Five years ago, Dan Bricklin posted The Cornucopia of the Commons: How to get volunteer labor. This excellent essay explains simply what factors need to combine to create common value out of individual selfishness, and why it’s more likely in the information age. The recent flurry of activity around tagging and folksonomies prompted him, in January, into a brief return to some of the lessons from his original post. Not all systems follow the guidelines which emerged from his essay, and he added a reminder that no one must feel guilty for not contributing.
Broadly, though, the folks at the leading edge of web development are delivering applications which build on the lessons captured in his essay, whether causally or not.
Via Randy, I found Stefano Mazzochi’s post on, among other things, a method for disambiguating tags in a web-wide folksonomy. He ends the post with “And, to prove the point, we have built a system on this 🙂 Stay tuned.” It’s a deep look at a new idea… but he better deliver the promised system if he wants anyone to implement such a complex vision. Mazzochi states, after showing one of his hash-encoded samples: “Note that the lack of readability of that statement is a feature, not a bug: these instructions are meant for machines to be processed, not for humans.” Well, I would argue that getting tools deployed to create such technically sophisticated metadata is a non-starter. Many people adhere to the “worse is better” mantra that is credited (partly) for the web’s explosion. Still, clearly a smart guy and I’ll pay attention… Mazzochi was thinking about the economic and social aspects of metadata in 2002. From Mazzochi’s CV, you can watch a thirty-five minute video (RealMedia) on The Economy of Distributed Metadata Authoring. Most of what he presents is now almost common sense, but he was a year or two (at least) ahead of most folk, even Stewart and Joshua. At least in this video, Mazzochi clearly understands Bricklin’s points.
Along these lines, Ryan King gets excited about microformats, pulling together links to many different ideas that have been bubbling for months. I’m interested in those suggested by Adrian Holovaty. In all of these instances, as far as I can tell, the bootstrap factor is high, meaning that the individual user or site will not get a lot of benefit from adding this blessedly simple and human-readable metadata to their markup. Smart sites already draw these connections within their own sites, whether with explicit markup or not. It is absolutely valuable to individuals — and therefore to those that want to serve those individuals as customers — to cross site boundaries. The question is whether the sites and individuals doing the markup will reap the bounty directly, or only indirectly through increased relevance (and, one hopes, return) in external search engines and aggregators. If microformats delivered some selfish utility more directly, then the cornucopia of the commons would fuel their growth. Maybe I’m missing some examples of immediate return on investment (of time and tools)… let me know. Either way, microformats are an OK place to place some low-cost, low-friction bets with the hope of future goodness rebounding to those who help accelerate the bootstrap.