I loved this presentation on Discovery by the Mr. Tweet folks. And today Fred Wilson had a great post on the value of ‘status updates’ (I’ve been calling it micro-messaging).
I’ve been taken with the use of inline tagging as a way to enhance discovery and it’s power. On twitter the @ reply and the # tag are great examples. What we’re doing with VenTwits and GroupTwits (coming soon) is adding tags that identify entities, groups, and topics. I’m no semantic expert but I’ve been fascinated by how people are starting to use it. In Toronto, we’ve seen the #hohoto story and around the world we’ve seen the power of tags like #gaza.
By using a tag in a short 140 character message you are indicating something of particular interest to yourself. It links that message to any other message including the tag… the tag essentially creating a thread that links a common interest. By being able to tag entities, groups, individuals, and topics, we can weave a variety of threads together through a single message. The frequency of this weaving will create incredible patterns that will only get richer over time. Patterns that describe the flow of individual and collective interests.
There is so much more going on here… but I think the power of this is huge and somehow I think it has the potential to weave itself into the fabric of all our digital text messages and actually have a shot a shaping a usable semantic web.
I often think about hashtags as “public metadata”; the interesting thing is that the complete flexibility of hashtags is what makes them so powerful yet so inefficient. Perhaps the greatest opportunities are figuring out how to combine people and actions around hashtags, integrating the flexibility and introducing some efficiency to the sorting and tagging behaviour.
Increasing efficiency = value creation = revenue model? đ
Related: an old thought of mine on hashtags, applying this thought from Ethan: “Interstitial advertising increases interaction costs and kills Net-enabled social connections dead.”
Even though it's nearly 9 months old, Ethan's thought still holds true yet is still largely unrecognized or adopted by most Internet-based businesses…
i think part of what is interesting with what we are doing with the hashtags is adding history, layering additional data (e.g. external feeds), and creating a destination that provides aggregation and allows people to participate without knowing the tags. Tags I think are for those who are core/pariticularly motivated users which is good from the sense that they are the ones that shape the basic ontology/structure through their tags. Less motivated/more peripheral people can then layer/engage on top of that.
i think part of what is interesting with what we are doing with the hashtags is adding history, layering additional data (e.g. external feeds), and creating a destination that provides aggregation and allows people to participate without knowing the tags. Tags I think are for those who are core/pariticularly motivated users which is good from the sense that they are the ones that shape the basic ontology/structure through their tags. Less motivated/more peripheral people can then layer/engage on top of that.