Wired: Lawrence Lessig: Wired 13.02: VIEW: “After its Warner label, Reprise, decided that the group’s fourth album, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, was no good, Wilco dumped them and released the tracks on the Internet. The label was wrong. The album was extraordinary, and a sold-out 30-city tour followed. This success convinced Nonesuch Records, another Warner label, to buy the rights back – reportedly at three times the original price. The Net thus helped make Wilco the success it has become. But once back in Warner’s favor, many wondered: Would Wilco forget the Net?”

Dave King’s ImageBurst looks pretty neat. I gotta give it a try. Here goes a few samples. You never know what you are going to get when looking at the most popular pics at Yahoo!

Yesterday I gave instructions on how to roll your own Philadelphia blog aggregator using the OPML file at Philly Future. Today I share links to some popular news/blog aggregators.

Lead Firefox developer joins Google.

Google video search.

…Browsing is shopping, strolling, flipping through a magazine. Browsing is fun, casual, entertaining.

Searching is mechanical, trial and error, frustrating. Searching is work.

There’s a powerful emotional difference between the two.

…Here’s what’s neat about tags: They’re bottom-up, so the classification comes from the people who make the content, not some highfalutin academic. They’re flat, not hierarchical, so they avoid the pitfalls of hierarchical organization. And they’re emergent – a thousand monkeys with a thousand typewriters and all that.

But other people have already talked about all that, but what I find truly exciting about tags is that they’re all about browsing. And not the directory/library/annoyingly hidden kind of browsing that led to the death of the Yahoo Directory and the emergence of the single Google box – the fun kind of browsing, like shoe shopping on Haight Street.

At Technorati, we’re sitting on top of this amazing, living, gigantic database of information culled from what we call the real-time web (aka the blogosphere). Wanna know who posted the word “tagonomy” first? Wanna see who links to powazek.com and what they said? We can tell you. But you have to search. You have to type something into that intimidating box and click a button and hope for the best.

Searching is work, browsing is fun.

Tags are the first major interface to our living database that’s truly browsable.

Derek Powazek: “Searching vs. Browsing: 1/19/05

Last Tuesday Google, MSN, Yahoo! and an unprecedented group of blog toolset providers announced a solution that aims to prevent comment spam.

Will it definitely work? Will there be unintended consequences? Those are the kinds of hard questions that sometimes keep people from trying difficult things in the first place. On that score – I applaud this. It’s difficult get developers to agree on the simplest things and the cooperation is truly impressive.

Simply put – “nofollow” will allow site maintainers, like myself, to decide whether some links are worthy of getting a PageRank (search engine) boost, or not. We can do that by adding an attribute to links users post in our comments, but truth be told, we can do this to any other links we put on our sites as well.

Anil Dash thinks this is a good thing. Shelley Powers worries about its effect on conversation. John Battelle, someone who is still undecided, worries about the same thing. The Register declares this contributes to “the Balkanized web”.

I’m not sure I’d go that far. In fact, I don’t know exactly what to think yet. I do know a few things:

1. This doesn’t change any of my habits when posting comments on other sites. Not a whit. When I post a link in conversation, I do it to be read by the folks reading that thread – I value the conversation – not the PageRank boost. So you elitists who look down on that practice can stuff it.

2. Robert Scoble is right – the idea of using “nofollow” to link to things I disagree with or want to slam is… enticing. I’m not saying it’s right – but it sure is interesting. For example, if I wanted to tell you about a hate site that I think is downright evil, but don’t want to give it any “google juice” – I can now do so. You can see how this can be abused though right?

3. I can see one or more large media companies decide to use nofollow as the default for external links. I think education and monitoring will help to dissuade, but not eliminate, this from happening. PageRank isn’t an entitlement. And big media has more of it than you my fellow bloggers. This is a new tool for them to influence it – if they decide to. I hope not. I could be wrong.

We’ll just have to see how all this plays out.

Jon Udell has done a screencast of the changes Wikipedia’s page on it has gone thru. Fascinating and educational to watch for anybody interested in how a Wikipedia page evolves over time and in the open. via Jonathon Delacour.