[warning: long post]

I had the pleasure of attending Clay Shirky's talk at Fort Mason last night. Shirky is one of those people that, when they talk, everything makes sense. I hope I do him justice in my own spin on his ideas...

With technology changing so fast, we run the risk of losing significant historical data. This runs against my own theory that social media is giving more and more people the tools to produce historical data - blogging, photo communities, social bookmarking, etc etc + lower cost of storage + falling costs of Wifi + new, accessibly priced machines - all work together to expand the layers of stories told. My belief was that, unlike in previous generations, history would be written by everyone, not just by a few.

And it could be...but the issue is that digital media is at a greater risk of being lost than my Oma's diaries or the Rosetta Stone. Shirky gave the example of the Domesday Book, written on paper with ink in 1086, surviving over 900 years, yet technology used in 1986 to reproduce this document electronically only survived 6 years and the reproduction was lost while the rudimentary version lived on.

That example made me realize how absolutely fragile everything we are building is. It makes me rather sad. I think about my fear of leaving Blogger because I would lose my posts from the past year. I'm locked in, trapped to the technology...

Certainly open source is changing that. We aren't being locked in any longer. We are starting to own our own metadata. What's that? OWN OUR OWN METADATA? Radical stuff. I would go to the ends of the earth and back for a company that would do that for me.

And then there is the whole classification mess that tagging is just beginning to solve. Or will it? Folksonomies help us make sense of our worlds while they help us to connect with other people who make sense of their worlds in the same way. That's hot. (did I just say that?)

Great quote from Clay: "Calling these labels TAGS worked because the word TAG is right on the edge of descriptive and strange"

Brilliant.

Tags aren't flat, they are degenerate. They amplify and rescind. They are dynamic and moving. (In the same vein you can also say Tags are perverted, but that's a whole other story)

So YOUR OWN METADATA + DEGENERATIVE TAGS = historical disruption.

Why disruptive? Because:

1. Anyone can create it, not just a chosen few (as indicated in the Dewey Decimal system's biases)
   
   
2. My classifications are my classifications - I can choose to go with the 'tagging pack' or define my tags the way I want 'em ... there is no central totally agreed upon system (as Shirky says: "The only group that can categorize everything is everybody.")
   
   
3. Metadata owned by the creator means that the creator, not anyone else, decides what to do with it. If you want to kill it. You kill it. If you want to pass it down through generations, you do that, too. Think about it: what if Shakespeare had a hissy fit one day and destroyed every copy of every play he ever wrote? Well, yes, he would be a total dumbass and we would have suffered a loss, but what historical account would have stepped in to replace it? Scary, huh? I like scary. Who says Shakespeare had the rights to social commentary of his time? Hm?
   
   
4. Then there is the whole issue with DRM...I won't even go there...you know the evil that lurks within...
   
   
5. And, as Shirky pointed out, we can 'detect concept rot'. We can watch ideas, memes and issues die. We can record exact moments in history when ideas shift. Knowing history makes us smarter in the future...or so I believe.
   

I truly believe we are teetering on the edge of a major change in history. The pendulum may swing back the other way someday to kill the movement, but, hell, it's about time that we saw a little change on the horizon.

The only thing that is going to stop this movement is spam. I'm afraid that by the time tags are widely enough adopted to make a difference, spammers will have mined them to death....see, I told you that they will ruin everything.

But anyway...Clay rocked Fort Mason last night. Now, there is much work to do...

(and btw, I don't agree that stopping spam is like finding the cure for the common cold...I really think there is a way to stop them, reduce their incentives, whatever...there has got to be a way. It's like crime. When do the consequences outweigh the benefits? Whatever. I'm going to find a way)

technorati tags: clayshirky, metadata, tagging, opensource, longnowfoundation