Microformat clash
A while ago I posted on how services like Edgeio can aggregate tagged blogposts or tagged URL’s and include this data into their service…as long as these tagged posts or object use the microformat rel=tag.
What if a service aggregates data from objects with the tag “apple”, it may be a service listing Apple computers…then what if another service starts, and also aggregates data from objects with the tag “apple”, but this service is a listing for peoples experiences with the fruit apple.
These services may not know about each other, thus they are creating noise for each other…I guess this is the difference between the publisher explicitly submitting a post rather than the service collecting posts on their own.
Maybe service one has to broadcast to the blogosphere to use the tag “applecomputer” instead…if a service like Edgeio starts up, it is essential they need to tell everyone what tag names they aggregate, and hope that other services don’t come along and try to advocate the same tag, especially if they are about a different topic or type of service.
If another classified services start up they can just aggregate the “listing” tag also, this is also handy for publishers as their posts will appear on multiple boards at the same time.
But if a new service started that aren’t about classifieds but chose to use the “listing” tag…if they generated enough popularity, people would tag their posts “listing” in order to appear on this new service. The repercussions are that Edgeio will now get posts tagged “listing” but the content may have nothing to do with their service…so there has to be a greater quality control filter.
(And also this new service will get all posts tagged “listing” that were intended to appear at Edgeio).
So are these microformat tags going to one day start clashing, due to the harnessing the bottom up approach?
Will a more defined approach such as structured blogging be more appropriate.
Maybe there is more to this, not sure…
Check out Alex Barnett’s latest podcast on microformat’s…I’m yet to listen to this.
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“Maybe service one has to broadcast to the blogosphere to use the tag “applecomputer” instead…”
I really don’t think that’s the way its going to go John, because it just seems so artificial and unnatural. What I think will happen is that we’ll see the evolution of tag hierarchies and clustsers in our social bookmarking systems such that there will be no ambiguities. For example it will be clear what kind of a ‘apple’ is being referred to when we see it in context -
IT -> Computers -> *Apple* -> Mac
Food -> Fruit -> Apple -> Granny Smith
This is one of the reasons why I think RawSugar have stolen a march on del.icio.us with their innovative approach to tag clustering and hierarchies.
Comment by James Corbett — April 6, 2006 @ 2:27 pm