Psst! Haven't you heard? She's really smart and full of great ideas, but like, she talks on average of 3.5 to 7 SECONDS longer than the average verbal exchange allows. Can you BELIEVE the audacity? Who does she think she is, clarifying her points in such precise detail and thereby heading off my own irrational and unsubstantiated objections before I even have a chance to voice them? How DARE she infringe on my inalienable RIGHT to start out believing of every human that opens his or her mouth, "you are stupid and wrong -- and therefore a terrorist threat to the status quo -- because I didn't think of your stupid superior innovative idea first! Die, innovator! Die! We HATE you for being one step ahead of us and will therefore make certain you never work in this town again!"The moral of our introduction today is, crime just doesn't pay. Moreover, it is the worst interpersonal crime of all to deviate from the norm in any way. So stay safe, never step out of line, never speak your mind, never invent, and never ever ever risk a failure, however bold the venture. Whatever you do, DO NOT ATTEMPT TO CHANGE THE WORLD FOR THE BETTER, particularly via improved software, hardware, or network capacity. You have been warned, brash and foolish innovator.
Today, we take a look at making the web even more Taggity, Stickity, Post-it-y, Traily, and Gossipy. MyStickies are a Web 2.0ish incarnation of an old idea -- as I recall, Alexa was early to the party, but changed course when prehistoric web inertia won out. In any case, this is an idea that poses no threat of being accused of being Too New, as it's been implemented many times in various inferior forms. Said stickies are also in a similar category with Trailfire, as well as vaguely related to tagging in general. Personally, I've always clumped all these efforts under the general made-up heading of a Parenthetical Markup Language (PML) for the web. The problem with all such efforts is that they are subject to Network Effects and if they are to succeed, must reach that ineffable Tipping Point where the adoption momentum curve crosses adoption inertia curve. The last time that happened was probably with HTML itself and the emergence of NCSA's original Mosaic web browser.
Clearly, tags are here to stay and will be a fundamental component of web content aggregation, coordination, collation, and contexualization forevermore. However, tags still don't provide that rich PML experience for which humans yearn. And after all, until everyone has equal opportunity to backstab, badmouth, alienate, and assassinate human web identities in the same manner that they blackball and blacklist humans in real life, the web will simply be incomplete. So let's get to work! There's loads of permanent reputation ripping to get done! All you humans that make those of us in the middle of the bell curve feel just a little bit stupid or uncomfortable ... Up Against The Wall!
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