FooCamping… semantics and folksonomies and other things i don't really understand.

I’m in a session about folksonomies and sharing data.. folks are throwing around words (ontology, folksonomies, containers, etc) that I’m trying to google/lookup on Wikipedia as fast as possible. It’s at times like this I realize I’m not really a smart guy.

I’m waiting for someone to ask me about Mahalo and how we’re addressing these issues and the best thing I can come up with it “umm… we find the best links and give them to people looking for them.”

Jesse Robbins says he’s a consultant for a company called Swivel that is a wiki for data. Looks interesting: http://www.swivel.com/

Chris Messena is talking about mashing up data about movie reviews from Netflix, IMDB, and Rotten Tomatoes and orbiting them around each other and that some energy comes out of it. Like putting two datasets together produces some energy… I don’t get it. Chris has a very cool red wrapper on his laptop.

Tom Carden, who I don’t know, is talking about how hard it is to get from chaos (like a folksonomies) to an ordered structure takes a lot of work. I think that’s what he said.

There are some point floating around about Facebook being open and MySpace being closed. However, I don’t think that the folks talking about that understand that Facebook being open is just a genius strategy to close out MySpace, and that Facebook is not open at all. Once you make your application into Facebook you’re dependent on Facebook for those users and you can never leave. You’re better off making your application a widget and dropping it into facebook/myspace then mucking it up and being dependent on Facebook down the road… right? I guess that is Facebooks gambit: open up to lock startups in.