I was talking my my friend Adam the other day about Wink, and he mentioned the “Wink Answers” feature. This is a typically ingenious Web 2.0 functionality mashup of search + wiki + tagging. Apparently, Wink is a tag-enhanced search engine — but once you search, you’re offered “Wink Answers” in addition to tag- and Google-powered search results. Wink Answers are simply wiki entries keyed to search strings. Given that a string like “mov video converter” is much more specific than any of the single words contained therein, this could be more useful than, say, the Wikipedia entry for video formats. Neat idea. Apparently, someone else has already taken this to its logical endpoint and mashed wiki + URL to create “Shadows” — clearly insane, but not surprising.

In any case, there isn’t yet a _Wink Answer_ for “mov video converter”. Given the results of my search yesterday, I now have the answer. The question is, why would I stuff it into Wink? I can blog it right here, Google (and a thousand other spiders) will crawl it, and the next time you search for “mov video converter” on Wink (or Google, or anywhere else), my post will show up, if it’s a good one. The only reason I’d shove my Answer into Wink is if I don’t have some other way to hang it out where spiders can see it — and if I’m on the net searching for info about “mov video converter”, then I almost certainly do.

The same problem/solution applies to reviews, which I’d guess are the broadest and deepest user-generated content out there. So why do so many people take so much time to write detailed reviews and post them in single, walled off databases like Amazon, Yelp, sfsurvey.com, etc.? It all comes down to the value exchange. You provide the content, the site provides the UI, and specialized economy of scale. The amount of personal content/data/facts that you’re willing to embed/give to a site is related to the utility that the site provides to you, personally, with regard to that information. But, more importantly, it’s directly proportional to the extent that particular site can act as a proxy for your desired audience.

As broad search UI’s become more powerful, the need for specialized UI’s to act as proxies to specialized audiences is reduced. If I can search for “reviews San Francisco chowhound azie” — and I can — and get an aggregate thread of web-wide posts and information, including stuff that doesnt happen to be posted on Chowhound’s board, why would I want to wade through this? I don’t.

I think I finally understand why “blogging” _might_ be such a big deal.

Check back shortly for “wink answer mov video converter“.

wbloggar is a pain. It’s nice to have an editor app to write blog entries, but for some reason when I edit an entry with wbloggar and then post it again, it sets posts.post_category and post2cat.category_id to -1, which causes all wordpress to barf. You can’t fix it from the WP interface, so I’ve had to go straight to mysql to fix it when this happens. Ugh. Maybe someone out there knows of a better blog editor?

Why don’t I just use WP’s online post interface? 1) it’s online, and sometimes it takes me a while to complete a post, and 2) it has these f**king HORRIBLE keyboard shortcuts that cause the whole entry to be erased sometimes. I know that would be easy to fix, but I haven’t bothered yet because I usually prefer to write offline anyhow.

Also, Picasa2 is sooo nice — BUT I can’t get past the fact that I don’t have a way to easily post images to WordPress. I spent some time a while back scripting up an interface btw iMatch and WP, and it works so well I don’t want to abandon it. Luckily the edits and captions I put in place with Picasa seem to stick when I suck the photos into iMatch, so not too much is lost. It’s really too bad that Picasa isn’t a more open platform - maybe someone has figured out the database format? Or maybe there isn’t a database… But then where are the tags and captions stored?

Jeremy Wagstaff of WSJ/Dow Jones called today, asking what this “tagging” thing is all about. Remember the 80’s? Tagging was something else entirely then. Par for the course for a new-school journalist, he interviewed me via Trillian from Indonesia, and asked if it was OK to blog about our conversation. That prompted me to revisit my blog, since I’ve been somewhat OTA for a while.

So when I went and logged into WordPress, I found a post that I had drafted a few months ago. I had already been writing about tagging and tag-centric views, and having just been down at the Technorati Hackathon I was musing about how trackback is an imperfect pivot for following conversations:

I posted last night about the hackathon, and linked to the wiki. Technorati shows only one other person linking to that URL — so where are all the hackers? Is looks like more people linked to Dave Sifry’s announcement page…. So, which URL to include in my post, so that it’s properly connected to the Technorati Cosmos?

This is of course quite relevant to the topic of the day. Trackback sucks because even though URLs are good unique identifiers, they don’t carry enough semantic weight to serve as useful pivots in information space. Technorati is a partial solution to the trackback problem, because even though it provides a central place (an anchor for pivoting on URL’s), if I’m writing about a topic and I want to link to other conversations on that topic, linking to one and only one URL that might have to do with that topic is both insufficient and cumbersome. By linking to the URL for the Technorati Hackathon Wiki or to Dave Sifry’s announcement of that event, I was asserting that my post was related to one or the other (or both) of those specific entities, thereby excluding reference to anything else.

On the other hand, if I include (as I did) a reference to a broader concept, such as my “technorati” tag, then I can easily pivot on that tag, linking to other entries [throughout the web] on that basis. That’s what I was writing about back in April of last year, that’s why I started calling my WordPress categories “tags”, and that’s why I pulled together blog entries and del.icio.us posts, and then eventually photo tags into a tag-centric navigation system on my blog. I’m sure I’m not the only one to have come up with this — but it does look a hell of a lot like Technorati’s tag aggregator.

So, what’s with all the hype? Tagging isn’t anything new — it’s just simple meta-data, applied in a flat (vs. hierarchical) namespace. It’s basically open source for information classification; the opposite of both the brute-force computational approach (”AI”), and the top-down, fewer-experts-know-best method (libraries, Yahoo in 1996). I’ve always thought that rigorous taxonomies are not “profitable” in terms of information management; they cost more to maintain than the value they add minus the error rate. It might be true that taxonomies can only be maintained successfully as public goods, e.g. the Dewey Decimal system, the domain name system, etc. Google leapt ahead by combining the machine approach with some of the benefits of the ‘Wisdom of Crowds’: PageRank. But this is still implicit/implied vs. declared data. That’s what it comes down to: can you reach a more accurate understanding of what something is about via interpretation of the content itself, or by examining the aggregate of what author(s), readers, and commentators declare?

I can also understand the point of view of those who think that it’s optimistic and naive to believe that aggregate amateur metadata is of real worth. I haven’t had to time to digest all of the discussion on the topic, and there’s probably something I’m missing in their criticism. But, my own experience — not just in blogging, but in application and data architecture in general, tells me that there is real value here. delicious is certainly a testament to that.

So it’s not technology — it’s the applications. For me, it was a combination of blogging and delicious that brought the utility of tags to the fore. Once I saw applications like Flickr and gmail using the same concept I began to think more about how to bulid further. I have a few more ideas on the topic; it should be interesting to see what happens over the next few weeks. I’ll try to keep more up to date, as “tagging” is clearly exploding.

In the meantime, let me be one of the first to cast a vote against the horrible, awkward term: folksonomy. Really, folks, we can come up with something better. We certainly should.

OK, I know that I don’t look like a hacker. But I was just at the Technorati Hackathon — (or was it Hack-a-thon?). I borrowed Rich’s PC (well, it’s actually a Mac) and did a little hacking. I learned about IRC, sortof, and Matt and I chatted about WordPress.

We were talking about tags, categories and trackback, and Matt reminded me of, TopicExchange. At first glance, TP seems like Technorati, but without the delay of crawling — but also without the benefit of search. Ahem. But it does let you view by posts and pivot on tags (categories). They have an XMLRPC interface, so WP could be set up to ping TP for each category on a new blog post. I think that I’ll do that later on…

I was thinking — would it be useful for something like Technorati to support tags/categories? It might.

Blog comments often seem like a dead end. If I leave a comment on someone’s blog, how do I follow the conversation? What about comments related to the topic that are made on other blogs?

The idea of Technorati is that instead of readers posting comments on authors’ blogs (dispersing the thread of conversation all over the web), readers would post their comments back on their own blogs. Then, as long as “all” blogs are indexed by Technorati, you can use their search index to find all posts “anywhere” that link back to the post that originated the thread. As long as anyone commenting on the original post references the permalink URL of that post, then you can find all the comments by searching Technorati for that URL.

I saw Rich last night, and he pressed me to turn off comments and use the “Technorati Cosmos” — their search results — instead. Well, I haven’t turned them off yet (maybe if Technorati becomes a bit more reliable), but I have added a link to the Cosmos for each WordPress post (see below).

I also wrote a bit of code to pull the results of the Cosmos search for each post into the comments posting popup, so that people can see if Technorati is doing its job. I tried myelin’s technorati.py, and Aaron Swartz’ technorati.pybut they both throw errors that I don’t understand, not having learned Python quite yet today. I went back to Google and found phpTechnorati, which does the trick nicely. The Technorati guys should include a link to this module on their API Implementations page.