Blog taxonomies/ontologies

Dave Pollard highlights a problem area of global taxonomies and blogs in THE DREADED T-WORD, OR, WHY DOESN'T GOOGLE KNOW HOW TO CLASSIFY BLOGS?.

My comment on his post:

"Dave, it seems to me that we need a whole new way of facilitating the creation of emergent ontologies through socially-focused mechanisms. We need to allow each user and each community of users to describe their identity and content in their own way, yet to share common terms of reference with whom they wish and to the extent of their choice. The evolution of meta-languages with multidimensional commonalities thus becomes part of the organic process of community building. Just as a person subscribes to RSS updates of content from, say, your blog, they could subscribe to update notifications of your personal ontology, and either manually or automatically merge all or selected parts of that update into their personal ontology. People would be free to be as different or similar to one another in their ontology as they wish, but individual freedom on one hand would be balanced against community integration and interoperability of data on the other. Of course, this ontology sharing process doesn't have to be limited to one-to-one interactions. Specialist community sites could create topic-focused uber-ontologies with contributions from the community's various members. These community ontologies would then become a resource for everyone. It's a granular thing. This is one of the things we're working on at i-together and Kendra Initiative."