Now that’s funny. The Blogebrity site is an entry in this contest to create an effective viral marketing site. I dunno, maybe this kind of thing is even instructive to some people, but a little satire is good enough for me. I’ll leave it to others to cover the marketing lessons in this.

(Via Micro Persuasion).

This is drawing a lot of interest this morning. May bring even more people into the news content game and increases the pressure on other news outlets to open up.

BBC Backstage:

backstage.bbc.co.uk is the BBC’s new developer network, providing content feeds for anyone to build with. Alternatively, share your ideas on new ways to use BBC content. This is your BBC. We want to help you play.

People have started posting their ideas here. Many of them are silly (who needs another weather alert feed?), but there are some interesing ones. Here’s one of the funny ones:

Combine bbc RSS feeds and Google / Yahoo spellcheck API to automatically send abusive email to BBC feedback whenever the bot thinks it has detected a spelling error.

Chris McEvoy illuminates yet another flavor of folksonomy: Bloglines users are a load of knitters has lots of interesting stats and analysis. Chris even makes a data file available of all 10K categories having >= 10 items. Very cool.

The top 10 most popular folder names on Bloglines are:

1. Blogs
2. News
3. tech
4. Technology
5. People
6. Politics
7. friends
8. Comics
9. blog
10. misc

I wonder if one person’s friends are another’s people and yet another’s misc(!?) What do you do with misc? Seems to me these categories would get more discrimating near the end of this list, but then of course your data points dwindle and vanish. Hmm.

(Via Susan Mernit)

Erik Benson recently relaunched All Consuming with an emphasis on registered users, more media types (movies, music, etc., not just books) and … support for free-form tagging of those things. A folksonomy for books! I like it.

Examples:

Politics

Cooking

It’s a little sparsely populated yet, but I can’t wait for this thing to grow and seeing some tools emerge for slicing and dicing of tags (intersect:Cooking+Physics ?).

There’s been a lot of buzz recently about “leveraging the hive mind” with attention.xml. Basically, attention.xml is an XML spec for publishing your reading habits (how often you read a feed, how much time you spent reading a post, or when you last read a feed). It’s intended as an open foundation for a “cloud of reputational presence and authority [that] can be mined by each group of constituents” as Steve Gillmor says in this article. I think it’s a very cool idea — but having a cloud, although that’s essential, is only the first part to making it rain, as Gillmor readily admits.

The idea is that this pool of information about millions of users’ reading habits can be fed into various embodiments of smarts (like recommendation engines, either built into feed readers or separate services) that munge the attention metadata and generate useful recommendations about what you should read next. Who wouldn’t love that? There’s so much stuff out there to read and the current selection mechanisms are ridiculously crude and inflexible (some feeds are always worth reading, some only occasionally, and keyword search feeds have too much recall and therefore don’t solve the filtering problem well).

So the recommendation engines are where the rain starts to fall from the cloud. I suspect that we’ll see a lot of collaborative filtering and a lot of tag scraping in the first batch of attention mining engines. And then, in another phase, I hope we see engines that move beyond metadata and add content itself into the analysis. When a recommendation engine knows not only that people read blog X more often than blog Y, or that post k from blog Z was significantly more popular than any post from blog Z before or since; when you also know what post Z is about and what blogs X and Y are about and can organize this about-ness and learn from it — without categorizing the world — then you’ve got yourself a recommendation engine. I’m looking foward to that day. Let it rain.

Finally, for those of you who have moved beyond reading altogether, Chris Pirillo talked with Steve Gillmor about attention.xml in this podcast recently.

One interesting scenario that Gillmor held out is this: Because each user’s attention is a form of capital (hey, they’re your habits, why should you share them for nothing), sharing your attention.xml could become a form of payment for access to some content. Agreed, that should be worth something to publishers (as long as your feed reader doesn’t already provide your attention profile to publishes, without your knowledge. Ouch, there’s a though — where’s the source to this feed reader?).

Pito Salas has some interesting notepad noodling on taxonomies, folksonomies, etc., including a mapping of some familiar implementations of *onomies (del.icio.us, yahoo!, flickr, file system folders, etc.) into a two-dimensional grid with x axis := {for my own benefit, for other people’s benefit} and y axis := {my own stuff, other people’s stuff}.

In other words, the axes are audience and origin of artifacts (photos, blog posts, etc.), which is an interesting way to look at the practical side of information sharing (check out Pito’s drawing,/a>, and it reminded me of the apparent crisis of purpose (or crisis of application?) in the social software space, where the crucial question seems to be “why bother to share?”

Folksonomies have almost nothing in common with taxonomies, both from a graph theoretic point of view and a practical point of view. That’s a good start for folksonomies, but although experiments like furl, del.icio.us and flickr have been running for a while, it’s not clear that the folksonomy is a compelling ingredient in each case, or even whether its value grows indefinitely with the volume of contributions or whether there’s a point of diminishing returns in some of the variables. Still, I’ll take it over a taxonomy every day. Oh, and I love the word folksonomy. Let’s see if I can get into this post one more time …

Additional reading: Wikipedia entry Folksonomy has external links to some good reading on the subject.