There was recently a column on, I think, ZDNet in which the author said that
he thought that Google's stock would go down hill in 2006, in part because
'social tagging', in the mode of del.icio.us would come to dominate the search
market, and Google didn't have such a system.
There's an awful lot of hype about this, these days, but those hyping appear
not to realise two things: first, 'social tagging' is an informal analogue of
what Google actually does in a more systematic manner. The page rank algorithm,
although secret, is known to rank pages on the basis of the extent to which
they are cited by others. Sounds a lot as though the links at the top of the
output are the result of a 'social' decision, doesn't it? Secondly, where do
those who contribute their links to del.icio.us find the pages? My guess is
that they use Google; so what is being reported is what Google finds in the
first place.
And they tell me that this haphazard process of a limited number of people
(against the millions who actually use the Web - and use Google for their
searches) submitting their links, is going to lead to a better search system?
Crazy in my opinion.
'Tagging' is also proposed as a new phenomenon. But what is it? Simply
'indexing'. Of course, the 'tagging' term is promoted by people who know
nothing about indexing, have probably never heard the term and imagine that
assigning a keyword or a phrase to a document is something novel. This is how
fads begin! All we need is the proposal that 'social tagging' is a new
'knowledge management' technique and we'll know that it is about to die :-)
'Folksonomies' is a silly term for these collections - partly because it is
such a silly corruption of language and partly because they have nothing to do
with taxonomies - or classification as we used to call it. No classificatory
structure can simply emerge out of the process, there's no vocabularly control
and, apart from anything else, the coverage is heavily skewed away from the
scientific and academic. If, for example, you are interested in Reye's
syndrome, you'll find nothing bookmarked at del.icio.us - but about 472,000
items on Google with the top five or six links offering you direction to expert
sources.
No wonder Google is happy to have Yahoo spending its money on such
foolishness. :-)
Tom Wilson
Professor T.D. Wilson, PhD, Hon.PhD
Publisher/Editor in Chief
Information Research
InformationR.net
e-mail: [log in to unmask]
Web site: http://InformationR.net/
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