I have been trying to label all my blog posts. With over 2800 blog posts it has been taking me over a year to do this. I am not really sure how many more I have to do before I am finished. Doing this I have found a lot of broken links. Lots of the stories that I posted blog entries about are no longer on the web.
This has effected my writing some. I am not trying to write entries that stand up even if the person does not follow the link. I need to be able to write entries that always make sense even if the links go away.
If the link does go away I might clean up the broken link, but I am not going to find the story someplace else. It is not worth my time.
What are the other ways of looking at your blog? Above is a word cloud I got from wordle.net. I think this is pretty interesting. It is taken from the labels/tags from Sad Salvation. You can claim that this is what my blog is about. The labels are incomplete and I am not sure my blog is about anything. It still gives me something to think about. If I ever finish labeling all my old blog entries I will have to look at this again.
The other night I watched an episode of Frontline about advertisement titled, The Persuaders. The episode really got me thinking about brand. Which brands are important to and which brands are not. There are brands I prefer, but I do not think they are core to my purchase decisions. There are brands I prefer, but I do not see myself a fan of that company.
The show is all about how companies get people to buy their products. I would like to say that I always buy the best product for me. I would like to say that advertisements never change my ideas. I know that is not true. I know that I see ads and want the product in the ad. I see ads and decide what I am going to have for dinner.
After seeing the episode of Frontline I thought of the idea of the tag cloud of my brands. Seeing which brands are in my life. It is not only the brands I know I like, but the brand I use begrudgingly. I know that the tag cloud below is not accurate, but it is a start. I think it could be an interesting art project.
There is a limit to the number of characters that can be used with the Blogger 'Label' system. I forget the limit, but I have run into in on some of my lists. When I run into that limit I use the tag 'Tag Overload'. I wonder how many other people use meta-tags. I wonder how many other systems have tag limits.
One of the interesting things it me is how tags do not have standards. I had to come up with tag overload on my own. I had no guidelines or standards to rely on. Everyone is making things up for themselves. I know this is one of the points of tags. We want to decentralize information. In the long run the most powerful meme will become the standard.
I wonder how we will look back at tags in five years. Will they change the world or will we look back at them and wonder what we were thinking? I know that for some people tags have change the way they think about information. One of the key ideas about tags is that they do not fit into one category, but many categories.
I was at the SFlickr meetup and ... was asking people for a definition of Web 2.0. At first no one could define it. I said that web 2.0 is just tags. The were only one succinct answer, Web 2.0 web sites are focused around user contributed content.
I was struck at how easy that answer was. If I think about the Web 2.0 sites that I use, they are about about user content. Look at YouTube, Yepp, del.icio.us, dodgeball, Upcoming.org, and Flickr. All of the interactions on these sites are about users sharing information. There is nothing to share information about if there is no content.
I think something has changed in the way people have been using the internet over the last two years. About four years ago users started to take control again. Now websites are trying to fine way to give users control in ways that are useful. I think that is what Web 2.0 really is.
Whenever I go through my referral logs I always find strange stuff. It makes me wonder how good Google is for the average user. People find Sad Salvation looking for all kinds of stuff. I wonder how often people can find what they are really looking for. I think search engines are still primitive. I wonder if they will be able to really develop or not? I know people say that Tagging might help with those problems. I just wonder how much stuff I am looking for but cannot find.
