Floating Island

This week, we are using tags and debating the pros and cons of this online filing system.

At first glance, tagging appears to involve complex and intricate procedures that can be intimidating to a newbie like me. Overall, I see it as a basic trade-off: I can make a sizable investment of time and effort now, in order to improve efficiency later on, or I can continue with my inefficient habits, which will make me less effective over the long term but won’t require that I learn anything new today.

This leads to a nagging concern over current tagging systems being superceded in the near future, so why bother to learn a system that may become obsolete? Weinberger revels in the perception that tagging “sticks it to the man” by diminishing traditional hierarchies of knowledge, which is seems like a contradictory impulse for a system that is supposed to help us organize information.

There also seems to be some debate as to what constitutes tagging. A recent Pew survey found that 28 percent of American internet users have engaged in tagging, but it fails to define what they counted as tagging. 28 percent seems like an improbably high result, especially compared to the reported 2.3 percent tagging rate among Chinese users (who generally tend to be younger and, in my view, more tech-savvy than American users). Again , there’s a lack of information on the methodology used in the China survey.

Technorati v. Google:

I searched the phrases “hong kong” “cultural policy” together in both Google and technorati. Google’s top result was the Centre for Cultural Policy Research here at HKU, which is great. Google’s top hits tend most towards educational and government institutions, .orgs, and news websites—very little from blogs.

In contrast, technorati’s results are all blogs, with only 39 hits (though somehow this shrank to 21 as I clicked through the results pages),. My own blog post from last week was ranked second, but most of the others were entirely irrelevant. Technorati doesn’t appear to filter out the craziness of the online world— my search pulled up a lot of identical rants against Bush. This is both an advantage and a drawback: nothing is censored, so you are guaranteed to get every blog post that includes your search terms. At the same time, most of it is useless, so the searcher still has to search within the results pretty extensively.

In the future, I would probably limit my use of technorati to keeping a pulse on the hot topics of the online world and what people are saying about them. But for searching on an esoteric subject, I didn’t find it to be very helpful.

Del.icio.us seems much more useful, but also a bit more complex. I’m sure it will be very useful to my work once I get over whining to myself over the steep learning curve involved and start adding more bookmarks.