Funferal

Dissecting the blogosphere

Tim Bray disagreed with Stephen Downes but I found his suggestion of integrating FOAF into RSS feeds as a means to get beyond the single ‘blogosphere’ model intriguing. I’m not sure it’s the best solution, or even particularly workable, but it is an attempt to get at the problems around responding to gross popularity online, as technorati, blogdex and other tools do.
Personally I think there’s space for somewhat centralised tools that would recognise common trends in linking and language. So if two sites have outbound links to the same sources and at least one inbound link each from sites that are separated by [a small number of] degrees of separation they would be linked, and you could have a ‘you might also like’ tool or similar.
This would not require more tagging than people are doing by default, and would avoid the tag-name problem that Downes notes. I hate having to use particular category names (which approximate to tags when viewed by technorati). So why is my ‘intellectual property issues’ category different from someone else’s ‘IP Law’, or ‘intellectual property’, or ‘copyright wrongs’ etc., etc.? Why should I have to use ‘blogs’ instead of the more general ‘online communication’?Shouldn’t tools like Technorati recognise that I have something in common with other Irish or Urbana blogs, without my having to add particularly named tags to my posts? [The awkwardness of adding anything more than a single category to an MT post is at least partially at fault here.]