Captive Adaptations

Interesting choice of words for the title, how do you bring back something that is present everywhere. I have no clues why my subconscious mind is more creative than my active mind, but lets save that for another day. Well, I just wanted to draw or bring back your attention to Google as a company, which we know is present everywhere. Just finished watching this 57 min video of a talk by Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google at the University of Washington.

By the end of the talk, I was completely engrossed with the possibilities/opportunities that lie ahead of us, and vastly important challenges that we can all contribute to solving, and more importantly how Google as a company is constantly reshaping itself or for that matter how sharply focussed a company can be about its goals and challenges.

Very engaging, to be honest as I write this paragraph right here, it just struck me how Eric Schmidt as a person can direct your mind and vision to addressing these issues, and how he projects the Company and his business space to the foreground while completely blurring himself into the background.

Since he is addressing this to the academic community, its leaves you with a very refreshing feeling of inquisitiveness, rather than the shallowness of the corporate pitches we are used to. Its dated May 26 2005, about 2 months ago, but I highly recommend that you make time to watch this.

The overarching reach and control of RSS channels, will soon cascade into a “Feeds Tsunami” loaded with overwhelming information you just asked for . Its sort of the “Watch what you wish for” thing or the “Do not bite off, more than you can chew” kindaf. No seriously, I simply enjoy the luxury to be able to tune into a particular “tag” frequency and be a mute spectator to the various ideas floating around. But the number of RSS feeds to get to a particular information piece is just increasing at break neck speed.

Imagine say getting feeds for a particular blog, I am just trying to enumerate the number of channels/ways in which this can be achieved.
1. Through the RSS feed on the blog itself.
2. Through the feed on the Feedburner or other aggregators.
3. Through the feeds on sites like del.icio.us, jots etc based on tags.
4. Through the feeds on technorati, and many other blog search engines.

I have already listed say 8-10 feeds for a single piece of content, isn’t that amazing. No wonder in a few days we will have the Feeds Tsunami !!, similar to the Cable TV channels explosion.

Sometimes it just feels good to go into Gataga and “search” for any updates on a particular meme that you are in pursuit of, rather than unknowingly subscribe to same feeds via various channels, hey by the way did you know that Gataga also has an RSS Feed of the top 30 results at the very bottom of their page !!. We just can’t escape syndication, can we ??.

All right I am coining a new word, based on what I have been observing lately. Tagocracy - is for tags of the people, by the people and for the people.

Annotating or tagging is turning out to be so viral and essential, that within social communities / virtual contexts the new absracts formulated for words/sentences are taking on a significant vocabulary of their own.

Folksonomies has already been in vogue for around 10 months or so now. So welcome to Tagocracy, the new movement.