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.

…The media folks (generalizing) still think that the important effect that blogging is having on them ? and they do believe it’s having an effect ? comes from bloggers who are sorta kinda journalists. But that’s a tiny percentage of the blogosphere. The truly disruptive effect of bloggers comes from the rest of the blogosphere that doesn’t think of itself as journalistic at all. We’re not the farm team for Big Media. We’re a different ballpark entirely.

In fact, we’re not a ballpark at all, of course. The other big gap between us is easy to state but hard to explain: The media is owned. The blogosphere isn’t. We together are building it. The media have to try to get us interested in what they do, but the blogosphere is constructed out of our interests. It’s ours not (just) in the sense of ownership but in the sense of what we care about and what we are.

David Weinberger: 1/22/05

Well said. It made me think of Shelley’s declaration: “I will never issue a disclaimer at this site. Again.”

Ed Cone is looking into blogs about faith or post about it regularly.

Here goes some that come immediately to mind:

Martin Roth’s blogs4God

Heal Your Church Web Site

slacktivist

Official conference blog, webcast, Jeff Jarvis and David Weinberger are blogging it as it happens.

I think too much focus has been on the nebulous word: “Credibility”. The whole idea of getting journalists to embrace blogging and current blogger pundits to recognize journalistic ethics (journalists are not the enemy!) is the real conversation. “Credibility” – well that should be a by-product. What happens when the mass media starts to really dig in and pay many journalists to blog? Everything I’ve read about The News & Record tells me they have the right idea. If you work at a paper, read this now.

That’s what Cringely says and that’s what I’ve been saying at work. I want one. Bad. Richelle has an iBook. I’ve been jealous for far too long 🙂

A great collection to be found here.

Dan says that its time to wave goodbye to the the idea of journalistic objectivity and move on to embrace new (old) principals that are required in this day and age: thoroughness, accuracy, fairness, and transparency. Couldn’t agree more. I’d love to see pundit bloggers agree on these principals. Boy would I.

Meanwhile Jay Rosen says the whole blogger vs. journalist argument is over. I’ve never really subscribed to the idea that it existed since I’ve always looked at blogging a toolset.

Ed Cone shares the smartest thing I’ve read in a while on the subject (I say that because it agrees with what I just said!): “Blogging is a tool, Journalism is an occupation, and Credibility is a goal” from The Head Lemur.

For pundits/journalists/domain experts – credibility is the goal. For the rest of the world – Shelley’s right – it’s about fun, communication, expression and sharing.