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Stowe Boyd is a well-known media subversive, and an internationally recognized authority on real-time, collaborative and social technologies. His new blog is Message.

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November 01, 2005

iTags = Open Tags?

Posted by Stowe Boyd

While on this protracted road trip (headed back tonight, at last), I got the chance to spend some time with one of my favorite polymaths, Mary Hodder. I was in Berkeley, yesterday, interviewing her for a new video series, The New Visionaries, where she was outlining what her new company, Bloqx, is up to (and you'll have to wait for that show to find out since she hasn't announced much of anything publicly yet). That show is likely to be posted in mid to late December.

Mary was also at Tag Camp on Friday, but I missed her session on iTags. (One of the things I would like to fix in the Tag Camp format is dropping the multiple tracks in favor of shorter presentations -- just as many, but only 10 minutes. This would allow everyone to hear everything, and if someone is really howling-at-the-moon crazy, you'd only have ten minutes of it. You could institute some anonymous voting system to allow the best 3-5 presenters to do an encore, near the end, of longer duration.)

She's been noodling with Drummond Reed for the past six months (and ~~more recently with~~ who was introduced to her by Kaliya Hamlin, who has also been involved in this whole effort) on the issues around open tags (see Open Tags: Made For A Distributed World).

This group has advanced a new approach, called iTags, that leverages the proposed XRI standard as a means of gaining what it is I was clamoring for: a way to denote that a post relates to a concept, without necessarily pointing to a particular tagspace, such as the one managed by Technorati. My point re: open tags is that we -- the authors -- can't know where in the future our posts may be referenced based on these tags. But Mary and her co-conspiritors go further:

[from Napsterization]
The idea is that a user could tag an object (photo, video, sound file, text or an entire blog post), where the tag, and the object, would then go out through the RSS feed or be spidered, with some additional information that doesn't now exist in tags. That tag and object would include the user's identity, the licensing for that object (presumably people would use this more for rich media objects than for just a blog post, as most blogs already have licensing generally for text on the blog) if needed, and the tag. It would remove the requirement for a tag to be coupled with the originating URL (blog post URL) because identity would be inside it. It would allow individual CC licensing which rich media producers want to do sometimes, in order to differentiate the rich media object from the rest of their blog, which may have different licensing.

They are proposing a microformat approach to collating the tag, the author, and the license to use the context and the tag. Hmm. Very endeavorous. My sense is that they may be reaching too far.

My hunch is that it is going to be hard enough to just get the various taggregators, like Technorati, to invert the basic model, as I suggested they ought to. What I mean by inversion is this. Instead of declaring the tag by pointing to the technorati page associated with "Thai" for example, I would like to use some contrivance that points to the place on my post where that tag will be displayed when posted:

<a href="http://www.corante.com/getreal/archives/2005/07/24/name_of_post.php#tag_thai" rel="tag">thai</a>

This seems purely self-referential, but imagine the rest of the scenario: taggregators like Technorati should switch to a trackback model of use. That is to say that once they spider a site (or read its RSS feed, or whatever) and discover a new tag, they would send a trackback ping to the underlying blog software. That would lead to the association of the trackbacks, for example, that point to the "thai" tag on my post. A reader looking at that post could also see a list of trackbacks from various taggregators that have picked up on the "thai" tag, and they would be free to wander there.

This might look like this:

[tags: thai
technorati, taggregator2, taggregator3
cohiba
cigar afficionado, other
]

At some point, listing the various taggregators won't make sense, perhaps, or may need to be displayed in a different fashion. And of course, the blogger would have control as to which trackbacks he/she wants to display. But the reader would be presented with an array of other locales to browse based on the tag terms.

Alternatively, as I have outlined in earlier posts, the blogger could create (via plugins or builtin blog functionality) a local tagspace, where all the entries that mention a tag would be listed, much like existing category archives (which is conceivably one way to implement it). Taggregation could be simply achieved by taking RSS feeds from such local tagspaces, and consolidating. For example, we could create a Corante tagspace by instituting local tagspaces at all Corante blogs, and aggregating those into a Corante-wide tagspace. But current blogging tools don't support this sort of 'tagback' -- just trackback. Trackback can be used, but the trackback reference should be back to a specific tag, not to the post as a whole, although the URL of the post would be likely what would be displayed at Technorati and elsewhere.

But the tag trackback mechanism is critical for open tags, from my viewpoint. And it is the thing still missing from all the efforts I have see. I applaud Mary, Drummond, and Kaliya for their proposal, but I wonder about people's willingness to adopt XRI, and I still want the tagback mechanism in place.

[tags: tagback, iTags, open tags, Mary Hodder, Drummond Reed, Kaliya Hamlin, Open Tagging, Tag Camp, Technorati>]

Comments (41) + TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology

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1. Ben Carcio on November 1, 2005 04:06 PM writes...

I read this piece and I got excited about XRIs, read up on them, and like you, think its a stretch. Tagging should be open and shared, while XRI seems to be a restrictive identity managing tool far below the visual layer (IP and DNS stuff). This concept may make sense with CC issues (video, audio), but not sure it fits the same egalitarian vision you have with Open Tags. Looking forward to seeing what Bloqx comes up with.

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November 01, 2005

iTags = Open Tags?

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