1. kellan on February 9, 2005 8:35 AM writes...

I've spent some time with the Robots and they're not an "Amazon stealth project". If they're looking for a round of investing in a project that was initially self funded that seems like a fairly normal next step. Mark Fletcher told us yesterday that Bloglines had been talking to Ask Jeeves for several months about the acquisition, I don't think that meant Bloglines was a "stealth Ask Jeeves project".

(I've got a better example involving Google, but alas they're still stealth)

2. W.B. McNamara on February 9, 2005 9:01 AM writes...

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UPDATE: The Tagging story had a big focus on 43 Things. Turns out that 43 Things is a stealth project funded by Amazon. Makes the original title of this post quite prescient. Now that you know who you are sharing it with, you might want to rethink that goal of owning the collected works of Adam Smith.

The holding company responds by blog, saying the social contract still stands. Personally, this kind of private equity is so personal it should have been public in the first place.
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I apologize in advance if there's something that I've missed in the Salon article or elsewhere.

That said, why is it being stated as fact -- here and elsewhere -- that "43 Things is a stealth project funded by Amazon?"

The Salon article constantly shifts between present and future tense when discussing the Amazon investment, which leads me to believe that the author wasn't certain which was the case. The blog post on the Robot Co-op site says that:

"Amazon.com has invested in The Robot Co-op. We think it will get easier to meet our goal to Start a company that survives longer than 2 years though we still have lots of work to do"

...which suggests that 43 Things did not have Amazon funding all the way along. I'll certainly agree that this statement is non-specific enough that it doesn't rule out the possibility of an Amazon founding of 43 Things, it's the only more-or-less definitive statement that I've seen either way.

I'm not yet convinced that there was anything to "make public" until recently, but would appreciate any information that I'm missing.

3. Nick Douglas on February 9, 2005 4:27 PM writes...

Off-topic, but has anyone noticed Tagsurf (http://tagsurf.com/), which builds a tagspace for discussions?

4. Dimitar Vesselinov on February 10, 2005 11:24 PM writes...

Limitations of Tags

Descriptive inconsistency
"One example of the effect of human behaviour and the inherent limitations of manually describing information - albeit from existing descriptions - is illustrated by the results of a US Department of Defense edict, mandating that internal users responsible for authoring documents also create an appropriate description of the content of the document. At first glance, a seemingly sensible and pragmatic decision. However, after many months of activity, it was discovered that the vast majority of documents had been loosely described and tagged as "general". Whilst tagging schemes - and particularly XML - attempts to break away from such generalist terms, it remains dependant upon the same shortcomings of human behaviour that manifest themselves as "inconsistency". An individual's ability to describe information is dependent upon their personal experience, knowledge and opinions. Such "intangibles" vary from person to person and are also dependent upon circumstance, dramatically reducing the effectiveness of the results."

Idea Distancing
"Tags also fail to highlight the relationships between subjects. Termed "idea distancing", there are often vital relationships between seemingly separately tagged subjects such as wing design/low drag and aerofoil/efficiency. The first category may contain information about the way the wings are designed to achieve low air resistance. The latter category discusses ways in which efficient aerofoils are made. Obviously, there will be a degree of overlap between these categories and because of this, a user may be interested in the contents of both."

Not scalable
"In order to be very specific in retrieval and processing of tagged-based documents, the number of tags will need to be very high. For example, tag numbers in a company such as Reuters run into the tens of thousands. However, as the number of tags increases, so does both the effort and the likelihood of misclassification."

High labour costs
"Taxonomy creation and tagging is still a predominantly manual effort requiring input from librarians, users, and IT staff. This means large labour costs involved in making sense of information."

http://autonomy.com/content/Technology/Limitations_Other_Approaches.html