Now imagine a world where everything can
have a unique identifier. This
should be
easy, since that's the world we currently live in -- the URL gives us
a
way to create a globally unique ID for anything we need to point to.
Sometimes the pointers are direct, as when a URL points to the contents of a Web
page. Sometimes they are indirect, as when you use an Amazon link to point to a
book. Sometimes there are layers of indirection, as when you use a URI, a
uniform resource identifier, to name something whose location is indeterminate.
But the basic scheme gives us ways to create a globally unique identifier for
anything.
And once you can do that, anyone can label those pointers, can tag those
URLs, in ways that make them more valuable, and all without requiring top-down
organization schemes. And this -- an explosion in free-form labeling of links,
followed by all sorts of ways of grabbing value from those labels -- is what I
think is happening now.