Institute For The Future

"Technorati, community, and strife"

Just a social software-related straw in the wind.

This morning, I was looking for comments on the recent op-ed piece by Christoph Schönborn, the Archbishop of Vienna, about the Catholic Church's position regarding evolution. I paid a visit to Technorati's "evolution" tag page, which lists blog posts that have been tagged as dealing with "evolution." Technorati prides itself on providing a near real-time view of current discussions in the blog world, so I figured it would be worth a visit.

About a quarter of the entries on the evolution tag page are from the blog of William Dembski-- a leading ID (intelligent design) proponent.

At first, this struck me as yet another shrewd piece of agitprop on the part of the ID movement-- a kind of content Trojan horse that Technorati would automatically gather up and put inside the city walls. (Clearly Dan Simmons' Olympos is still on my mind!) And it could be a way to (apparently) innocently inject dissenting material into a community discussion. But is it?