(2003-04-16) Wikiword As Topic

With all the discussion of OPML directories and Easy News Topics and Topic Exchange, I thought I'd throw out a different perspective.

I think of every WikiWord as a micro Topic or Category. And the links across nodes in a Wiki create a graph of relations among Topics, analogous to a hierarchy of topics (Interest Graph). Which could allow some sort of Network Flow model to weight the match of a new node (e.g. WikiWeblog entry) to an area of interest. This smells more evolvable than the top-down approaches. Need to hash this out a bit more on WikiWeb...

(May7'03) You could even this of this as a dirty Semantic Web, as Mark Nottingham has pointed out (OK, it's limited; I'm not sure how you'd get any other predicates in there. But you can do some nifty stuff in there; by using certain objects on a page and then doing searches on multiple facets, you can capture a lot of information.) (with verb-related follow-up) (Most of the scenarios I have in mind right now would use the containing page as the subject, a special syntax to denote the Wiki Verb, and some delimited text following the Wiki Verb as the object.). And Sister Sites provides auto-linking across wikis when the node-names match, which is even cooler...