OK, I am honestly confused at the outrage over the smart tags. In
fact, when I first saw smart tags, I thought "this is a validation of
Dave Winer's ideas about editthispage." Since anyone can make
smarttags (and I have seen some non-MS versions already deployed; one
for doctors, to allow a particular group of doctors to link directly
to relevant medical applications on their intranet when particular
things appear), and since the user is the one who ultimately chooses
which smart tags he or she will view, it seems like the ultimate
democratic tool. The SDK for creating smart tags was available long
before the release of smart tags, and it is really not that difficult
to create these things.

It is quite possible, for example, for slashdot to create a smart tag
for their fans to download, which will point to open source versions
of any commercial software tool that happens to be mentioned in a
page. Not only is this sort of thing likely, it is exactly the sort
of thing that smart tags are hoping will happen. Saying that one
company will control smart tags is like saying that IBM would try to
build a computer that only ran software produced by IBM. This is one
reason why third voice failed, and this is a reason that comet cursor
has difficulties -- you get only what they give you. If someone
makes a smart tag that lots of people like, those people use IE.
This could perhaps explain why the smart tag SDK has been available
for so long. Smart Tag *is* a platform and *must* be a platform; it
would be bizarre to think otherwise.

BTW, I have seen a few implementations of people making their own
smart tags. One was a hospital group that uses smart tags that
automatically connect the doctor to relevant intranet apps when
certain keywords are recognized.

Also note that a smart tag is *not* a hyperlink, and does *not*
replace any hyperlinks that might exist. The so-called "smart tag"
is not as obtrusive as a hyperlink, and must be deliberately "rolled
open" by a user who is interested in seeing what sort of actions the
smart tag engine has suspected are possible. Has anyone who is
complaining about this actually used a smart tag? I hope so -- my
description is poor material to use for sake of argument, and I would
hope that people have actually looked at the thing they are
villifying.

Next, I hope people realize that smart tags are aimed at "actions"
and not necessarily "hyperlinks". I could hover over a person's name
for example, "roll open" the smart tag, and have it dial the person
on the telephone. So you can also hyperlink. Big deal.

Now, the really subversive part of smart tags is that they allow
someone like slashdot to attach actions to a page that was not
necessarily created by them. This is where I have perhaps
misunderstood the idea of "editthispage", which technically allows
only approved "editors" to edit a page. But on the other hand, the
smart tag does not modify the site (please use a smart tag before
arguing with this). And it seems that the decision of whether or not
to have smart tags available should be up to the user, not the site
owner. A smart tag is nothing more than a metadata plugin that
allows people to share metadata. It is as if you have hired a person
from slashdot to sit with you as you browse the web and whisper in
your ear "psst, you can get that software for free over here"
whenever you go to a page that has commercial software on it. It
seems frankly quite facist to insist that your users not be permitted
to browse your site with whatever little helpers they like. It is
like a store owner kicking your wife out of the store because she
keeps telling you "those tools are too expensive". If the user
doesn't like the little whispers they get about the pages they visit,
they'll ask their smart tag to go sit in the car.

Furthermore, smart tags are *exactly* about sharing metadata.
Metadata is "data about data". For example, consumer reports
provides metadata that rates the stuff that advertising companies
tell you. If all of consumer reports metadata could be vetoed by the
companies they reported on, that would sort of defeat the purpose,
right? Metadata *must* be independent (in a "freedom" sense) of the
data. Would I pay money to consumer reports for a smart tag that
takes me to reviews of products mentioned on pages I am visiting?
You bet!! Can you choose to *not* buy the consumer reports smart tag
if you think those guys are liars? You bet!! Like any metadata,
users are free to choose whichever metadata sources they trust (or
none at all). The *only* thing that smart tags do is make it
possible to get that metadata.

The web up to this point has allowed only exchange of data. Tim
Berners-Lee's vision of the next phase of the web is about allowing
people to share metadata. The web blew away the boundaries of
publishing by allowing anyone to be a publisher. Of course, only
techies could be publishers up until the point that blogs made it
much easier to publish. The next stage of the web, as envisioned by
lots of smart people at the W3C, is to allow anyone to publish
metadata about anything else. Smart tags are very much like the
first stages of the web in that anyone can publish metadata, so long
as they learn the technical side, and they need to advertise in
search engines, etc. to get people aware of their metadata. I hope
it is not too long before publishing metadata becomes much easier;
like blogging. In fact, in some ways Third Voice made metadata
sharing as easy as blogging, but unlike smart tags, Third Voice
supported only the types of metadata that they thought you should
neeed (you could not publish your own different types of metadata --
only annotations allowed). In any case, implementing smart tags was
like trying to lay a few miles of railroad. There is a long way to
go before we have everything TimBL envisioned. But we are just the
laborers dragging these rails and can only do so much.

Finally, I suspect that the particular nationality (oh, I
mean "corporate affiliation") of the laborers who agreed to lay the
railroad track is a large part of the objection people have. So
please for a moment pretend that "smart tags" is simply a plug-in for
IE/Office that has been developed by some small company that does
consulting for Unix and NT. They realize that the idea is quite
compelling and they also know that they need to get lots of other
people to make cool smart tags so that consumers have choice and a
reason to use this platform. So what do you suppose they would do?
Well, they would probably want to put together a few tags that could
show off the power of the platform and get other tag providers
excited. They would probably look at doing something that had broad
appeal and was not too controversial -- something like a dictionary.
They would probably avoid something controversial like political
party information (and people will get their "politics" smart tags
from their political party office, NRA, or whatever anyway). They
would have just about zero incentive to try developing every smart
tag a person would want; why do all of that work when they are not a
gomez.com or consumer reports anyway?? So far, do you still hate this
company? If they were finally noticed by some other big company and
purchased for wider distribution of the technology, would it then
suddenly become immoral? This isn't meant to be argumentative, I am
honestly curious. So I want to know which parts of this make people
so alarmed:

1. Is it the sharing of metadata that is alarming?
2. Is it the fact that control over viewing the metadata lies solely
in the hands of the users and cannot be taken away by someone who
wishes to suppress users access to collateral information?
3. Is it the fact that a particular company wrote this, and it would
be more acceptable from someone else?

Thank you,
Joshua