Tagging Voyeurism
Out friends over at Abstract Dynamics have written an interesting article on the phenomena of tagging. For those that don’t know, tagging is a new kind of shared meta-data being used largely alongside blogging. Technorati is a great central repository of this sort of thing, along with del.icio.us. And while While I’m not sure about the asymetrical distribution of information occurring because of tagging (isn’t it just a different kind of information) Mr. Blaze’s point on striation did ring true with me. Not so much because some people are getting less information by looking at an overall picture but because the value of unique terms is increasing. Already an easy way to get something on Google is to simply coin a term. Have that term tagged, get people talking about it on multiple blogs and you have yourself a little secret portion of the internet. I feel like Ajax is a great example of this. I named my own blog Banapana for precisely the same reason. It’s a nonsense word and one therefore that is easy to track on sites like del.icio.us, technorati and google. Once the fracturing of vocabulary in such a fashion becomes common sense is it possible that we could end up with a glut of nonsense terms?
This sort of thing is in alignment with the tracking of memes as well. Create a meme, set it up on a few blogs and sites that point to each other and get it out through email or friendster and see if you can grow it. I even use technorati’s ability to turn searches into RSS feeds to follow some of the memes that I think are important to this site. You can think of it as meme tracking or dynamic research.