Shooting at Bubbles

In last Friday’s podcast I had a bit to say about this whole lifestreaming idea being put forth by Steve Rubel as a way to unify an individual’s online ramblings whether they be a blog, Twitter or whatever. In the podcast I equated the idea of lifestreaming with being something of a cyber black hole which in the post’s comments Dave Gray thought was possibly being a little unfair and that in his opinion this lifestreaming had merit as a time saver for readers.

Possibly Dave is right but that still doesn’t shake my original feeling about the idea main because regardless of his impression that lifestreaming might promote idea sharing it still requires that I even know of you to be able to read about your ideas, to be able to have a conversation with that person or even others with the same idea.

In that same podcast however I broached the concept of idea streaming or the ability to join many conversations that might all be centered around an idea or concept and since then I have been thinking about how such a thing could be done. Then I realized we already had the very beginnings of a way to do this staring us right in the face – tags.

Currently tags are used as a link back to the Technorati service which allows you to see what other blogs out there might be using the same tag as a way to identify their posts. In this rudimentary fashion they do their job but past Technorati and only being able to list tag linked blogs they really are pretty useless.

But they could very well form the basis of idea streaming if they were fully developed into a universal way to identify not just the topic or content of a post but also ideas or concepts brought about by the posts. This is where Technorati could have really shined and truly provided a service beyond the scope of search engines.

The key for this to work though would have to be the ability to create an RSS feed based on a tag. Say for example you have an interest in artificial intelligence so you would go to a tag warehouse and do a search for that and/or AI as a tag to see if it was even being used as a discussion point. If it is then you can create a RSS feed for it that can be added to your client.

At this point ideas are no longer a matter of hap chance that you will stumble across sites talking about the idea but rather they come to you and are constantly added to as new people enter the conversation by using the tag. This tag warehouse could also be setup to understand tagging methods in other mediums such as Twitter. While Twitter doesn’t currently have any tagging mechanism that is about to change if folks like Stowe Boyd and Chris Messina; who are proposing a hash (#) tagging system for the service, get any traction with their idea.

While most in the tech blogosphere already know of tags and how they work; but for the rest of the web they still are pretty well just hyper-linked words at the end of some bloggers post and this would have to change – it would have to grow beyond the tech b’sphere.

Ideas spread when they are easily accessible, innovation happens when people are easily involved. The way it is now it takes going out and constantly expanding your area of information flow. With idea streaming fed by constantly refreshing feeds based on tags the people come to you and if the concept was built right you could even have an idea recommendation system so that possible related idea tags could be suggested to you.

Do I think that something like this could take off? I don’t know and while I do believe that the concept has merit I am also realistic enough to know that I don’t have the name power to help it gain any traction. That will have to probably be left up to one of the movers and shakers standing by the river of news seeing the idea floating by to take it up and make it; or something like it, come to life.