OneBigWeb

Published On: November 30th, 2005  

One of the most exciting innovations in Google Base is the idea of allowing users to define their own schema’s to publish information. We perhaps need a new term to describe what results out of the unification of all these schema’s. How about Folkschemas? Folkschemas are to Schemas as Folksonomies are to Taxonomies!If one wishes to be pedantic, it could be argued that Folksonomies are in fact a subset of Folkschema’s!

Clearly, the value of a folkschema’s and folksonomies is dependent on the level of consensus that exists about the symbols (eg tags, labels, attribute names) and conventions (eg should something be a label or a attribute). The value of the content is greatly diminished if this consensus does not exist. How can this consensus be forged?

One approach would be to ensure that userbase growly slowly over a period of time. Consensus emerges in a very organic manner. This is exactly what contributed to the success of tagging in flickr and delicious.

The other approach would require the application creator to act as a benevolent dictator in defining the schema’s/taxonomies and enforce strict compliance. Once there is a significant amount of content, the restrictions could be relaxed allowing for accretions at the edges of the existing schema.

GoogleBase does come with a set of predefined schema’s. But hardly anyone appears to be adopting them. Neither is there any enforcement nor is there a large body of content which conforms to a particular schema. And, coming from the Google stable, GoogleBase does not have the luxury of growing slowly either. It is due to these reasons that GoogleBase would not be able to compete with niche players like oodle or simplyhired.

Ning is another application which supports user defined schema’s. While Googlebase focuses on commercial content, Ning focusses on social content. Ning appears to be suffering from the same problem of schema stability as GoogleBase is. What Ning perhaps needs is a hub application. Since blogs are at the heart of all social content, a good blogging application on Ning could serve as the hub. Other user created “spoke” apps could provide innovative functionality by exploiting the aggregated blog content.