Sean Coon muses about how Silly String completes trees. Well, actually, he muses about the shape of language, wrapped in an homage to his felicitously-named mentor, Bill Readings.

I like a lot what Sean says and the people he quotes from. And it makes clear just how un-tree-like is the structure of language. Ferdinad de Saussure, whom Sean quotes, talks about words not as leaves on forking conceptual branches — a picture Aristotle might have liked and that WordNet assumes — but words as standing in distinction from other words. Saussure’s view does not resolve into anything like a tree. At least as far as I remember. Likewise, when the British philosopher John Austin says that the word “real” usually doesn’t signify some positive quality but merely flags a distinction in mode — we only talk about a real gun if we need to distinguish it from a toy gun, a fake gun carved from soap, or a pretend gun made by pointing a finger — the meaning of “real” does not consist of its position in a tree.

Language, it seems to me, generally lacks the basic properties that make a tree a tree, with the one important exception that sometimes concepts contain other concepts. But there’s lots more to trees than that. E.g., a tree structure has a top and bottom. The elements are discrete. Each element hangs from one branch. All the branches signify the same basic relationship. The branches inherit essential characteristics from the branches they’re attached to. Branches have essential characteristics. Meanings can be traced and paths can be followed. The organization is neat, not messy. And even the basic notion of containment is a metaphor and way too general: Does “color” contain “red” the way “nation” contains “city” and the way “actor” contains “David Caruso” ? And, by the way, “yard” does not contain “dog” even if your dog is in your yard and “stomach” does not contain “peanut” even if you’ve just eaten one.

Sean’s post doesn’t get stuck in the tree metaphor. On the contrary. He uses Silly String to remind us that the tree of language has messy connections among its leaves. He points out that language isn’t a single tree, the same for all. He refers usefully to Saussure and Barthes.

So why stick with the tree metaphor at all? It’s gotten in the way of understanding for about 2,000 years now. (Porphyry is usually credited with being the first to draw categories in the shape of a tree.) Except in the limited domains where we carefully structure language into a tree, I think we ought to drop it.

I tried to get at this, or at least hint at it, in my reply to Julian Bond’s comment on a post of mine a few days ago. Or, as a certain book puts it, everything is miscellaneous…although that phrase by itself is misleading unless we immediately ask: Then why didn’t it stay that way?

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Mitch Ratcliffe posts about yet another threat to our Internet: “Wisconsin Republican F. James Sensenbrenner’s draft legislation that would require Internet service providers to deliver records of users’ surfing to the federal government.” [Tags: digital_rights mitch_ratcliffe]

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EatMyHamster.com is Digg for humor. The site — a living beta — lets users submit funny pages and raise them or lower them on the list. Good idea and well implemented.

The site authors say they’re doing to introduce some form of social filtering or groups, to handle the extreme differences in taste in humor. Or maybe some form of categorization and/or tagging. Maybe an entire Dewey Decibellylaff Classification system is in order… [Tags: humor]

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EirePreneur has a fascinating post on research by the Weizmann Institute of Science that a “tree-like hierarchy…may be a basic underpinning of language.”

There’s no question in my mind that arranging concepts so that A includes B which includes C is fundamental to how we think. But I’d only call that a tree if C can only hang from one branch. If it can hang from lots of branches simultaneously, we have something way messier and more complex.

From the article about the article:

Mathematically, these concept vectors can go in many directions, and reading the text can be thought of as a tour along paths in the resulting network. The multidimensional concept vectors seem to span a “web of ideas.” The scientists’ work suggests this network is based on a tree-like hierarchy that may be a basic underpinning of language. The reader or listener can reconstruct the hierarchical structure of a text, and thus the multidimensional space of ideas, in his or her mind to grasp “the author’s meaning.”

Hard to to tell from this exactly what the research showed. I haven’t yet found the original… (Thanks to Lisa Williams for the link.) [Tags: taxonomy everything_is_miscellaneous eirepreneur]

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Yesterday’s post about what tags should link to has spurred some really interesting discussion. As a result, I’ve mocked up a page that has some of the features and properties I’d like. It’s where you’d be taken if you clicked on a tag at the bottom of one of my posts. (I use “taxonomy” as my example.) It aggregates all of my posts tagged “taxonomy” and includes pointers to the Wikipedia “taxonomy” article, Flickr photos tagged “taxonomy”, and Technorati’s aggregation of everyone’s posts tagged “taxonomy.” One of the advantages of this approach: The page is mine and is (in theory) dynamic, so if Technorati (say) goes out of business, I can change the template and thus not have every page contain a broken link.

Unfortunately, I don’t know how to code create such pages automatically. [Tags: tagging tags]

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Someone during a break at the Syndicate Conference told me about the Fiskars scissors site where users are engaged in lively conversations about scissors! Scissors! I would have said that a commodity like scissors would not develop enough interest to support this type of thing. But I would have been wrong. [Tags: marketing fiskars]

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Some people, including me, feel awkward about using Technorati as the namespace for our tags. (The namespace is the place that your tags link to.) I use Technorati not because — disclosure — I am on their board of advisors but because I mistakenly thought I had to if I wanted my tags indexed by Technorati. Nope. Even if you link to some other site, Technorati will index your tags.

So, what other namespaces are there? I asked Dave Sifry and he suggested Wikipedia as an obvious choice. That would mean that the tags at the end of your article would link to the Wikipedia article by that name. I’ve done that with the tags for this post, so if you click on the tag “tagging,” it takes you to the Wikipedia entry on tagging. Normally, my tags take you to the Technorati page that aggregates other pages tagged with that tag.

E.g., Instead of <a href=”http://www.technorati.com/tags/tagging” rel=”tag”> tagging</a> I’m using, <a href=”http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/tagging” rel=”tag”> tagging</a>

Of course, where there is no Wikipedia entry, e.g., “everything is miscellaneous,” you get a broken link.

So, shouldn’t there be a non-vendor, open site that can serve as a namespace? But what would that site do with the tags it’s aggregating? And what would it take for it to aggregate those tags? Wouldn’t it have to have Technorati’s infrastructure? In other words, wouldn’t you have to rebuild Technorati?

I happen to be a fan of Technorati (and not because of my relationship to the company). I know and trust Dave Sifry. But there’s always a risk to counting on a particular company to be a continuing part of your own infrastructure. If Technorati goes under, or gets bought and becomes evil, I have several years of posts pointing at it. Plus, I actually like the tag services Technorati provides. So, I’m not sure what to do… [Tags: tags technorati taxonomy everything_is_miscellaneous]

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Richard is head of Edelman PR, the third largest PR agency in the world. [Disclosure: I consult to Edelman, reporting to Richard.] Eric Norlin is interviewing him. (Robert Scoble bowed out because his mother is ill. Best wishes, Robert.)

[Josh Hallet has posted the audio of the this session.]

Q: Why are you pitching bloggers without reading them?

A: On behalf of the PR field, I apologize. There’s a better way. If not, bloggers will revolt.

Q: What’s different about Edelman?

A: We try to be a good example. We don’t always succeed.

Q: So, how would you pitch Robert Scoble?

A: You’d probably send him an email saying that you saw something he wrote, that you represent a company, would you like a sample without any strings attached? Would you like to get info about this company in the future? Permission based!

Q: Does the offer to provide product without strings scare companies?

A: Yes. Tech companies are scared the least. Heavy industry is worried the most. The mentality of corporations is the control of the message. We’re saying that if you want to be credible, you can’t control the message. E.g., GM Tahoe ads.

Q: If your product doesn’t suck, why do companies worry? It’s like 7th graders on the playground.

A: Marketers want to know they’re getting a certain audience at a certain frequency. The ad agencies have impressed on them for 30 years that you go from impressions to action. We — all of this in the room — deconstructing that model. You can’t have a topdown conversation where you buy a certain number of impressions. We’re saying it’s a horizontal conversation, peer to peer. It can turn bad for a company but that’s good because you can learn something. We you do media training you learn the message triangle: Always come back to the three same messages. Kerry lost the debates because he was media trained while Bush came across as a regular guy. So, the message triangle is gone from Edelman’s lexicon. That you can only communicate three messages is baloney. It’s a great opportunity for PR if done properly. If it’s message triangles and top down and spin, we’ll be flushed down the toilet of history.

Q: Are the ad agencies getting this?

A: Somewhere between panic, fear and nerves. The ad agency world has a huge reservoir of people who know how to make 30 second films. They don’t have a model for making money in the new world. The best work being done in ads is being done by younger agencies that don’t have an installed capability of doing 30 second ads. The ad guys are terified. It’s ruining their revenue model. They should be at this conference, but they’re not.

Q: Who reads press releases these days?

A: I had a discussion with _____ [missed it] who said the press release needs reinvention. Add tags to the press release: This is the company description, this is the supporting quote. He said he doesn’t want our news judgment because PR companies don’t have news judgment.

Q: Plus every company is the leading provider of…

A: It’s a word that will go away.

Q: So what replaces press releases?

A: We’ll give a set of information with tags, so you’ll organize it the way you want. [Sounds like a microformat to me.]

Q: How does a PR agency deal with the fact that a 12 yr old in Australia can break news as quickly as John Markoff of the NY Times? (A Scoble question.)

A: You have to be listening to the voices, and not limited to those you’ve always thought of as your sources of news. Stories can start with those of little “authority” (in Technorati speak). Second, stories frequently start in the blogosphere; the PR agencies don’t generally understand that. The Dove Real Beauty campaign started when Gawker noticed. We’re working with Technorati on a system that will work across seven languages — PR agencies willl be able to watch seven languages, real time, for your clients.

Q: Are big clients up on all this?

A: It’s a challenge. We’re working with having our clients show bloggers their products in advance of launch.

Q: What about Wal-Mart? Did you pay bloggers? [This is not actually what the accusation was. The issue was that some bloggers used pro-Wal-Mart information from Edelman without attributing it to Edelman or Wal-Mart.]

A: No, we did not pay bloggers. We look for bloggers who are positively inclined toward Wal-Mart, our client. Then we try to establish a conversation with them. A guy from our DC office sent a message to bloggers identifying himself as a PR agent and asking whether the bloggers would like more information about what Wal-Mart is doing about health care, etc. That got misrepresented by the NY Times. But: We identified ourselves and our client, told them our interests, and asked if they wanted a conversation. We followed every rule of engagement. It’s our right and our responsibility to do precisely this.

Jeff: The NYT requested a standard of bloggers that the NYT doesn’t hold to. It wants bloggers to identify where their info came from.

Richard: It would have been better if the bloggers had atttributed that the info had come from us for Wal-Mart. We didn’t say “You must mention Wal-Mart’s name as the source.”

Jeff: Bloggers don’t know the rules. They need training.

Richard: We will tell bloggers that they should mention the source.

Eric: What will PR look like in 5 years?

A: PR involved earlier on in the product life cycle: We’ll be a means by which a company can reach out to bloggers to affect prod development. Deconstructed press release. A more robust role in the corporate suite. I don’t see PR as being disintermediated. David Weinberger [hey, that’s me!] thinks PR gets in the way; no one wants to talk to the PR person. I think we should want the flak. We are indeed agents in that we represent our clients. I don’t see that PR has to be a negative connotation, which it currently has. We have to be about truth, listening, learning, and telling the corporation stuff it doesn’t want to hear. Five years from now, I hope PR people have the bvalls to say what they know. We need to give clients good advice. (We have thirty people blogging at Edelman. You learn by falling on your face.)

Q: What’s the retraining process at Edelman like?

A: It’s not easy. We have 30 people blogging. We probably have 15-20% who are regularly in touch with bloggers. That’s pathetic. I have to be tougher about it.

Q: (Audience) A blogger got sued by an ad agency, who then dropped the suit. Is it a good idea to sue bloggers.

A: No.

Q: Are you modeling the topology of the blogosphere?

A: There isn’t a model yet.

Q: Is PR getting smarter by looking at how groups interact, etc.

A: PR agencies are getting slammed for bad behavior, as they should.

Q: Who among the consumer brands get this best?

A: Unilever gets it.

Q: Who’s the best publisher – newspaper, magazine, etc.?

A: Washingtonpost.com is interesting.

Q: Do you advise clients to do executive blogs?

A: If the executive has an interesting voice.

Eric ends it by having a moment of silence for Robert Scoble and his mom. Amen. [Tags: pr richard_edelman syndicate]

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“Conferences suck…” is Jeff‘s opening slide at his opening keynote at Syndicate. He’s going to let us talk about what we want to talk about. But for this we have to figure out what we mean by “syndication.” He gives us three choices. Syndication is about: 1. Media; 2. Media; 3. 3. Technology. We choose money and syndication as our topic.

Jeff kicks it off. RSS is a great way of distributing stuff, he says. To monetize RSS, we need metrics: How many views, how many users, etc. Bittorrent has put a wrapper on torrents so they can be sold. Can we put a similar wrapper on feeds, Jeff asks. He also talks about an open source ad marketplace for blogs that he wrote about in AdAge last week. Advertisers want to advertise through blogs. For this we need metrics and a marketplace. Next he wonders whether there’s a place for paid, subscription-based feeds. Finally, he raises the issue of DRM.

Person: People steal my feed. they put it on their sites. So I put ads in my feed.

Person: If you have an open source ad marketplace and open source metadata, then how about open source algorithms for filtering what we get?

BlogPulse: What kind of data about bloggers do you need? Content? Keywords? Traffic? etc.

Eric Norlin: Marketers don’t know what they want because their model is that they capture something about the users and then blast something to them when they don’t want it.

Jeff: We could look at who initiates conversations. The demographics of the authors matter…

Doc: You can’t measure everything that matters.

Me: The static maps of links that establish “authority” miss the flow of ideas and conversation that may start on low-ranked sites, flow across, up and back. The static maps overemphasize that type of authority.

Jeff: Flickr’s “interestingness” works without dealing with popularity (because the nudies would always be the most popular). Instead Flickr looks at the social relationships — especially when people look at photos outside of their social group. Not the wisdom of the crowd but the taste of the crowd.

Scott Abel: We should be selective about what we syndicate. I want to make people come to my site where the ads are. I’ll syndicate some little things.

Most people in the room provide full text. The guy from USA Today only provides headlines. People in the audience don’t like this. USA Today is looking at how to provide full text with ads.

Jeff: We want to be able to subscribe to a tag within a blog. jeff talks about Edgeio which lets you tag an item for sale, or a job posting, etc., so you can have a decentralized marketplace. Likewise, we should be able to find restaurant reviews by looking for items tagged “restaurant,” “mexico” and “nyc.” [How structured does this metadata need to be? Microformats? Semantic Web?]

Person: More metadata on feeds?

Person: Is there info about how many people read feeds only in their aggregator.

Feedburner1: There’s no material difference in clickthroughs for full and partial feeds. [Surprising!]

Feedburner2: We provide data on subscribers, views, clicks and a measure of reads.

Jeff: I wish my aggregator would tell me which ones I’m not reading. Also, I’d like temporary feeds: A World Cup feed that dies.

Jeff: I use tags for internal navigation. Others use them to indicate for others what a post is about. I want both. And then I’ll be over-tagged like I’m over-bookmarked.

Person: Technorati tags suck. They don’t show up.

Dave Sifry (technorati): Sorry! We’re not perfect. I’m sorry we missed your tags. Talk with me later…

Person: Why are the same blogs featured on Technorati all the time?

Sifry: If you claim your blog and put in your photo, you should be featured…And about tag spam: Spam only becomes a problem when it has no accountability. One person’s Spam is another person’s dinner. The key question is whether it’s accountable. [No, the question is whether it shows up when I don’t want to see it.]

Jeff: How about the machine-generated spam blogs?

Sifry: That’s solvable. We’ll talk…

Person: There’s not enough metadata. Dave Winer doesn’t even put titles on his posts, so why do you think people will put tags on their posts?

Person: Technorati doesn’t fit in with Delicious, etc…

Me: We need an open source tag namespace innstead of having to use the Technorati url…

Sifry: You are wrong, sir! You can use any namespace you want. [Yay!]

[That is: Instead of <a href=”http://www.technorati.com/tags/sampletag” rel=”tag”> sampletag</a> You can use whatever url you want, e.g., <a href=”http://www.somewhere.com/sampletag” rel=”tag”> sampletag</a>]

Person: Technorati didn’t pick up any of my tags…

Sifry: I’ll be right there…

[Tags: syndicate jeff_jarvis tags technorati]

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Undoubtedly because everything I brought with me, including the inside of a toothpaste tube, got soaked last night as I walked the few blocks from the train station to the Syndicate conference, I woke up this morning with a punny headline in my freshly-rinsed brain. Your job is to come up with a news item for which it would be appropriate:

As always, the prize consists of winning. [Tags: puzzles syndicate]

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