Dave Winer is making Tag Soup, and I like it. Reminds me of the old story "Stone Soup," about the soldiers who come into a town that is hoarding food. Instead of taking the food by force, they say "Let's make stone soup," and dump a few stones into boiling water. The villagers, intrigued, are drawn into contributing meat, vegetables and everything for a banquet. At the end, everyone concludes that they are astonished that you can make soup from stones.
It's that way with the heterogeneous tagging schema on the Web. Rather than reduce things to a single language, we need the richness of constantly developing tags (tags for formatting, tags for filtering, tags for everything) to ensure that the medium continues to develop new expressive capacities. This is what Dave puts so well when he says: "Sometimes you invent something thinking you know how it's going to be used, and the world surprises you and uses it for something else."
Posted by Mitch Ratcliffe at October 12, 2002 03:09 PM | TrackBack