, by everybody - is a real loser. It's the "1,000 monkeys typing Shakespear" theory, writ across the web. To believe that random acts of tagging, by unrelated people and for unrelated purposes, is going to give birth to deep meaning and the secrets of the universe is, well, bullshit. At least, it's bullshit if you want anything useful to emerge in the average human lifespan (which is about how long it takes for Technorati to return search results.) Tagging is a great idea, but there are some great ideas that just dont scale. Like sex. Sex with one person? Great idea. Sex with 1,000 people? Bad idea. Tagging is like that.
Matt Mower is a pioneer in the tagging space, developing several innovative tools for assigning topics to blog entries, and working on early versions of eVectors K-Collector group aggregator. Hes been hammering away at the senselessness of Technorati for some time now.
Weave a circle round him thrice
I just Kevin Burton's response to Jason Kottke abandoning Technorati in which he says:
I'd rather have a Technorati that was fast and always worked even if that meant only indexing 1M blogs. Even 500k blogs as long as they are the top 500k blogs.Which is, I think, indicative of a class of problems people are experiencing in thinking about the blogosphere that revolve around a concept I'll call Leaderboardism.
Right now Technorati are claiming to index 15.7 million blogs and have a database of 1.4 billion links. WOW! Those numbers are certainly impressive. But what does this huge data-warehouse buy us? Gripes about performance and database outtages aside, not much it would seem. I don't get anything from a Technorati search that I value over, say, a Google search. In particular I don't seem to get value from Technorati understanding the blogosphere better than Google which you would think they really should.
Kevin thinks a better idea is to just index the most important 500,000 (3% of Technorati's claimed reach) of blogs in the blogosphere. Sure that would make Technorati fast. But would it make it more useful? After all, who is deciding who is important? How are they deciding it? And isn't importance subjective anyway? To my way of thinking what Kevin is advocating would make Technorati faster and less useful in equal measure (unless you are mainly interested in what the usual suspects think).
The problem is that the blogosphere has grown too large for summary statistics to be relevant to a large group of people anymore. Your Top 100 isn't mine because you aren't interested in basketweaving and vole racing and I am.
I think Technorati (and Feedster who seem, so far, to have avoided many of Technorati's pitfalls) should abandon Leaderboardism and focus instead on how to make their database relevant to each individual.
Relevance is about understanding the context of the reader and delivering the results they would have asked for if they'd only known what they were. I will consider it a success not when I can see The Top 100 Blogs but when I can see The Top 100 Blogs you've never come across but will wish you had! For reference I read 2 of Technorati's Top 100 (although I have read about 30% at one time or other and am familiar with over half) so clearly their measure of relevance doesn't match mine very closely.
This takes me all the way back to where I started thinking about Village Shops in Blogspace.
I just did a quick count on the Technorati Top 100. The score:
- Blogs I read regularly 3
- Blogs I read occassionally 8
- Blogs I used to read 3
- Blogs Ive heard of 8
So 22% of the Top 100 has some (but maybe not much) relevance for me. Or, put another way, 78% of the Top 100 is irrelevant for me. Not only that, but if there were other blogs in that Top 100 that were relevant Id be hard pressed to figure it out. Technorati gives no clue.
What is clear is that if you dont care about politics, software, web design, techno-gadgets, or pc hardware the Top 100 is useless. Which begs the question, Top 100 for who? Blogs for all manner of special interests are popping up, and they are far more relevant to their readers than a random collection of blogs rated by a frenzy of strangers. Folksonomy arguments aside, TagOrgies just dont work. Tagging is personal and there must be, at some level, some shared context for tagging to have significant valuable.
If the taggers can reconnect with the idea of context, and apply their efforts to helping groups and communities speak to each other we can make progress. But until then, were just a bunch of monkeys looking for a publishing contract.
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