November 22, 2005
Looks like Michael Arrington over at TechCrunch put out a Top 10 List of company profiles he would like to see happen - this blog is all about #4 and #10. Instead of building local sites however, I want to think of a really, really simple way to publish tag lists. That way merchants that wish to address those tag lists would be able to respond directly to the consumer that is wanting goods and/or services. For example, if I wanted a black washing machine - i would put out the tags: "black" "washing machine" "buy" (or "info", "offer", etc.) .
The mechanism that I'm thinking that will do this is the DNS infrastructure - not part of it or extend it, but another separate infrastructure that would support the publishing of tags in a distributed manner. Not sure if I'm on the right track here - but this is an open conversation to kick this idea around and see if it has legs.
In the DNS world, I can publish a tag (reukema.ca for example) and push it around the world with a simple entry into my DNS. I realize that this "tag" identifies my server on the net, so why can't it identify a unique tag on my server, after it finds my server? The other problem is the combination of tags, and how to find servers with those combinations. Going with my Reukema.ca example - it's one tag and one computer. Resolving the tag points to an IP address.
With my tag scenario I would get a whole wacky of servers that would host any given tag. This set would be reduced further as each tag was added to the query until I would have a set of servers that would have the combination of all tags. I would then reach out, and pull an SSE feed relevant to that set of tags that would allow merchants to update my feed with their offer. I could then respond by simply updating my feed, which would update their feed. To end the dialog, I would simply remove my publishing tags, and my server would simply disappear.
To control the definition of a tag - a governing body at the root would provide definitions (this is really stretching due to the number of tags - but let's keep going). Tags would then have common meaning for everyone, just like .com, .net, .org now do for the Internet.
Well enough of this stuff tonight ....I've got real work to do...
As always, what do you think?
November 19, 2005
Interesting discussion over at Nick BradBury Blog (FeedDemon) where he discussed adding Rank to OPML - I took a different tack to it and wrote the following comment on his blog:
Before we starting thinking of rank, we have to start thinking of categorization, and the ability to find/seek what we are looking for. Being around for while, I remember the web before Search (Altavista, Google,etc.), and how difficult it was to find something when you didn't know were to look. Now that it has been categorized (still problems, just ask Scoble), we are now turning our attention to rank, and context to help find information from the clutter.
We all know that blogs and the contribution to blogs are growing like wild fire - and we are now producing so much that we can't find what we are looking for, or the inverse, weed out what we don't want.
OPML is not the answer, nor do I think a centralized search engine is as well. Thinking outside of the box for a second, I would like to think of DNS. It contains information that allows us to find what we are looking for, and it's not centralized.
Could we not do for tags, that we have done for .net, .com, .org, etc. Could we not have tags that are registered within a library/DNS that we could then point to an "item" (defined by Alex in previous post) rather than a computer with a numerical address?
Tags is also something that I'm working on to categorize marketing messages, but I don't want to "subscribe" I want to publish what I'm interested in - "items" delivered to me - now that would be aggregation at it finest (IMHO)
Tags are the step in the right direction, but before tags can really work we need to define them - much like we have defined .com, .net, etc. I have not thought it all the way through, as it would be great to discuss it and throw some ideas around. I bet however, that we could leverage what has worked out of DNS (decentralized, distributed, yet interconnected and update able) we could create a DNS for tags.
This base infrastructure would then allow categorization of "items" on the web, RSS feeds, etc. With that available, aggregators would return items that are marked appropriately for my interests - regardless of the feed, podcast, web, or whatever else we get going to disseminate information. What do you think? Am I way off base? If so, why?