Professional Reading Shelf
Tagging
Social Search
Social Networking
Source: Newsweek
Newsweek Cover Story Tackles Social Search, Tagging and Related Issues
This time Newsweek tackles social search, tagging, and the rest. Flickr’s Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield grace the cover. Services mentioned include the usual suspects and a couple of others:
+ Flickr
+ YouTube
+ MySpace
+ Facebook
+ imeem
+ Dabble (This company hasn’t even launched yet and the authors can’t describe what it is; their pr person should get a raise.)
+ del.icio.us

Here are a couple of brief comments (from Gary):

+ Someone needs to tell the writers of this story that tagging is not a taxonomy. Sorry to be a stickler. Tagging uses user-generated keywords while a taxonomy has structure (often hierarchical) and is often, but not always, well organized. I tried doing something like this about a year ago in response to another Newsweek article. I explained that cataloging, classification, controlled vocabularies tagging, etc., are not the same thing. Some might consider this to be minor stuff. Perhaps. However, large circulation weeklies should strive to be clear in describing a term that is often misunderstood and confused by the public. Why not explain the differences and the pros/cons of each type.
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+ Being the tv/pop culture geek that I am I love YouTube. However, this article makes no mention of the potential copyright issues it and similar web video hosting servives could face. As more video content producers begin selling content, will people pay if it’s available on YouTube for free? Will someone pay $1.99 for an episode of Lost on iTunes when someone has posted it on YouTube? Btw, this is a topic that Newsweek itself discussed in a recent article. I’ll add that searching for material on YouTube can be a big challenge. Why? Tags and poor metadata. Some add lots of tags (hopefully I call something the same thing the person who tagged the item calls it) and complete video descriptions. Others entries contain very, very little. As the database grows larger this will make more false drops and time wasting likely. Librarians also know that the quality of cataloging (aka metadata description) can vary from cataloger to cataloger but there are some conventions that one must or should follow. Note to libraries: OCLC does have a guide to cataloging web resources. I don’t think this is a new document but perhaps it’s time to update it. Perhaps some of the concepts (not precise rules) could be applied to other services?
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+ Yes, tagging can be very powerful and useful for very individual or small focused groups like an eight grade class or a group of friends or co-workers. To be useful to the masses (if/when) it reaches mainstream/widespread is another matter. Is the point of tagging to make information retrieval more precise for a large group of users? Why? Synonyms, pluralization, etc. Also, spam and gaming the system. This is another topic NOT addressed in the article. What would stop someone reviewing the most popular tags and then including these tags in every item they post? I’m sure with several logins and a script this could be achieved quite easily. We all know what happened to the meta-keyword content tag. Aside from spamming, for tagging to save effort and make retrieval more precise, something I’ve called structured or fielded tagging (location field, author field, date field, etc.) is needed. The Catch-22 is that most people wouldn’t do it. Others would say that in some cases on the open web, a document or other item should speak for itself and let technology like dynamic clustering, audio transcription, content-based image retrieval, etc., do the work for the masses. Again — on a personal or small group level — it’s another matter. The same might also be true when it comes to small specialty or vertical databases. Librarians know that everyone isn’t a cataloger. Btw, standardization amongst tags and tagging services is needed.
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+ We read about del.icio.us and its acquisition by Yahoo in December. However, we don’t learn why Yahoo made the purchase when the’ve been developing (human resources, $$$) their own tagging/social search technology, MyWeb 2.0. I was also surprised not to see anything about Yahoo’s home-built blogging, social networking service, etc., Yahoo 360.
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+ Tagging issues. Look at the most popular tags. They are blog blogging blogs. What’s the difference between each one? Tech and technology are two more popular tags. Again, what’s the difference? You get the idea. For personal use, no worries but to improve access to the database for all? I realize that life moves slowly but we still see (after a couple of years) that most of the popular tags are technology related? Will tagging become more
“mainstream” and when we will see non tech topics dominate the most popular tag list? It’s much the same at My Web 2.0. Again, everyone isn’t a cataloger. In an age when people want more time, tagging can be time consuming. Are topical or discipline-oriented tagging sites the wave of the future like Connotea? Would the vocauarly be easier to control?
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+ We read little about why Google has not embraced social stuff (with a few exceptions) to this point. Yes, they purchased dodgeball (a mobile dating/meetup service, though it’s hard to find out about it on any official Google web page) and have Orkut, a social networking service that hardly gets any attention these days (at least in the US). What happened? Why isn’t Google doing more in this space? Why hasn’t Orkut been more successful? You would think that with Google and the Google brand behind Orkut it would be more popular. Why not? No mention in the article. However, we do read a quote that once again will keep people (including the stock market) guessing (something Google is so so good at that also keeps the buzz buzzing) by Eric Schmidt.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt says that he doesn’t understand why people think his company wants to be the next Microsoft. “Everybody thinks we’re building operating systems, PCs, and browsers. They clearly don’t get it,” he says. So where does Google want to go? “Look at MySpace,” he says cryptically. Very interesting.
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Internet
Online News
Source: Pew Internet & American Life
Online News: For many home broadband users, the internet is a primary news source
“By the end of 2005, 50 million Americans got news online on a typical day, a sizable increase since 2002. Much of that growth has been fueled by the rise in home broadband connections over the last four years. For a group of ‘high-powered’ online users — early adopters of home broadband who are the heaviest internet users — the internet is their primary news source on the average day.” Direct to full text report.
(via DocuTicker.com)

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