Shape of Blog Space

Shape of Blog Space

This morning I took a little detour in blog space off my usual track and spent an enjoyable 45 minutes wandering around in various minds. Having been reading "Linked: The New Science of Networks by Albert-László Barabási " recently ( highly recommended for those of you interested in networks), I thought there may be a semantic map in blog space that relates to the map of the Internet. If we want build software to optimally extract, collate and present the thoughts of blog space we really need to understand the semantic map. Otherwise we will again be reduced to brute force approaches to the problem of the information explosion. This would I think be a step backwards as there are a many interesting views being presented in the blogverse. Perhaps this is a good focus for the current RSS/RDF debate which appears to be a debate over style rather than substance. If there was a real problem that needed to be solved the debate will become more concrete. So I pose the problem, can RSS move towards a semantic mapping tool from a headline aggregator, could we use it to fly through a conceptual map of blogspace. The possibilities seem endless if I have hooks to tag RSS descriptions I can create my own personal conceptual map, getting a little far out there can we start to extract true meaning from our collective thoughts. There raw material is there, we create it everyday it just needs the infrastructure to make sense of it.....
- posted by John McDowall @ 10:08 PM