Smart Tags ate my Cat

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There's a huge furor right now over a new feature that Microsoft has put in Office XP and is going to put in Windows XP. Why do I care? I happen to have been in on some of the first smart tag development efforts and was part of the team that wrote some of Microsoft's first smart tag whitepapers (yet to be released).

The smart tag furor epitomizes a lot of what's best and worst in the programming community. On the one hand, a single Slashdot article can focus dozens of the best and brightest that the industry has to offer. On the other hand, a lot of noise and heat gets produced by people who react first and educate themselves about technology later.

The truth of the matter is that more social and technical criticsm are often one and the same. The furthest reaching implications of a technology aren't neccessarily the technological or even the economic one. They are the social implications, the privacy issues, issues concerning speech, freedom and creativity. Technology, however, has a kind of hard-core knowledge around it that the social sciences just don't. Anybody can be an ersatz social critic, and some of those people are going to turn out to be right. But you can't criticize technology unless you do your homework first. So if, for example, you don't know that smart tags do not send any executable code with the document which contains them, of you think they are the same thing as hyperlinks, you've missed the boat. And then, even when you know all the technical details, you're still only halfway to understanding the technology.
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Paul Cornell (Microsoft): Developing Smart Tag Solutions

Dan Gilmore: Smart Tags a Surveillance Tool? No, Microsoft Says

Slashdot: a ton of frenzy flavored with an ounce of intelligent criticism

Connie Guglielmo (ZDNet): Microsoft Tries To Get Smart