dwineman: OK, so Tumblr did something weird with my last post: after it had been up for a while, without permission or notice, someone or something added two new tags that I can’t edit or remove: #tech and #advertising. Tech? Sure, I guess it was a tech post. Advertising, though: um, not really? Huh? If you click on the magic tags, you’ll see that the tag search pages for tech and advertising are special; they have some extra filters at the top (Radar/Popular/Everything) and a list of editors. There’s even a FAQ that explains how the whole thing works. I’m not sure how to feel about this. On the one hand, it’s cool that people thought my post merited inclusion on those Featured Tag Pages, by whatever standard. On the other hand, though, tags aren’t just metadata. They’re part of the content, and they can add context and humor — some people use them like Twitter hashtags to deliver a sotto voce punchline that alters the interpretation of the entire post. On a publishing platform like this, there’s a kind of social contract that my blog’s content is my own; if someone other than me is going to edit that content before or after publication, then it had better be with my consent. So having tags become something not entirely under the control of the author changes things. In a bad way? I don’t know. But it sure feels weird. That “advertising” tag bugs me, because there was nothing about advertising in my post other than a weak joke at the top in which I pretended to be a social media expert. I think the editorship system may encourage mistakes like this, though: rather than one person or group deciding how each post should be categorized, you have individuals responsible for certain tags, and they each have an incentive to be the one who claims the best posts for his or her section. So the ideal strategy for an editor is to tag every popular post that comes anywhere close to matching the category; careful reading, judiciousness, and attention to detail are not embraced. But that’s Tumblr, I guess. I was just thinking this morning that it’s great to see Tumblr get back to kicking ass after hustling through the downtime issues. I haven’t seen a social network handle discovery with as much potential as what Tumblr has started rolling out over the last few weeks. In order for the quality and signal-to-noise to remain high, there should be no incentive to add that post to #advertising. It’s a hard problem but I think we’re seeing the beginning of something big.

dwineman:

OK, so Tumblr did something weird with my last post: after it had been up for a while, without permission or notice, someone or something added two new tags that I can’t edit or remove: #tech and #advertising. Tech? Sure, I guess it was a tech post. Advertising, though: um, not really? Huh?

If you click on the magic tags, you’ll see that the tag search pages for tech and advertising are special; they have some extra filters at the top (Radar/Popular/Everything) and a list of editors. There’s even a FAQ that explains how the whole thing works.

I’m not sure how to feel about this. On the one hand, it’s cool that people thought my post merited inclusion on those Featured Tag Pages, by whatever standard. On the other hand, though, tags aren’t just metadata. They’re part of the content, and they can add context and humor — some people use them like Twitter hashtags to deliver a sotto voce punchline that alters the interpretation of the entire post. On a publishing platform like this, there’s a kind of social contract that my blog’s content is my own; if someone other than me is going to edit that content before or after publication, then it had better be with my consent.

So having tags become something not entirely under the control of the author changes things. In a bad way? I don’t know. But it sure feels weird. That “advertising” tag bugs me, because there was nothing about advertising in my post other than a weak joke at the top in which I pretended to be a social media expert. I think the editorship system may encourage mistakes like this, though: rather than one person or group deciding how each post should be categorized, you have individuals responsible for certain tags, and they each have an incentive to be the one who claims the best posts for his or her section. So the ideal strategy for an editor is to tag every popular post that comes anywhere close to matching the category; careful reading, judiciousness, and attention to detail are not embraced.

But that’s Tumblr, I guess.

I was just thinking this morning that it’s great to see Tumblr get back to kicking ass after hustling through the downtime issues. I haven’t seen a social network handle discovery with as much potential as what Tumblr has started rolling out over the last few weeks. In order for the quality and signal-to-noise to remain high, there should be no incentive to add that post to #advertising. It’s a hard problem but I think we’re seeing the beginning of something big.

VW’s Fun Theory creates a speed camera lottery

This is really brilliant. Traffic camera set up to take pictures of speeders who then get fined… everyone knows about places that have this. The lottery part is that some of the people going below the speed limit also get their picture taken and win part of the proceeds of the fines from speeders. It lowered speeds in the test area by 22%.