Great questions!

Laura Scott — Thu, 02 Mar 2006 20:03:54 -0600

Looking forward to more thoughts on this.

Laura
· BlogHer website admin
· pingVision: Drupal theming, design, development and hosting
· personal blog

I was thinking...

Liz Rizzo — Thu, 02 Mar 2006 16:12:21 -0600

How interesting that we're all feeling intense today. :)

is there something in the stars???

debra roby — Thu, 02 Mar 2006 15:24:17 -0600

Mir,

Your post and my post and the technorati post...

Is there something in the stars fomenting this?

Debra
A Stitch In Time
Simple Still Life

Updated ! words + tagging = real power?

mir — Thu, 02 Mar 2006 13:41:11 -0600

Okay a third pass.. because my Mac just sent a tiny grenade into the land of writing directly into your browser window.

I am the books editor here at Blogher, but sometimes, because I love to read, I get a little caught up in the more basic elements of books that is to say, words. What they are good for, the damage they can do, and the fact that a vocabulary used in a techno-social setting is a very powerful thing indeed.

My current exploration stems from several posts here on Blogher;

First of all I read the really intense discussion about "growing a pair" the other day on Blogher.

Then I read the post about Dropping the A-list mentality and the discussion of maybe, women converse and communicate in a different way online.

Following that I read Danielles post in which she self-identifies as a negro, and then wonders aloud what audience-impact her choice of descriptor will have.

Finally I read What is technorati anyways? and picked up some ideas about tagging, language and popularity.

Unlike a library, where books stay in view long after they are relevent, how are tags creating a heirarchies of taxonomic/linguistic power in web content? Also how are the dialects we use in our blogs going to change the face of web communications?

Luckily for us all, there are some blogs that explore the intersection of words and technology. Not only in terms of what gets written and by whom, but how the intersection of technology and language (like tagging) creates a whole new level of discursive power and I mean this in the most foucauldian sense my kittens...

I am fascinated by the way colloquial language creates order or disorder on the web, and also how only words that have weight survive. What does that mean for the unpopular tags? Or to the idea that language as a whole is not a monolithic structured entity but a living breathing collective effort. One that is the end result of as many errors as it is successes.

Take for example spelling. I know I have dozens of versions of the word "tutorial" in my delicious account Antipodean Suggests thinks there ought to be a word to describe words "so-badly-spelled-they-are-by-default-awesome".
She suggests;

Misphantel / Mis - fan - tel

1. A misspelled word that is so poorly spelt no one but its author can discern what it means.

2. A word that by virtue of its appallingly bad spelling fools Microsoft Word into thinking it is another word entirely.

(n) Derivative: [Mistake, from Old Norse mistaka, to take in error ; Fantastic, Middle English fantastik, from Greek phantazesthai, to appear ; Spelling, Middle English spellen, to read letter by letter

And what about the history of how we parse our words? HeiDea explores the logic behind letter weights in scrabble and her arguement if applied to the arbitrary nature of tag clouds suggests that context much more then frequencey assigns value to a given term.

Therese over at humlabs is exploring emerging communications from a linguistics perspective. Her exciting research looks at how something like text messaging, once thought to be an unexpressive/unemotional mode of communication has gained a new human currency in Web 2.0 applications. Due to phenoms like blogs, written words often substitutes for real time communication modes (talking hugging laughing or smiling). How does this new feeling/text effect our comunications : )?

In all three of these examples the basic idea is that for words to be fully understood and evaluated there needs to be context, be it personal (a word so mispelled only its user knows what it is), communal (a tag like Blogher only exists given a collective agreement to the meaning of blogher) or social, ;) - means smiling.

Unfortunately, Technorati doesn't understand words like that. How (if we want to), can we subvert a power structure that is based on algorithms and on usage, rather than the real strength behind language, which requires that the reader understand the words (if not the authors) intention, and the context the word is being used in?

To clarify, given context words have real power to hurt (ie; "grow a pair") or to heal ("i'm sorry"). Tags haven't got that kind of intentional power, they only have associative (how many iterations of the word are in play at any given time) power. Which is why words like "jessica simpson" have more weight in technorati then say; "emma goldberg".

The problem with Technorati is it will always privilege the dominant discourse (Jessica) over the rarer, personal (requiring context) or perhaps progressive discourse (Emma). But that's not intentional, it's simply an algorithm.

Let's look at how we use language here at Blogher, because words of true power don't neccessarily get put into circulation all that often, and I think this is one instance where what's being said online is having an enormous impact on the world at large.

BlogHer - Updated ! words + tagging = real power? - Comments

Great questions!

I was thinking...

is there something in the stars???

Updated ! words + tagging = real power?