Fred Wilson answers what is blogging..
This is a 'truncated' stripped, edited post by Fred Wilson, seed investor in del.icio.us (I wonder what features they have coming out, now they've had a few months of seed capital - I'm almost at 1000 items !) Its a great full post Fred writes so check it out. Interestingly in cutting it I've found I hardly touched the tagging section due to it being so del.icio.us/benbarren ! His contention established at the start is simple : "Blogging is about three things: Posting, Subscribing, and Tagging...
POSTING
Podcasting is blogging.
Posting photos to flickr is blogging.
Building a link roll on del.icio.us is blogging.
Posting your cell phone videos of your cat on vimeo is blogging.
Building your personal page on MySpace.com is blogging.
Anytime a user posts their content on the web in a place they control for the world to consume, they are blogging.
The following activities are not blogging yet, but are very close and should soon be bloggable.
Writing a book or record review on Amazon.com.
Placing an item for sale on eBay.
Posting an event on evdb.com.
Writing a restaurant review on menupages.com.
SUBSCRIBING
RSS is a big deal, but it’s a technology not a human behavior. It’s like TCP/IP or HTML. It’s an enabler.
But subscribing to RSS feeds is a human behavior
Readers vote every day by subscribing or unsubscribing to RSS feeds of the blogs they like.
TAGGING
How do you keep track of all that user generated content?
Classic Internet search (Google, Yahoo!, MSN, ASK, etc) is not up to the task and never will be. Technorati is proving that with its herculean but flailing efforts at providing blog search.
But you can establish a framework for user generated content and build on top of it. That’s where tagging comes in.
There are two kinds of tagging and they are not the same.
First there’s self tagging. That is when the person making the post contributes some descriptive tags to the post. That’s how most of the Flickr tags are created. That’s what Gawker is doing with its tags. That’s what Jeff Jarvis just added to Buzzmachine. That’s what O’Reilly has been doing for a while now. And that’s what Technorati is doing with its tags.
Self tagging is important for two reasons. First, it breaks the hierarchical straightjacket that categories and folders have had on organization schemes. Tags are fluid. You just add them whenever you feel like it. So the posts get described by their creator correctly instead of by least common denominator.
Second, when they are aggregated like Technorati does, they provide a much better way to search the blog world. It’s not surprising that Technorati is placing a lot more emphasis on its tag search and a lot less emphasis on its blog URL search.
The second kind of tagging is user tagging. That’s what del.icio.us and others offer. This is when the person consuming the content contributes a tag. In the del.icio.us world, its in connection with bookmarking the content so that it can be remembered and shared.
But there are other reasons for user tagging that are developing quickly. One that I like to talk about is tagging mp3s that are available on the Internet so that they are delivered to your friend’s iPod.
Or tagging a recipe that I find on the Internet so that they are delivered to the Gotham Gal’s MyYahoo page in hopes that she’ll make it for dinner.
Tagging describes the content so it can be found, shared, delivered, and consumed.
Tagging extends the notion of subscribing because in addition to subscribing to a blog, you can subscribe to a tag.
When the posts get categorized via tags (whether self tagged or user tagged), the tags themselves become RSS feeds. That’s how I get the mp3s delivered to my friend’s iPod.
I believe that together posting, subscribing, and tagging will profoundly change the worlds of media, entertainment, commerce, and communication.
We are five years into the posting revolution, two to three years into the subscribing revolution, and maybe one year into the tagging revolution. We are just looking at the tip of the iceberg in terms of what can be done with these techniques.
So join the blogging revolution and get busy posting, subscribing, and tagging..."
POSTING
Podcasting is blogging.
Posting photos to flickr is blogging.
Building a link roll on del.icio.us is blogging.
Posting your cell phone videos of your cat on vimeo is blogging.
Building your personal page on MySpace.com is blogging.
Anytime a user posts their content on the web in a place they control for the world to consume, they are blogging.
The following activities are not blogging yet, but are very close and should soon be bloggable.
Writing a book or record review on Amazon.com.
Placing an item for sale on eBay.
Posting an event on evdb.com.
Writing a restaurant review on menupages.com.
SUBSCRIBING
RSS is a big deal, but it’s a technology not a human behavior. It’s like TCP/IP or HTML. It’s an enabler.
But subscribing to RSS feeds is a human behavior
Readers vote every day by subscribing or unsubscribing to RSS feeds of the blogs they like.
TAGGING
How do you keep track of all that user generated content?
Classic Internet search (Google, Yahoo!, MSN, ASK, etc) is not up to the task and never will be. Technorati is proving that with its herculean but flailing efforts at providing blog search.
But you can establish a framework for user generated content and build on top of it. That’s where tagging comes in.
There are two kinds of tagging and they are not the same.
First there’s self tagging. That is when the person making the post contributes some descriptive tags to the post. That’s how most of the Flickr tags are created. That’s what Gawker is doing with its tags. That’s what Jeff Jarvis just added to Buzzmachine. That’s what O’Reilly has been doing for a while now. And that’s what Technorati is doing with its tags.
Self tagging is important for two reasons. First, it breaks the hierarchical straightjacket that categories and folders have had on organization schemes. Tags are fluid. You just add them whenever you feel like it. So the posts get described by their creator correctly instead of by least common denominator.
Second, when they are aggregated like Technorati does, they provide a much better way to search the blog world. It’s not surprising that Technorati is placing a lot more emphasis on its tag search and a lot less emphasis on its blog URL search.
The second kind of tagging is user tagging. That’s what del.icio.us and others offer. This is when the person consuming the content contributes a tag. In the del.icio.us world, its in connection with bookmarking the content so that it can be remembered and shared.
But there are other reasons for user tagging that are developing quickly. One that I like to talk about is tagging mp3s that are available on the Internet so that they are delivered to your friend’s iPod.
Or tagging a recipe that I find on the Internet so that they are delivered to the Gotham Gal’s MyYahoo page in hopes that she’ll make it for dinner.
Tagging describes the content so it can be found, shared, delivered, and consumed.
Tagging extends the notion of subscribing because in addition to subscribing to a blog, you can subscribe to a tag.
When the posts get categorized via tags (whether self tagged or user tagged), the tags themselves become RSS feeds. That’s how I get the mp3s delivered to my friend’s iPod.
I believe that together posting, subscribing, and tagging will profoundly change the worlds of media, entertainment, commerce, and communication.
We are five years into the posting revolution, two to three years into the subscribing revolution, and maybe one year into the tagging revolution. We are just looking at the tip of the iceberg in terms of what can be done with these techniques.
So join the blogging revolution and get busy posting, subscribing, and tagging..."
posted by redbarren at 11:58 PM
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