I now follow more than 100 feeds via Bloglines. That’s too many to give the good posts the attention they need or even to find the good posts. Some of the feeds I subscribe to are feeds-of-feeds, like digg and reddit, so that adds another level of overload onto my overtaxed neural connections. I consume so much information yet I feel starved… it’s like eating a box of Cheez-its when what I needed was a mixed veggie stir-fry with tamari almonds and brown rice.
But I feel optimistic about 2006. Individual bloggers won’t be the protagonists of the story. We will not see traditional news media reinvent itself for the new millennium. 2006 will be about the people and software that can help us wade through swamps of information, that separate the well-written and well-conceived from the fast and junky infofood that dominates, in amount if not in influence. Who will be our information nutritionists? Tag gardeners? Magazines? Automated domain-specific popular link finders? Blogs revamped as community blog guides? Perhaps all of them.
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One thing that ‘tag gardens’ are going to have to tackle as the become more mainstream (and more global) is disambiguation. I think there may be a niche for shared (as in across multiple ‘tag gardens’) disambiguation services.
If different organizations or people’s tag ontologies are useful, yes, I can see the need for disambiguation. I’m still thinking that as the number of tags goes towards infinity we’re back where we started: using a search engine to find what we want. But I’m trying to keep my mind open.