Machine Tags: the first bunker-busting meme bomb of 2007
Prepare for a confusion-geiger-overclockin' fallout of essays about the difference between the warm, fuzzy, lickable, and humaney tags, and the cold, hard, bitter, and machiney semantics!!!
Meme and tribe engineering-wise, Flickr's choice of the term machine tag is quite smart, because it allows the tag hipster to differentiate himself from the semantics nerd, even at the very moment he adds a triple to the system.
After all, this highly-structured data is only for the machine, unlike the wonderful "anti-semantic" tags, which are, like, small pieces loosely joined, you know, wisdom of crowds stuff, right? Riiiiiiiight.
Ideological issues aside, machine tags highlight one problem that plagues the orthodox Semantic Web, and its simple solution:
When you tell people about graphs and triples, they run away, but when you tell them that they can add arbitrary name/value pairs to their documents they become very happy.
This does not come from just about anywhere: our programming and user-interface models and tools are biased towards tree-shaped data, and ill-equipped for the paradigm shift which the original Semantic Web tried to achieve.
The Semantic Web in its original vision (which has already started to fade away) wanted to replace the document/object/page/node as the central object with the graph (set of triples).
This change is quite profound and unlikely to happen, for it would require a complete change of our models and tools, which are used to working with nodes and not with edges.
What is much more likely to happen, as evidenced by machine tags (and filesystem extended attributes, and Google Base, and Structured Wikis, and Datablogging, and Lucene fields, and Java annotations, and about every other computing system...) is that every system will allow us to add custom name/value pairs to our nodes. Not more, not less.
Throw in a search engine and you're as close to a triple store as you'll get in this round of innovation. And it's wonderful!
Look at how far we got without this ability and tremble in expectation at the wonderful mashups and integration hacks on the road ahead. Just watch.
dude, you are spot on!
Posted by: earl | January 25, 2007 at 23:30