Nick Denton just revealed that he’s going to allow people to tag their comments on his Gawker websites, so related comments will be sifted and sorted together.
Let’s say you want to say something about Vogue magazine editor Anna Wintour. You simply write it, tag it with a little HASHTAG (that’s a pound sign for you uninitiated) and her name, and voila, everything you and everyone else writes with that tag goes onto the Anna Wintour page on the site — presumably with all the stuff the Web site’s editors have written about her, as well. All on one page for all the world to see.
Denton says he doesn’t know what will happen with the new system and that he expects “anarchy.” But he did tell the Nieman Labs website that he kind of hopes it becomes a dark Facebook, where “your friends and your enemies fight over” what it says on your “wall.” It presumably could work with companies, brand names, and, really, any category of stuff. People could tag anything that makes their stomach roll with “HASHTAGquesy” or devilishly mark an entry about Coke with a Pepsi hashtag.
As usual, Nick Denton is being an evil genius. He’s brilliant in the way he threads the needle between editorial control and letting the crowd speak. And he’s also appealing to our base nature, and begging us to have at it with each other — on his blogs, of course, so he gets the traffic and the benefits. He notes that even as the blog gets more professional — controlled editorially by editors — he wants the Gawker community to continue to contribute.
So, what’s worse: Being tagged on Gawker, or being left off? You decide.
Dorian Benkoil, the host of the WebTV series Naked Media, is a principal at Teeming Media, a digital media events, research and editorial business consultancy.
