Wow dude,

That was brilliant. I will be sharing that as well.

Cordially,

Uncle J

Indeed.

Rethink indeed. Fully consider, perhaps; because we no longer have the comfort of the environment of tradition to define them for us. So really, we actually have to figure out What they are.

There is a little Livingston Taylor lyric that says this:

"No longer afraid of falling
We cut the strings to the sky
We found level ground
And we put ourselves down
Amazing we all didn't die."

A.L, not sure where you are in regards to faith, but The Truth Project shines a great deal of light on who we are. The only part that I had issues with was the part on evolution; but to be fair he does not advocate either ID, 'Young Earth Creationism' or any such thing. He only dismisses the idead that Darwinism answers the question fully of the origin of life.

He finds very important things to say about who we are as people; and why our freedoms are so essential. And he does it straight from the Book. I don't know if I'd call him it necessarily, but he is the closest thing to a Classical Liberal Theologian as I have seen in recent years.

River,

Anyone who "dismisses the idea that Darwinism answers the question fully of the origin of life" doesn't understand Darwinism, which doesn't attempt or claim to address the origin of life, only the origin of species, which is to say the manner by which species differentiate.

Very nice video.

My only quibble: I don't think "we" as individuals will be the ones organizing it. Creating it, yes, but not organizing it. As John Dvorak(?) has said, is the only solution to finding stuff on the web the search engine/Google concept, where virtually the whole Web has to be stored on servers somewhere in order for it to be queried? Unfortunately, right now, that's all there is.

Hype, smoke and mirrors... nonsense.

You think you're teaching a machine something when you click or link? Horsepucky. There is no "there" there.

We have come an incredibly long way since.....1990.

Paul,

Horsepucky?

Hype, I understand. Smoke, mirrors, nonesense...these, too, I get. But Horsepucky?

How does 'bunk' sound then?

This piece starts off well in some ways, looking at how the initial HTML design conflated presentation and content. (In the interests of efficiency given the then limits of net and PC - it wasn't wanton.) Then XML arrives to save the day and make it easier to (for instance) pipe around RSS feeds. So far so good, though a historian would note that the idea dates back to SGML, the older standard that was bastardized to create HTML.

Lo and behold, the same XMLization lets us associated metadata with the data in a more structured fashion, since it's no longer as crufted up with presentation details. Including 'tags', which we all make up as we go. (Who else is going to, one might ask? Even the Yahoos recognized that organizing the web in a centralized fashion didn't scale and threw in the towel a few net-eons ago.)

Cool, we can mark our favorites on flickr, del.icio.us and whatever for our buds and whoever. Does that constitute 'teaching the machine'. That's where the clip veers abruptly from a popularized gloss on the history of the Web to bunk.

Tags don't create any sort of uber-meaning for digestion by the machine. They've been around long enough, applied by lots of people, that we have experimental evidence for how they are actually used. By the spring of 2005 Clay Shirky showed the the distribution of use of particular tags across pages, and application of tags to any particular page followed a power law curve. There's a more recent study, with nice graphs, over here (PDF file).

So what about it? Just this, that's exactly the same statistical pattern exhibited by any natural langage. There's no special privilege for the outputs of a social tagging system, no one true meaning for the panopticon machine. Just a mechanism for building consensual languages on behalf of virtual communities. A very cool thing in itself, without being inflated into twaddle.

As for rethinking privacy, copyright, yayaya, those may all be at issue, but they were all in play well before 'Web 2.0' or any other marketecture slogan.

Tim, I'll disagree slightly. I certainly don't think '@.0 changes everything' any more than the web changed everything. But some things are changing...

What's different about this is two things -

1) the 'machine' involved (which consists of the technology, data, and metadata) which is essentially all I care about when I open my laptop - is getting smarter and more useful because of the contributions of people in tagging, searching, linking, etc. It's a true 'Mechanical Turk' in that way - you can't separate the layers, up to and including the wetware one.

2) because nongeeks are making content (data and metadata) to an unprecedented degree, many of the original fantasies about what the Web meant are peering above the horizon. As the level of social penetration rises, the quantity of data increases, and the span of it increases as well.

A.L.

Heartily agreed on the second point - that's the difference that makes a difference.

Re the first, yeah, but there's no one ontology or mechanism to rule them all. Tagging and other forms of metadata are each just part of a total ecology. The most interesting thing is how and whether they support idiosyncratic organization by communities and individuals. To the extent that tagging lets the 'audience' impose its own organization and views on the net, that's important becuase it encourages the same diversity in metadata as exists in the primary content.