This post is prompted by a comment by Ed Mitchell on one of my recent posts. Ed said:
2. The key has to be the ongoing
aggregation of our distributed thoughts on our blogs by
interest/practice focused hubs which gather our thoughts and then, when
neccesary, we can come to the communal knowledge watering hole and kick
off in small focused bursts around specific issues…This gives us the independence we want when we want it and the communal many brains focus when we need it…
We must start using effective keywords and experimenting properly between ourselves!
Focussing on the last sentence. When you are granted a CB Radio licence you get a Call Sign which is unique to you. What if we all had a 'Blog Sign' that was unique to us? Then we could use each other's Blog Signs to tag things that we think particular people would be interested in. Then we could aggregate on our Blog Sign. Have I just reinvented email? Is this built into blogs already and I haven't noticed?
Let's see if I can start a trend. My Blog Sign is s1m0nb3rry.
How might that work? Why not just one tag that we all see? Too much signal to noise?
Thanks for the comment Beth. How might that work? Well, I am quite new to the world of blogging and I have several friends and acquaintances who blog: you, David Wilcox, Ed Mitchell, Nick Booth, Steve Bridger to mention a few. I find it really difficult to keep up. I miss things that they write that I would find useful. From conversations with them, I know they miss stuff too.
If David wrote something that he knew I would be interested in he would tag it as normal but also add the ‘s1m0nb3rry’ tag as well. Likewise, if I wrote something that I wanted David to note, I would tag it ‘d4v1dw1lc0x’ to draw it to his attention.
I would use bloglines/technorati etc to aggregate on the ‘s1m0nb3rry’ and give these top priority on my reading list.
It way be that there are already techniques to achieve this but I haven’t come across them.