I actually mean this kind of in jest, but I am struck by the style of this post on IP and syndication. Scoble is acting as a human aggregator and interpreter of blog posts. Now, at the end of the day, people are probably best at understanding and interpreting text meaning, but we have been hearing so much about folksonomies lately and ways of automating them that I have to wonder how long guys like Scoble are going to be able to keep on in the aggregation function.
A lot of what Scoble is doing is providing pointers to resources and to some extent engaging in social interaction with the posters as he posts about them. It's really quite personal. The notion of going to a folksonomy, a sort of folk taxonomy for web resources where everybody contributes based on their own best judgment, gets away from this personal touch. You're really looking at what a group of people have done and to some extent tap into group consensus.
In the end, I suspect this less personal touch can handle a higher volume of posts to classify and archive. People may still prefer Scoble's personal touch, but he won't be able to cover enough. His readers will start to look elsewhere for pointers to web resources, and scoble will do less of his pointing function.

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