(2005-03-03) Downes Northern Light

Tim Bray [says](http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2005/02/27/Dubost On N V) that Stephen Downes' Northern Voice session was generally agreed to have been the most controversial of the conference. Downes said:

• a website/service is not a community (Virtual Community). A community has to be based on actual relations among its members

• the Long Tail/Power Law phenomenon is based on poor filtering/Meta Data mechanisms, which result in people linking to the wrong ("random") things/blogs, rather than those that are most salient.

• better tools will change the process, breaking the Power Law phenomenon. He's talking about 3rd-party Meta Data, FOAF, ratings, RssAggregator-s that focus on one's Social Network... because meaning comes from Context, which means it's not contained within a single blog-post in a vacuum, and therefore tagging systems won't work well (to the extent they focus on being an abstraction of a post-in-a-vacuum).