Interview from the Edge: David Swedlow on Beyond Folksonomies

We're talking today with David Swedlow, who is hosting the panel discussion on Beyond Folksonomies at the 2006 SXSW Interactive conference in Austin, Texas, March 11-13.

I'm going to borrow the panel description from SXSW because it sheds some light on the topics we're covering with David.

As the web evolves, contextual navigation is increasingly necessary. The top-down, authoritarian, Semantic Web approach is way too restrictive, and the bottom-up, free-love, rebelliousness of folksonomies is way too permissive. What's next? A compromise of extremes? A middle-out approach? Something completely different?

David and I jump into the deep end of the pool on a variety of topics that are at the edge of the computing scene. If you've been playing around with Delicious bookmarks, technorati tags - social tagging, tag clouds and memetrackers like Memeorandum, TailRank, Megite, etc. - then you'll find this conversation interesting. If you've been following Steve Gillmor and the Gillmor Gang discussions on Attention Trust, then keep listening. We delve into that as well. That topic led us into a discussion around one's identity on the web and what that will mean in this new web environment.

David also talks about a shift coming in website marketing, away from counting page views or unique visitors to learning more about a person's attention and focus at a website. This is more than just recording what they visit at the site; it's more two-way. We talk about how you might log your web activity and make this attention log available to others upon request. Maybe they pay you for it! 

Listen in now to get in on all this. I totally enjoyed my time with David. I hope you do too. Be sure to check out David's blog at http://www.opposablemind.com/ for more of his creative and insightful thinking.