Steven Johnson on blogs
Salon features an article by Steven Johnson on blogs, titled “Use the blog, Luke”. Johnson is the author of Emergence and he envisions having a web browser that would display comments from blogspace on the web page you’re currently viewing, as an answer to the problem of navigating the web of blogs.
He points at the problem that the URL isn’t standardized, that it often contains data related to the “session” of the invididual visitor, and continues, “If we had standardized tags for just five or six additional elements, you could start mining the blog space for on-the-fly information resources that would truly rival Google’s.”. The databases are already there, he writes, for example at Blogdex.
He also talks about “positive and negative links” – that you should be able to link without positively affecting the page’s PageRank, and his talk about being able to define ”’guardian’ Bloggers” makes me think of the Semantic Web.
A very interesting article! (Via kottke.org.)