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Steve Rubel and David Weinberger have written interesting pieces on why business people should pay attention to folksonomies. Folksonomies are self-generated taxonomies that people use to categorize their own blog postings and other material they have archived on the web. The key thing about folksonomies is that they consist of one word tags, with perhaps multiple tags applying to a resource. These tags allow archivers (including people writing posts to weblogs) to more clearly signal what the resources they catalog are about. Folksonomies also allow people to more easily determine which archives are relevant to them by providing an extreme summary of the relevant themes. I wonder if all of the attention they are getting is deserved.

The BIT320 Distributed Learning Blogosphere (blogging community) is composed of a few components:

• An aggregation web site hosted by Myst Technology partners. The most important component of which (by far) are the feed harvesting pages for class participants and syndicated guests (A LOT more on how this component could be developed below).
• All of the feeds from student participant (OPML) and syndicated guest (OPML) blogs.
• The actual typepad blogging systems where students make their posts. This system determines in large part the extent and way students can contribute to the overall community.
• Client feed aggregators such as Sage (the one we adopted) that allow participants to track what is going on in the system.

I've been intermediating a debate between a content management systems (CMS) guru and a search engine optimization (SEO) specialist. Both are principals in reasonably successful micro-companies (companies with between $500K and $1 MM in revenue and only a couple of full time employees). At the heart of the debate is the issue of discoverability, in this case, how easy it is for people to find you on the web. What I think has been explicitly missing in the debate so far is that they are both talking about an underlying process that is both machine-driven and social. Call it the information value chain meets the social network.

Everybody is agog that Google is targeting a value of $36 Billion with its IPO. Is Google worth it? Part of the answer lies in what you think Google can really do for you and your competitors' business.