I should start collecting a fine for every time someone says ‘Web 2.0‘… it’s utterly ridiculous. It reminds me of the ‘blogosphere‘ talking about social revolutions and such 2-3 years ago, yet few participants realized that they were simply talking to themselves. Or as one quote from The Simpsons reveals:
Milhouse: We gotta spread this stuff around. Let’s put it on the Internet!
Bart: No! We have to reach people whose opinions actually matter!
My main beef is not so much with the technology involved in this hub-bub, it’s the starry-eyed marketing push behind it.
Unfortunately, there are numerous tagging schemes used on websites or blogs that are seemingly worthless:
- “Folksonomy” tags - they are no different than meta-tags from the ’90s. The great thing about most search engines like Google, Yahoo or MSN (GYM) is that they ignore these completely.
- Calendar archive tags (e.g. month-to-month, week-to-week)
- Category tags - these are redundant
- Trackbacks - great, 273 people linked to your article about an AJAX-based periodic table, trackbacks are not organized in any useful way; perhaps using the OWL-based Flash system that News.com has implemented can put them to some use
- Blogrolls - sure it’s nice to know who you read, but if left unorganized or extraordinarily long, are near meaningless (aside from boosting your PageRank)
Applications that actually implement tags in a useful manner:
- Flickr and other photo/video-tagging sites. They actually help locate related pictures and such (e.g. College Humor does a good job with this)
- The new Amazon Mechanical Turk service also uses a type of keyword tagging to help automate various tasks that AI cannot currently do in an inexpensive manner.
For better and for worse, tags are here to stay – as they say, it is not the tool itself that necessarily has value, but what you do with that tool. Hopefully more tagging tools used in Flickr and Mechanical Turk will continue to sprout up (note: the Facebook now offers a feature that allows you to tag the individuals in a picture, which adds another dimension to the “popularity halo effect” that gives it more staying power in the long-run).