Bud Gibson follows up on the tagging / folksonomy discussion that Stephen and him kicked off over here (one of the benefits of subscribe to comments on WordPress I guess!)
In particular Bud points to the impact of tags on search engine results and argues:
“as illustrated by the technorati example, folksonomy tags are more than just tools to add meaning. They in effect act as content aggregation points that can be used by socially entrepreneurial firms like technorati to gain a foothold in web visibility for emerging topics.” [The Community Engine]
This is certainly a fascinating perspective and I as Bud says is more a testament to the brilliance of Technorati et al. than an attack on the malicious use of tags, but as he also argues:
“The question content providers face is whether they want technorati or any other repository to act as an intervening link between them and searchers.”
Which, ironically (possibly), sounds like exactly the kind of question raised frequently by Stephen and others about the use of third party tools.
I think this is an absolutely nail on the head interpretation and lets me see clearly for the first time the real problem I’ve had with folksonomies / tagging etc. since the start. Tagging should not be third party facilitated. Out categories, titles, paragraphs, pictures, audio, sentences and words are tags… forming a folksonomy through the web and we need to work on that. Not on pinging Technorati or anyone else.
I actually don’t think I am that much different from Stephen on these points, except that my perspective is probably best summed up as more, “This is happening. How can we turn it to our advantage?” xFolk, a microformat I am proposing, is intended as a step in that direction.
When you say “tagging should not be third party facilitated” I am a bit confused. Maybe I am missing the point, I do not subscribe to the whole idea that tags help us find unknown content, but they do allow us to classify and aggregate similar content across different sites, something free text search engines cannot do because you end up with too much noise. Yes the fact that the search engines crawl the tagging sites does mean that their content is in the search engine, but I am not sure that it is really that bad.
For most of us the web is too large to navigate without a map, for many years these maps have been provided by search engines like Yahoo and Google. Essentially our online experience has always been facilitated through a third party and to some degree controlled. The rise of Technorati seems to have been in response to the speed at which the traditional search engines have been crawling the ever increasing web vs the speed at which blog type content is created. Pinging something only speeds up the process that has been undertaken for years by search engine web crawlers, even Google is realising that our thirst for real-time information is massive, look to their new SiteMap protocol.
Tagging is another method of providing a map for users of the internet to find relevant content, I admit manually putting another microformat within the existing href tag is a bad method of implementation. However using the existing categories within most blogging tools, or the keywords in Flickr and Del.icio.us makes sense. Further tags allow users to provide multiple classifications to a single item, something the traditional hierarchy does not allow.
The argument that Technorati is forming another layer is true to a degree, but how long will it be before the search engines provide similar services? Yahoo has already bought Flickr.
It doesn’t scale though.. or despam either (surprised we haven’t seen spamtags yet!).
My reckoning is that this is all about digital identity, control over your own content and the disaggregation that blogs are making possible.
Or someting like that. Need some sleep!
I’m not sure about the whole scaling thing and at 6:30am it is too early to crack open a note pad and do some use cases on the whole matter. However I would guess that from a technology point of view it will scale, it is the social point of view that I would agree with you. Once again we need better tools (note to self learn how to program better).
You are right in assuming that there is a huge underlying issue around digital identity which is being worked by others with far greater knowledge and wisdom than me.
A lot of this comes back to the whole comment vs no comments arguement and the control over your content and the aggregation of this content back into a single view. Technorati is providing some fo this but not very well.