I've discovered a blog post, dated Feb. 6, very similar to my post of Feb. 26. It makes the same application of the ideas behind "collaborative human interpreter" and "Amazon Mechanical Turk." And surely, many others probably had similar ideas before either of us. In a given age, certain ideas are "ripe for the picking" or even drop from the branch of their own volition; it is inevitable that they will appeal to someone. These ideas are "nearish" to anyone living in 2006--a world of Open Source, Annotea, Wikipedia, Flickr, and Blogger Comments for Firefox.

Distributed tagging takes advantage of the fact that the person looking at the artifcat is "nearish" to it, affectively (because she is interested) and perhaps cognitively (she may know more about it than the average person who is not looking at it).

One thing the poster probably intends but does not make clear, and that the comments do not seem to recognize, is that the tagging can be done by any reader of the article. If the tagger is not the "official" tagger, the tags can be stored on a separate annotation server. This is the model of the W3C's Annotea and of Blogger Comments for Firefox.

The benefit of not assuming that taggers are experts is that tagging can be first "prototyped" in one context (for example, an individual) and then revised and "vouched for" in successively larger spheres (e.g. a patient support group or other peer workgroup) and finally "approved" by someone with real so-say over the orginal published work or its subject matter. This would echo in metadata the same process by which data becomes encoded gradually into "standard of care."

Now we just need a browser toolbar that combines Annotea, the metadata schema used at Biomed Central, Blogger Comments for Firefox, and social networking. (Since this idea is so "nearish"(far too obvious to patent) I want to get it explicitly into the public domain, now, to prevent anyone's ever patenting any portion of it.

Read the Feb. 06 blog post at ghastlyfop.com .