Hum... by my calculations Twain should be an Ad Sense
millionaire about the time the sun goes into its red
giant phase and consumes the earth.
Regarding tagging, it obviously has a lot of hype
surrounding it. However, it can be extremely useful. For
example, if you wanted to find some pictures of
something obscure... say like a bougainvillea plant, you
might try this search:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/Bougainvillea
If you spend a little time browsing through these search
results, you'll find pictures and sites that you'd never
find by any other means (including Google). Can't say
that this is real "mainstream" yet, but shows the power
of tagging.
Oh, and I'd argue that it is Yahoo!, Google, et al.'s
job to figure out that the tag "weather" is similar to
the tag "wx"... that is some folks use the weather tag
while others use the wx tag. Some sort of
hyper-parallel-fuzzylogic-datamining magic should be
able to create "standard" names for things from
everyone's tag chaos.
Regarding "There is a reason why big music labels ARE
big and why they seem formulaic." Yes, there is a
reason: self space at Wal-Mart is limited. Therefore a
small number of bands end up selling almost all the
music. The hyperglobalinterweb changes the distribution
paradigm. I feel that this is/will have a huge effect on
the music and especially talk radio. For example, you
can now get more quality, "indie" technology news and
editorial via podcasting then there are hours in the
day. This is something that you couldn't do just one
year ago.
I'm also big on the future of internet-specific devices.
I've got a Dell PDA which I use exclusively as an RSS
news reader along with some light web browsing. It
really kicks ass for checking up on your RSS feeds via
Bloglines. The only thing that counts for me on
this device is the web browser (which, by the way, is a
piece of crap).
Word on cell phones. As long as the carriers stand
between the users and the content, this entire industry
will remain the internet on training wheels. Same hype,
different number in front the "G" and on the end of
"200".
-d