It's an interesting argument in theory, but I must admit I'm struggling to see how it'll work in practical terms. As with all open formats, they need to be accepted and adopted up by big vendors in order to be successful.

I'll admit the argument is largely conceptual right now, but the microformat is there. And, we are moving toward some implementations at least at the producer level.

I guess my cut is that it pays to make your information as available as possible. Publishing link blogs in a standard way should make you that much more visible.

great insights! this topic has been on my brain a lot recently. we need to spread this gospel as it's inevitable but will help all companies we know to get there first.

I really like where you are going with this and agree. Locking on to the user and data is the big fallacy of web2.0. They spawn competitors... like us (de.lirio.us) who refuse to play that game.

Mind you, only geeks care. Flickr users are spanning largely into the non-geek market now.

I'm compelled to think that only geeks care about this type of thing. We're planning to take de.lirio.us into the larger world of non-geeks
and if we made the data open I doubt any of them would care. Being a geek I bang my head at the reality, but it's true. Is there any reason, other than moral, for tagging data to be open?

I wrote the datalibre mission based on the blogging genre where data goes upstream from the user to the world. Here it is a pain in the ass
(the reason) to rewrite anywhere else (like amazon reviews) when you've done it once on your blog.

We're working on distributing an easy to deploy version of delirious so people can have their own just like a blogging client (with a format built in!), but I wonder if people see the same utility in it.

We'll see.

Steve Mallett - http://de.lirio.us

Steve Mallett, I understand where you are coming from. When using the tool, users care about the user experience. As a folksonomy front-end, you should focus on that.

But, as a folksonomy publisher, you should also focus on getting your stuff as widely publicized as possible. Let me note that if search engines pick up on your tags, they still link back to your repository, providing you visibility. Implementing xFolk 0.4 is so low cost (15 minutes of your time, even at $400/hour is only $100) and search visibility so sought after that you should just do it.

Coming back to your idea about business models, I think it is really the aggregators (likely search engines) that have a shot at monetizing this in the same way they have monetized their role as web indexes in general. However, I think that higher web visibility via search engines also increases your traffic, stickiness, and hence ability to turn a buck.

Ok, I think we're still on the same page, but on different paragraphs.

See, I think any search engine can get the taxonomy from URLs. For instance: http://de.lirio.us/rubric/entries/tags/kayaking (a bit bloated still, i know) Here's another, but from a blog entry: http://www.jluster.org/tag/social/tagging/ I'm switching to wordpress shortly just so I can do this too.

So.. really that is all out there now. Hit a tag follow the rss and you've got all the info you'd ever want.

When I'm thinking about open data I'm really in a world where I tag info about a book I link to on amazon, write up, and amazon -or- barnes & nobles -or- local book store can use on their website as well. Many receivers of data produced once without duplicate effort.

In short I'm with you and can implement xFolk in a jiffy. Frankly I feel that xFolk, and any other formats change, but URLs like at any bookmarking site are not as bound to change. The URLs themseleves might change, but URIs formats are pretty well standardized for long periods of time.

Food for thought: I really believe that without a motivation to do the work people won't. People, bloggers, normal everyday people aren't going to write all these formats for different uses into their applications and/or writings. In the end I really believe it is too much work vs fun & utility. These things have to be built with personal motivations in mind or they'll never take off.

Again, I'm with you. The idea is great. I wonder at the implementation.

Steve, OK, I see what is going on here:

"Food for thought: I really believe that without a motivation to do the work people won't. People, bloggers, normal everyday people aren't going to write all these formats for different uses into their applications and/or writings. In the end I really believe it is too much work vs fun & utility. These things have to be built with personal motivations in mind or they'll never take off."

Here's how I see this playing: I get tool providers like you to incorporate it in their publication and export formats. That removes it from the end user, as I suggest here:

http://thecommunityengine.com/home/archives/2005/06/an_xfolk_04_imp.html

where I say:

"Since xFolk is a back-end technology (i.e., a way of transmitting data for machine aggregation), I am working to get it produced as the output of already existing front-ends like blogmarks, scuttle, de.lirio.us, and even del.icio.us."

Another commenter makes a similar remark here:

http://www.solitude.dk/archives/20050605-0348/

where he says:

"For a straight-up, decentralized del.icio.us style tagging see xFolk. It's a XHTML microformat, and it's just been released in version 0.4. It looks very promising, I'd certainly like to see services like del.icio.us take advantage of the format as an export/import format at least."

If you look at blogmarks, del.icio.us, and jots, they all provide "post to your blog" features. It's there where I see xFolk playing a role.

There is also some possibility of a wordpress plug-in, but mainly I think it needs to "just come" in the export and publication format from services.

So, we may agree completely, or at least be on adjacent paragraphs.

Thanks again for the implementation.

Bud

i agree that web2.0 is doing for open and aggregating.but it scares of real modal which can be ease of using for non-geeks.