I’ve been very critical of Dave Winer’s comments about Smart Tags on Scripting.Com, but off some Microsoft employee goes to help make Winer’s case for him. Winer posted an e-mail from an MS employee defending Smart Tags. I almost stopped reading after the first paragraph,
I come at this from a non-involved end-user, basing my opinion on my experience to date, as just a “reader” , and as such, an end-user, I love smart-tags. I find it is one of the most user friendly, productive tool we have create since “auto-complete”.
Frankly, Microsoft’s implementation of auto-complete sucks. Its the first thing I disable when forced to use Word. My wife absolutely detests Microsoft because of auto-complete because to truly disable it you have to muddle your way through a long set of menu options, and then hope and pray that Word gets the message.
On the other hand, a later paragraph is downright scary assuming this is not some spoofed e-mail,
To suggest that the author knows best how to write effectively to each individual reader is silly, yet that’s what I understand of you position. When you write a piece, when any author writes a piece, he or she is always at a tremendous advantage over the reader. Theoretically at lease, you have at least familiarity if not command of the topic about which you write. The reader most likely does not. That’s why they are reading, to learn something, to be exposed to new ideas that you do not yet have or understand.
That sort of arrogance is just amazing. This is pretty much what Winer’s been arguing all along — that Microsoft wants to alter people’s content, and along comes this person to say “you’re absolutely right, and that’s a good thing! You should thank us for altering your content.”
On the other hand, the MS employee does add something which was interesting,
Many articles, including yours, accuse smart tags as “re-editing” the work?? I don’t get this, they do no such thing, The orginal work remains unchanged, no new links, no removed links. Smart tags do add “Meta-context” , and hopefully over time, our software will get even smarter so that the “Meta-Context” smart tags evolve with me, learning and tracking my “knowledge” quotient, thus getting more and more specific about what they call out and what they don’t, either based upon what it knows about the things I’m interested in, or what it knows about the things I don’t know a lot about.
Isn’t this the sort of thing that Winer’s been urging? That we’ll put these streams of XML data out there and let the end user mix, match, slice and dice information how he or she wants? Isn’t MS just bringing its weight to bear on a variation of what Winer has been championing all along?