the ryan king

Ericka Menchen says she has a problem with the term folksonomy in
The trouble with folksonomy (the term):

The trouble is that folksonomy is used to describe systems that allow users to tag their own content, and systems that allow users to tag the content of others (i.e. delicious).

I’ve told several people that I think author-tagging and reader-tagging are really two different things. I usually just get blank stares when I say this, so I’m glad someone else agrees with me.

Part of the reason reader-created folksonomies is that the terms used to describe the work are in the vocabulary of the reader, not the writer. Authors could never fully imagine how their readers will view their work. For this reason, reader-created folksonomies have a distinct advantage over author-created folksonomies.

I’d be interested to see if there are different patterns in tagging behavior between author-tagging and reader-tagging. I’d suspect that author-tagging tends to be more conservative, using fewer and more established terms, rather than invented or compound terms.

In response to some bullshit by IBM, Ryan Tomayko says: IBM poop heads say LAMP users need to “grow up”?:

The need for complex systems in the enterprise was and still is greatly overestimated. The trick isn’t to make PHP more complex, it’s to make the enterprise less complex. You need to equate complex requirements with complex systems less and start asking “do we really need this?“? more.

He really has some great points about why middlewhere is not neccessary.

Via Scott Raymond’s delicous links.

Phil Jones has a long piece in response to Danny Ayers‘ (and others‘) rebuttals to critics of the Semantic Web. He says:

This is just one of many examples why, in the final analysis, the W3C’s implementation of the SW smells so bad. And why programmers with a sense of design aesthetics run a mile when they see it. RDF is pitched as some extremely high-level meta-language which can describe almost anything, yet in practice it’s riddled with premature implementation commitments : to web-protocols, to XML standards etc. It’s this mismatch between the claims for generality, and these awkward, intrusive implementation details that looks ugly and is so off-putting.

Its a long piece, but worth the read (or at least a skim).

(Via Danny Ayers.)