Kind of ranty, but, it's been awhile...

Tagging: What most people call tags are really just keywords or categories. Tagging is bottom up, the former are top down. If I write a post (as I'm doing now), it doesn't make sense to me to say that I'm "tagging" it as Blogsmith implies (yeah, I know, I share responsibility for that...) I'm really adding relevant keywords. Tags would be if you, the reader, entered in your own keywords. Author Tags, in my mind, are an oxymoron.
Overall feeling: A misunderstood concept. Buzzword-phobia is bound to kick in.

Clouds: Clouds are cool. Not so much in the "OMG Tags!!1!" sort of way, but more in the "OMG Density!!1!" sort of way. It's a great way to conceptualize relevancy in a storm of mixed data. Trendy, sure, but there is some use there. The alternative way to present such data would be to list and rank, and well.. It's all about the quick glance, ya know?
Overall feeling: Cloudtastic.

Voting: The Wisdom of the Crowds, right? Well, kinda. In a purely theoretical environment where every niche, focus, and person has equal access and say, then sure, wisdom, nay, brilliance of the crowd. Unfortunately in 2.0 land, crowd means clique. When dealing with something like Digg or Netscape, here's how it really works; People sign up, people add friends. People subscribe to a feed of things that their friends are doing. All the sudden, information access is limited -- People aren't viewing all the data in the mix, they're viewing a subset of the data posted by their friends. That data gets votes and makes it way to the top of the page. Unless you have friends who have friends, you have very little voice. That's the reason 10% of digg controls the majority of the content -- the other stuff isn't even necessarily being seen. Digg goes as far as to put a nice green ribbon on each item that a friend as had their hands on, which really only adds to the issue. Doesn't seem like the crowd has a chance, does it? Either way, voting is another form of feedback, and that's *always* a good thing.
Overall feeling: OMG user feedback! It's going to transform media! OMG ...

Hive Mind: A natural, sometimes unfortunate, by-product of poor implementation. It's means to me that we need better interfaces and presentation of concepts. Find ways to wrestle control out of the selected few and into the hands of a larger pool of people. On Netscape, the idea is to, counter intuitively, pay people to help perform this task (anchors). The real curiosity behind paying the bookmarkers (navigators) is that it seems like its sanctioning a clique. The flip side is that it might solve the problem on how to drive participation without content. Anyway... We'll see.
Overall feeling: It's human nature. A "solution" would have to start with acknowledgment and then take it into account.

Social: Social is cool, social is fun, but the vast majority of people will always be at least a tad bit selfish. MySpace helped people find new music, Friendster didn't. Social networks are the platform, not the product. Tons of promise, but over-hyped and not yet applied well in most cases.
Overall feeling: Over used, under applied. Ack! BRB, another friend request...

Rails: Rails is easy enough to help designer type folks code and they love it. It's like giving a 16 year old keys to the Chevette. Rails is a lot of fun to use, but a lot of engineers look at it and see an MVC pattern. Neat. In 1994. When I read about designers saying its the best possible programming "language" (ruby and rails are becoming synonymous), I hope they realize that's like me saying GIMP is the best possible illustration package. Both are *great* projects and can be a tool for many cool things, but let's stop short of calling either revolutionary. Then again, it's young and probably a lot further along than PHP was at its age, so, who knows.
Overall feeling: Too early to say. Trendy? It's right up there with Pog.

Bootstrapping: Maybe I'm too young to remember, but it doesn't seem to me that there was ever a time when this wasn't the way to go. Sure, in the 90s everyone took huge boat loads of cash for their startup, but everyone outside of the echo chamber questioned their super bowl spending patterns. The "new economy" existed then, and I think it still exists now. It just requires you not to be dumb. If you have the means, do it on the cheap and hold on to the pie. Take money for strategy (time to market, partnerships, etc) not false needs. The key difference between now and then are the even lower barriers to entry. Even though I tease Rails, its enabled a whole new wave of "weekend warriors". Thats a good thing, take advantage of it.
Overall Feeling: Seriously. We have a great idea, but I'm going to need tens of millions of dollars to hire 50 of my friends and throw a lot of parties. Expect a P/E of 60 in a year after we go public next month. Social vote tagging, it's going to be huge. Written in rails. Skype me.

Data Ownership: From a consumer point of view, it's my data -- let me do what I'd like, even if that means taking it with me. Right now I'd love to take all my gmail off of gmail and put it somewhere else online. I *love* their service, but I'm too dependent on a "beta" product. It goes down for hours at a time. Can I do this? Sure I can download it to my mail client, but then what? Use a real mail client? Gross. Anyway, this gives traditional players nightmares, but open data initiatives are coming no matter what. Might as well embrace it and build a business plan that keeps it in mind.
Overall feeling: If Emiliano Zapata were digirati, he'd be captain microformat. "I'd rather die on my feet, than let you keep all my data." Heh. That was so cheesy, Gavin's in the bathroom throwing up from his lactose intolerance.

Syndication: Consumers love it. Theres only one problem. Revenue on the web is largely tied to page views. D'oh!
Overall Feeling: The first person to truly figure out this puzzle will be able to buy lots and lots of Pog.

There's been a lot said about the hazards of the "Hive Mind" lately. Jaron Lanier wrote an excellent essay here. Mike Propst touched on it recently in relation to our attempts over at Netscape.

I just wanted to throw my two cents out there on a particular aspect of it, and explain why the hive can be dangerous without some sort of mechanism for followup.



This just isn't true. It's the top result on Page 2 when my name is searched via google. For the non-geeky folks reading this, I'll do my best to explain why this would be such a "horrible" thing to be said.

To digg users, who are notably young and 94% male, this admission would have been evidence of "gaming the system." Gaming is naturally against the spirit of the democratic site, where the better content should win out with more votes. It strikes many of them as unfair to ask people you know to "digg" material that you submitted. In Weblogs, Inc's case, they believe that its an unfair advantage to have colleagues. Oddly, I'm positive everyone of these kids have begged their friends to digg their false accusations, but hey, what's hypocrisy in the face of teenage angst and a cause.

In reality, what was said was in response to the suggestion that Digg has anti-asking-your-friend-tools and we should develop them too. I replied with something funny like "i can assure you that they don't", or "if they do, they don't work very well", or something to that effect. I say this after doing our own research and evaluation, judging the content posted there, and more importantly by simplistic logic. I simply don't think that they have such tools, can't have such tools, and shouldn't have such tools. If they do have these tools, then it's obvious that they suck. Plus, what would it matter to them. Digg wants more people to come to their site. E-mail your friends. Please. From Netscape's perspective, I think it's a losing battle. I'd rather spend our resources on finding ways to innovate within the space. And yeah, e-mail the hell out of your friends. Spread the word.

Anyway, what I'm getting at is that I was misquoted as saying something that I didn't, and now it's attached to my name on google for ever and ever.

Digg.com takes pride in their we-have-no-editors approach. That's their whole jam. That's their cause that they sell to the young teenage male. Ask someone like Ryan Block, the managing editor at Engadget.com, about how he has to defend himself and his organization what seems like once a month. Without linking to any of that nonsense, the kids over there pretty much look for any reason to attack him. He's constantly taken out of context or reported as doing something that is either completely false or not entirely accurate. The problem is, there's no way to address it. It gets posted, it gets indexed, and there's no one to call and pester for its removal or correction. The only responses are buried deep in user comments and probably never seen nor read.

That wouldn't be such a problem if there weren't a large number of people who trust digg. There are even more people who trust the Google Results that index Digg. Like a growing number of employers.

Imagine I was misquoted as saying something worse, maybe something that could actually get me in trouble. Maybe it's time for a promotion, or theres a new boss to report to, or I seek employment with another company, or whatever other scenario you can think of. In the heat of all the anti-netscape sentiment, some 14 year old brat posts a misquote on a "news" site, and now there's zero method for rebuttal. Awesome... An organized, democratic method for slander controlled by the Hive Mind where liability is skewed in the name of social news and lack of editor accountability.

At Netscape, we've tried to develop mechanisms for users to report stories as inaccurate. An on-duty "anchor" (there's someone online 24 hours, 7 days a week) can research the story and alert users to the dispute. Often, it doesn't need to be removed, it simply needs a notice posted addressing the concern for other users to see. It's simple, it's clean. It's still democratic and user's still have a voice. There's just a basic system of checks to keep things in balance. Seems resonable (and proven) enough to me.

There's a lot of issues surrounding the Hive Mind. Maybe this post can help serve as a plain vanilla example of a basic aspect of it. This particular case is small, it's silly, it doesn't even matter -- but it's a simple demonstration of how the unrestricted hive can't be trusted. It's kind of like the Hitchhikers Guide. It's entertaining but it's inaccuracy has potentially dangerous consequences if you put to much trust into it.