There's a real convergence between knowledge management, social software, tracking conversations, and folksonomy. The question all of these are asking is how to make sense of it all. From a commercial perspective, it's a question of getting yourself found on the Internet by search engines that are driven by the ideas bruited about in these debates. People search for certain terms; you want to use the terms they use; and to gain exclusivity, you want them to start using your terms. So, it's not just academic or arcane, as it can seem to be.
Many people try to take all the topics I mentioned at the start of the preceding paragraph and treat them individually because there are peculiarities to each one that make a general solution seem impossible. My cut is that there is value to trying to come up with a solution out of the convergence and then solving the pragmatic details of implementation as they arise. In other words, to figure out the process of converging to common understanding in general and trying to drive it. With that said, I want to take issue with something David Weinberger said just today in Joho the Blog: Authors tags and topics:
I find it interesting that I haven't seen a new age tagging app that gives special social weight to the tags the authors of works create. Obviously authors get to sort their resources by the tags they've assigned, but when it comes to make sense of the aggregation of tags, authors' tags have no special weight.
This isn't a criticism. Rather, it's an observation about how reader-centric we're becoming.
Well, why should special weight be given to authors or readers? I think the real issue is converging to common understanding which at the end of the day is a social process. Common understandings govern both the way you make sense of the world around you and communicate that sense. Convergence to common understanding clearly requires a multiway interaction between a group of people to get agreement on what things mean. How individuals on the receiving end may tag (classify) communications is just a manifestation of the extent to which the group's understanding has become, in fact, common. As I pointed out in my last post, the group may not in fact reach common understanding.
The real chore of authors is to get their sense of the world accepted by those they are communicating with. That is an interactive process where it is unclear anyone should receive a special weight.
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