BBC: In Search of Cultural Identifiers
From the BBC Radio Labs blog: In Search of Cultural Identifiers (lots of links missing–go read the full post)
OpenLibrary are looking to enhance this model to allow grouping of publications into works which is fantastic news. If you can contribute code or knowledge I’d encourage you to do so. And the BBC isn’t all that interested in products. Neither are users.
If I tell someone that I’m reading Crash they generally don’t care if I’m reading this version or this version or this version. What’s interesting isn’t the product but the cultural artifact. It’s the same story with programmes. Radio 7′s David Copperfield isn’t a dramatisation of this or this or this, it’s a dramatisation of this – the abstract cultural artifact or work.
The problem is probably so obvious it hardly warrants a blog post but now I’ve started… Lots of websites exist to shift products. So when they’re created the developers model products not looser cultural artifacts. And because the cultural artifact isn’t modelled it doesn’t have a URL, isn’t aggregatable and can’t be pointed at. As Tom Coates pointed out people use links to explain, disambiguate and clarify meaning. If something isn’t given a URL it doesn’t exist in the vocabulary of the web.
(Via Ed Summers and Eduardo Leite.)