February 2005 Archives

I had a chat with Andy Seidl of MyST Technology Partners today. Andy has a web service called blogsite. This is a package deal for marketers that allows them to tap into syndicated searches and blog content, blog themselves, and syndicate their own content. Further, Andy provides read-outs on technical quality (broken links, etc.) and whether you are blogging frequently enough. All of the syndication features are available for the do-it-yourselfer in various web services such as technorati, pubsub, feedster, and findory. They can be tied together using feedreaders and blog posting software. A lot of work for the neophyte. Further, neophytes have a hard time maintaining blog frequency.

The nearest competitor I can find to this type of service is the new sponsored content blogging service recently announced by Paul Short. He wants to blog for marketers to the tune of $20–25K per month. Is this a blogging replay of “Mike Mulligan and the Steam Shovel” (the children's classic of man vs. machine)?

Josh Porter has asked on his blog what practical value people can get out of folksonomies, and Steve Rubel is trying to come to grips with potential marketing implications. A folksonomy is just the aggregate of tags (labels) people have applied to a resource in a shared archive. The best known example is del.icio.us, a system where people label and store their browser bookmarks on a shared web site. The tags for these bookmarks can be thought of as one-word descriptions of what the bookmark is about. The folksonomy for a particular bookmark is the collection of tags the various people who bookmarked it have applied to it. So people might tag the New York Times book review site as variously “books”, “literature”, “idiotReviews”, etc. That collection of tags is the folksonomy for that site. The word folksonomy can also be used for this same group classification process applied over many sites.

So, what's the practical value of all of this? My cut is that one of the main sources of value is in tracking the spread of memes (e.g., pivotal ideas, advertising slogans) that can be summarized in a word or short slogan. Are people picking up on a particular way of viewing the world, perhaps one that you espouse?