You have arrived at the web home of Noah Brier. This is mostly an archive of over a decade of blogging and other writing. You can read more about me or get in touch. If you want more recent writing of mine, most of that is at my BrXnd marketing x AI newsletter and Why Is This Interesting?, a daily email for the intellectually omnivorous.
While I was reading this IF post about "leveraging folksonomies" (paid subscription required), I realized that Technorati tags allow people to do the thing I find most innovative about tagging: Create impromptu, non-centralized communities without the need for any additional infrastructure (like creating a new group in Yahoo! Groups).
It was this seemingly innocent (and obvious) paragraph that sparked it:
An example this week was the 10blogs tag. A group of bloggers decided to suggest what 10 blogs they'd take to a desert island. Instead of emailing each other with a link to their top ten, they simply 'tagged' their blog posts with 10blogs. This allowed all bloggers to visit Technorati and browse through the whole blogosphere's top 10 blogs!Wow. DUH! How the hell did I miss that? I kind of feel like an idiot.