Tim Bray (oh yeah CTO of Sun) and David Sifry (Technorati, of course) on stage on. As David just said, following Julie Leung ... not fun.
David is talking about the birth of Technorati ... Interestingly, or maybe not, David started it to track the conversations spawned by his own blog posts. Sure, this is the core of the ego feed, but this is also an important facet of finding what is of interest to you.
"The flaw in search engines is that they don't have a sense of time" -- Sifry.
Posting volume ... just under a million daily+ bloggers ... the news cycles in MHz ... 15 posts per second. With a blog a second ... with so many posts at once ... how do you keep up?
It's nearly impossible. And that's okay, you don't read all the newspapers in the world or even North America.
"The magic middle" ... people who have between 30 and 1000 links to them ... the niche areas. Sifry feels, and I concur, that this is probably the most interesting part of the blogosphere the people who can still manage the conversations, the links. So then, how do you help these people get found? That's where blog finder came in. Track blogs on a topic ... what are your tags. Who are you. What are you about.
Now ... how do we coalesce the tag universe? Tagging, because it's a human thing, it's a sloppy thing.
Make tagging easy, but making it public and accountable thing, then there is an emergence of a system. A connection of similar tags, statistical analysis can be done to connect the dots and make tags connect better. By tagging, for example, in more that one language then the connections get stronger and better. This eliminates then need for a formalized dictionary ... or does it?
What is the challenge ... comment spam, trackback spam, splogs (spam blogs), splings (spam pings). The idea of accountability is the thing that keeps the signal to noise ratio pretty good. Your blog is public and on your permanent record.
Now, I think David is over simplifying this. The problem with spam in all its forms is greed. As long as there is money to be made from a single click, this will still be a pretty big problem to manage and to be continued to be managed.
Ah Net Neutrality ... oh there is a topic I will probably write more and more about ... and I agree with David, this is the single largest threat to the Internet as we know it. It's going to be up to us to stop it.
And before my battery tanks out ... I'm going to post this.
Tags: David Sifry, Tim Bray, Technorati
