The main thing that Yahoo Pipes has done is that it’s made the current “programmable web” more accessible to mainstream users. Just as so many programming languages make assembly language more accessible. However, there is still quite a learning curve for the average end-user. I have created some video tutorials to help lessen this curve. With your permission, here is the link: http://usefulvideo.blogspot.com/2007/02/yahoo-pipes-tutorials.html

Instead of “either/or” thinking about how a descriptive element (AKA: a tag) is applied to an item of interest, many rating/classifying/tagging situations could benefit from the ability to express the degree of application of a “tag” term, as well as to indicate the certainty of the tagger that the term applies. For example, instead of making a tag/no-tag decision (which is what the current authority control regime enforces), one acutally possesses the more nuanced ability to indicate that (1.) a given tag is 60% applicable to everything the item of interest is about; and (2.) the tagger is 90% certain that the tag applies to the item.

Given enough tags assigned this way – this no longer a problem with web-accessible items – techniques from psychophysics and/or marketing can then be brought to bear behind the scenes to relate the tagged item to other tagged items, while at the same time make it possible to tease out the tagger’s individual or group-related characteristics. Seeking consensus in tag assignation serves to squeeze out both “fractional applicability” plus individual and group differences in apprehending and/or appreciating an item’s characteristics.

Depends what you mean by consensus. What I don’t mean is a static definition. What I do mean is a dynamic process that works the way natural languages work. The latter idea was what I tried to convey in a screencast called Language Evolution in Del.icio.us:

http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2005/03/14.html

Or…and I realize this hasn’t caught on yet, but still…the stuff is more sanely available within the web page as an island of structure. In other words: a microformat.

BTW, thanks for the indirect decade-old shout-out. – cheers, BPA

Yahoo Pipes looks awesome! It too embodies what I really want to be able to do with the web and with software in general.

To me the real problem is pretty fundamental to the current way the web works. It’s really entrenched in a document paradigm. In order to extract one piece of info that could be “piped” to another component, either you have to fish around and find it within a web page (screen scrape it), or the publisher has to also provide a seperate XML document or Web-service API for that info — and each of these XML formats and APIs are often unique to each company/service. (Even if a stardard like RDF is used, it’s so wide open that you sometimes need to also apply special knowlege of application-specific semantics; and using standards like RSS is hard because it was never really meant for general non-news data publishing.)

You can’t just address a single unit of data (text or otherwise) or re-use in another context.

Recently I’ve been trying to build up some tools on top of a system called VOS (http://interreality.org) so you can build web pages out of more granular objects, which can be reused/filtered/rewired to create other web pages (similar to Yahoo Pipes), or used as inputs to other kinds of software components — even 3D virtual reality.

So far with VOS you can put together web pages out of VOS objects (the interreality.org site runs on this), and you can mix and match these objects in any number of pages. I’m still working on some automated blogging/news generation stuff, and some CGI/form stuff. I’m also looking for ideas for ways to take “live” data streams from external sources and display them in web pages and other media using this system; let me know if you think of any. There’s also a real lack of user-friendly tools for working with VOS object networks online.

Anyway, I invite anyone who’s interested to contact me to talk more about this. Or visit the web page and mailing list.

Best,

Reed

And before things even get that far, the tagging interface should help. For example, by providing realtime feedback like:

Tag Source “Hillary Clinton” “HillaryClinton”

A 33% 66%
B 50% 50%
C 66% 33%

Now admittedly that’s overkill for spellings of the same name that vary only slightly. It matters much more when you’re trying to decide between alternate vocabulary terms. Del.icio.us does a great job of prompting with choices, but of course only within the domain of its tag vocabulary. A prompter that worked across multiple tag-oriented services — and that gave realtime numeric feedback about the popularity of alternate terms among various constituencies — seems interesting.

by driving or constaining the tagging aren’t you killing the folksonomy?
Wasn’t the idea there that everyone tags as they wish and we’ll get a set of most popular tags?
Instead I’d address it from the other way around…
When you search for “Hillary Clinton” you should be offered with similar results i.e. those for “HillaryClinton”
Speaking of Pipes or something similar this would mean that instead of Equality operator we would have something like a Soundex. An advanced operator that extrapolates from the filtering criteria.

regards

Sic.