Hashtags are useless until threads are meaningful.April 26th, 2009 View Comments |
Enjoying a rich offline life, continuing a couple thoughts about online conversations; in short, instead of creating new tools to publish knowledge, we need to focus on better tools for creating wisdom…
Michael Lewkowitz, Dead of Alive – the future of hashtags:
A couple of weeks ago, Scoble had a epiphany that ‘hashtags are dead…’. That epiphany was really more about realtime search than the future of hashtags. If anything, inline tags (hashtags) are going to be an increasingly important aspect of the realtime web.
… Hashtags are just the beginning of in-line tagging in public micro-messages. They will enable explicit threading and permissionless participation in the realtime web in a natural and extensible way. Chris Messina’s original post had some great details, some of which which I believe will be part of the core infrastructure of the realtime web. And as public micro-messaging services proliferate, inline tags will help enable cross-platform threading with the potential to weave the web and even our offline data.
I wouldn’t really call Scoble’s proclamation an “epiphany”; I don’t think we’ve ever used #hashtags terribly well.
The openness of hashtags is its greatest strength and its greatest weakness; I believe using #hashtags will only be popular and well-understood when it makes economic sense for a person to use it; i.e. only when using a hashtags helps someone (promote themselves, be understood better, quicker, easier, help participate in a conversation) will people use them regularly with any rigor.
Meaning:
1) Given that the ability to understand the context of messages (micro- and macro-) through natural language search and contextual analysis (or through semantic web-type architecture) is difficult…
2) … we depend on users to use hashtags to self-identify important parts of messages….
3) … but there isn’t any real meaningful need for people to use hashtags until people can privately capture the externalities behind free public metadata.Until threads are meaningful (e.g. public, searchable, indexed, promotable), #hashtags are useless.
What is the point of using tags to supply metadata around a conversation until we can use them to improve the conversation? The real value in data isn’t the data itself but in structuring it to help us understand and improve our lives.
Meaning: hashtags are a start, but what we really need are threads.
Information and “knowledge” is easy to find, but where is the wisdom?
—
Of course, these aren’t new topics of mine; digging into the archives to highlight a couple related thoughts:
- Splintering Conversations, May 2008:
Instead of helping to solve the natural problem of communication that is called “being human”, online communication tools have only added to the complexity. Discontinuous. Fractured. Lack of context. Asynchronous communications scatter across our various inboxes, comments litter the web, incomplete conversations are lost amid the noise. Group conversations evolve, devolve, tune people out as the meanings and topics change, change from private to public to private.
… Social media has provided us a plethora of tools, devices, methods and new standards for communicating. We know these tools: they have infiltrated our personal and professional lives, changed the ways we live and interact. But we are still at the very early stages of learning how to use them.
- Are “Online Conversations really conversations”, Dec 2008:
Where is the tool that extracts meaning and not just knowledge?
… We’re a knowledge culture; in our race to create and acquire knowledge we’ve forgotten the meaning and power of wisdom.
Perhaps it’s impossible to create a web service to extract meaning and create wisdom; perhaps that’s why we need people and not just algorithms. Perhaps that’s why we still need to connect with individuals…
So, what do we do about it?
April 27th, 2009 at 06:19
I'm looking to you Taylor
April 27th, 2009 at 06:19
I'm looking to you Taylor
April 27th, 2009 at 06:19
I'm looking to you Taylor
April 27th, 2009 at 06:27
On inline tagging I see the purpose to be more of interlinking and reoreintation than of metadata. Metadata around a message is a different set of information that comes automatically from source or from additional action applied to the message container. Inline tags being used while typing within the container encourages a unique type of usage and relevance that I think actually forms a key backbone for the personal API's you discussed before.
April 27th, 2009 at 06:27
On inline tagging I see the purpose to be more of interlinking and reoreintation than of metadata. Metadata around a message is a different set of information that comes automatically from source or from additional action applied to the message container. Inline tags being used while typing within the container encourages a unique type of usage and relevance that I think actually forms a key backbone for the personal API's you discussed before.
April 27th, 2009 at 06:27
On inline tagging I see the purpose to be more of interlinking and reoreintation than of metadata. Metadata around a message is a different set of information that comes automatically from source or from additional action applied to the message container. Inline tags being used while typing within the container encourages a unique type of usage and relevance that I think actually forms a key backbone for the personal API's you discussed before.
April 27th, 2009 at 14:52
Interesting; but I'm more interested at seeing “relevance” and “reorientation” in practical terms than the theoretical; whether there is a separation between inline tags and metadata, or whether the different bits of data can really be put to practical use, depends on the implementation.
April 27th, 2009 at 14:52
Interesting; but I'm more interested at seeing “relevance” and “reorientation” in practical terms than the theoretical; whether there is a separation between inline tags and metadata, or whether the different bits of data can really be put to practical use, depends on the implementation.
April 27th, 2009 at 14:52
Interesting; but I'm more interested at seeing “relevance” and “reorientation” in practical terms than the theoretical; whether there is a separation between inline tags and metadata, or whether the different bits of data can really be put to practical use, depends on the implementation.
April 27th, 2009 at 15:01
Absolutely. Value in this space needs to be practical and
April 27th, 2009 at 15:13
Absolutely – practical in two ways. In ways that improve my interactions with the web and in ways that the web comes to me based on what I am doing independent of me interacting with the web. Theoretical distinction helps to tease out how to implement as well.
April 27th, 2009 at 15:13
Absolutely – practical in two ways. In ways that improve my interactions with the web and in ways that the web comes to me based on what I am doing independent of me interacting with the web. Theoretical distinction helps to tease out how to implement as well.
April 27th, 2009 at 15:13
Absolutely – practical in two ways. In ways that improve my interactions with the web and in ways that the web comes to me based on what I am doing independent of me interacting with the web. Theoretical distinction helps to tease out how to implement as well.
May 9th, 2009 at 20:21
A good example is this bifurcated thread here and http://igniter.com/post416
Do I have to repeat my comment from http://igniter.com/post416#comment-9172328 or have our technowizards a way to unify this small conversation.
May 9th, 2009 at 20:25
Inline tagging is a convenient way to add metadata since the words can (but don't need to ) be part of the discourse and our mind glosses over the # sign. But using words brings inherent meaning, i.e. metadata.
If it were just a question of thread interlinking a simple number or id would do.
May 9th, 2009 at 20:27
Actually, it's a great example; as you can see just from this exchange, Michael and I exchanged comments about the same topic (and the same post!) on two different streams; sadly it's a conversation topic that I've revisited on both blogs too much without progress
May 9th, 2009 at 20:40
As a start, I'd be happy to simply combine comment threads across blogs
Even though it's a manual hack, it would still be valuable…
May 13th, 2009 at 07:17
[...] About how real time data shapes real time decisions and the need for threaded conversations to make hashtags relevant; [...]
September 18th, 2009 at 19:25
[...] conversations is one I’ve laboured over in various forms for over a year; highlighting a post from earlier this year created from a discussion with Michael Lewkowitz: The openness of hashtags [...]