Twine Part Deux: Cats, Porn and Tibet

I appreciate the lively discourse both inside and outside the Twine beta. I still have my doubts, but I thought it best to use an outside benchmark for usability and utility. The best standard I have ever found (thanks to Tom Woodward) is from Ethan Zuckerman from his Cute Cat Theory of Digital Activism:

Sufficiently usable read/write platforms will attract porn and activists.

If there’s no porn, the tool doesn’t work.

if there are no activists, it doesn’t work well.

How do the cats fit into all of this? Zuckerman:

Web 1.0 was invented to allow physicists to share research papers.

Web 2.0 was created to allow people to share pictures of cute cats

With web 2.0, we’ve embraced the idea that people are going to share pictures of their cats, and now we build sophisticated tools to make that easier to do. as a result, we’re creating a wealth of tech that’s extremely helpful for activists. There are twin revolutions going on - the ease of creating content and the ease of sharing it with local and global audience.

So back into Twine I went. Sure enough, there was a twine on cute cats, tags for porn (though I am not sure why waterfowl is tagged “adult”) and a twine for Free Tibet! So perhaps I was a bit to harsh. I will continue to use Twine and wait for the advanced functionality greater participation will enable.

The true semantic web really can’t depend on folksonomies and participatory tagging alone. It will rise or fall on the content owners belief that their content is important. At least important enough to mark up semantically with an aim for comprehension, not SEO. We need more attention to structure and content, and less search engine pixie dust for the semantic web to really work. I hope, in the end, sites like Twine can help support and add value to those efforts.