I just got here, and I missed the first few minutes of Jeff Jarvis' presentation. It took me a few minutes to really settle into what he (and the audience) was talking about, partly because I walked here from Penn Station. One thing that became clear from a few comments Jeff solicited from the audience - marketers still don't know what to make of all this. One guy mentioned that his marketing department was worried about RSS, because they couldn't capture email addresses (etc, etc). Another guy complained that his content is being stolen by others (as if this is a new problem on the web).

Heh. And here's a guy who wants to limit what he puts in his RSS feed, so that people will come to his site and view the ads. I understand that problem, but it's walking straight into a buzz-saw. There's a parallel with the newspaper business here - headlines are an attempt to attract people further into the paper. RSS can, and probably should, be used the same way for content that needs to pay for itself. The reason that model is in trouble is that so many people are pushing out content just to be heard. I'm glad this problem isn't mine, because I have no idea how to deal with it :)

Ahh, the general desire for more (and better) metadata. The problem is simple - people don't tend to categorize on their own. For example: right now, in my BottomFeeder cache, I have 18,116 items. Nearly 12,000 of those have no category set. If the highly motivated people won't tag, who will? Unless there's serious automation support, it isn't going to happen. The audience is focused on the wrong problem. Tag spam, missed tags - that's so not the problem. The sheer unwillingness of people to bother is the problem.

Never mind though - the audience is obsessively focused on the real or perceived problems of Technorati. I maintain that the base problem can't be solved by Technorati, because they rely on users providing metadata. Meanwhile, people just love to blame Technorati and Dave Sifry - we have someone actually trying to show Sifry code. Forest, Trees, and all that :)

Having said that, I like the way Jeff ran the conversation.