2005/11/30

Tag Tuesday

Last night, we hosted Tag Tuesday at the AOL offices in Mountain View.  It was a good get-together; Edwin Aoki talked about tag spam, and Kevin Burton talked about TailRank. Naturally, my laptop battery ran out, and when I got home, I discoveredthat my DSL had crapped out so I couldn't blog.  Oh, thehorror.  So, just some quick drive-by notes.

Do meta-tags (tags applied to tags or tag-url tuple instances) make anysense?  It's tags all the way down...  Kevin Marks commentedthat co-occurrences of tags are good enough for most purposes. Need to think about that one.

Kevin's TailRank beta is a "memefinder" as opposed to an aggregator.  It uses OPML subscriptionlists to help filter information based on what you and your friends areinterested in -- and he's working on getting some kind of automaticsync-up going.  Seems like this would benefit from Ray Ozzie's Really Simple Sharinginitiative.  There's a problem here, though -- the whole point ofthis is that you don't have to explicitly subscribe to feeds, but ifnobody explicitly subscribes to feeds, where will the interest datacome from?

Now, I really like the concept of mobile.tailrank.com. I really don't want to manage a set of subscriptions for my mobiledevice and it really can't handle the set of subscriptioins I have onmy desktop.  But something that automatically filters interestingnews, with input from my desktop subscriptions, seems like a naturalwin for a mobile service.

Oh, and we had a smooth and uneventful Journals update this morning.  Fortunately for Joseph the Intern.

4 comments:

  1. Oooo.  I love the new photo of the baby.  And I guess that's you with the baby, eh?  When there's a baby in the photo, you know, all eyes go to the baby.

    ~~ jennifer

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  2. Intern? I know I've screwed up a few things, but I didn't realize I've been demoted that far.

    Oh, wait, you're talking about someone else. Whew -- Joe
    http://journals.aol.com/journalseditor/magicsmoke

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  3. I think meta-tags are still in a nascent phase and assumes that people are really familiar with tags. Unfortunately, I think the adoption rate of tags are probably as high as RSS. In general I think naming things is a difficult large overhead for humans.

    I agree with your TailRank thoughts. What's the point of RSS if now I have to do an explicit search. The greatest thing about RSS is content is pushed to me. Unfortunately it still needs to be easier to use...too many formats and why am I shown an xml formatted page? *sigh*

    Now mobile tailrank is interesting, if I understand you correctly it's a filter on top of your Desktop RSS feeds pushed to your phone? If that's the case it would be pretty interesting cause the screen space is so much less and my connection is so slow (it feels like I'm on dialup), but it's great for when I'm just waiting around at the airport or needing to check for that real important email...I'll endure the pain to find the latest on Brad Pitt & Angelina Jolie ;)

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  4. Actually, I think that naming things that matter is a pretty basic human instinct.  Heck, my one year old tags several hundred things per day with one-word names.  True, most of them are "duck" and "choo-choo" but that's what matters to him, right?

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