In a Snap
Monday, August 15, 2005
Harsh Kabra
http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/ew/2005/08/15/stories/2005081500100200.htm
THE euphoria of quickly unearthing loads of information by using search engines is often watered down by the problem of plenty. Wading through the clutter of search results, especially irrelevant ones, is frustrating
If only the contents were organised in neatly-labelled piles, tracking and discovering things digital may no longer be a grind. This is where `Tagging' helps. In computing and information processing contexts, tagging refers to the labelling of a piece of data with metadata. It is now growing in scope to enable people to annotate saved Web pages with additional information, which adds up to fine-tune search.
Tagging has taken off on a few Web sites such as Flickr, Furl, del.icio.us, and Rojo. Even while storing the addresses of Web pages of interest, and ensuring they can be revisited subsequently from any computer or browser, the ever-increasing member-base of these Web sites is voluntarily classifying and categorising diverse pieces of content.
In doing so, these members add descriptive tags to their bookmarked pages to swiftly rummage through the heap of bookmarks and zero in on their favourites the next time. More importantly, these tags are visible to the other members and help all of them swoop down on content they may never have found on their own.
Joshua Schachter, founder of del.icio.us, once said, "Our ability to produce content far outstrips the ability to sort and consume it." In essence, tagging is all about organising things in a way that makes sense to the human brain. It marks an important step towards realising Ben-Ami Lipetz's 1966 prophecy that "breakthroughs in information retrieval would come when researchers gain a deeper understanding of how humans process information and then endow machines with analogous capabilities".
What sets tagging apart from the search keywords or metadata that Web sites have long embedded is its social facet. In understanding and categorising something for yourself, you are also benefiting hundreds and thousands of other users.
At the same time, their effort at tagging information holds comparable benefits for you as well. More than depending on computer search algorithms, tagging unveils the larger benefits of collective human wisdom. So you can retrieve information that even a computer may not be able to trace for you.
For instance, from a clutch of folders on your computer containing numerous photographs, how would you quickly locate the one that features that old classmate of yours or the most beautiful shot of your spouse?
Simple. At the time of saving those pictures, label them with words describing the places where they had been clicked, the people in them, the occasion, and whatever more you want.
You can then search for a photograph based on any elements of this description. Interestingly, with other users also adding to that description, it keeps getting elaborate, thereby enriching the metadata and making it easier to find photographs.
Flickr, an online photo management and sharing application, allows you to do just that by helping you to make your photos available to others and enabling newer ways of organising photos. As the brains behind the initiative say, "Part of the solution is to make the process of organising photos collaborative... people like to ooh and aah, laugh and cry, make wisecracks when sharing photos. Why not give them the ability to do this when they look at them over the Internet?"
Chris Alden (founder of Red Herring), Kevin Burton (inventor of NewsMonster), and Mark Graham (Internet expert) read a lot of content online and wanted to improve the way digital information is consumed. In June 2003, they created Rojo, a Web-based service that allows you to efficiently organise, read, and share content such as online news, information and blogs. It lets you tag news stories and spares the drudgery of sorting news stories by publisher. Free and easy to use, it also delivers feeds to your desktop.
Furl is another free service that saves the important items you find on the Web and enables you to quickly find them again. Each member has a large personal archive of 5 gigabytes. Guided by the sites you've already saved, Furl also recommends new Web pages and helps you share the content. On its part, del.icio.us enables you to tag and share Web links. With several new extensions to its tagging system, del.icio.us helps dig out tonnes of multimedia from all over the blogosphere and beyond.
Tagging entries in Web journals helps the blog search engine called Technorati to quickly zoom in on them. Technorati lets you search not just its own indexes, but also other sites. Tags from Flickr, Furl and del.icio.us are leveraged by Technorati to track the most-discussed subjects on blogs. The blogging site LiveJournal could soon swap categories with tags. Why that, at consummating.com, even dating profiles can be tagged.
Tagging has already caught the attention of the search biggies. Behind Yahoo's acquisition of Flickr in March this year was the acknowledgement that tapping into the masses to facilitate the otherwise difficult job of finding pictures online holds enormous promise. "Tagging within a trust network is feasible because it allows people to compute the trust," said Eckart Walther, senior director at Yahoo. Internet directory and portal service Looksmart purchased Furl in September 2004 and has now enhanced the capability to create instant Furl bookmarks and share essential Web pages.
To substantiate how tags could completely change the way we blog and communicate, Glenn Reid, creator of iPhoto, underlines an exciting possibility where "all reader comments on all blogs could, potentially, be linked up based on their tags, so that, instead of following individual blogs, people would be able to follow conversations on specific topics conducted on hundreds of blogs".
If technologist Jakob Lodwick is to be believed, this is the age of the tagweb, which is a self-emerging network of ideas that can be graphed on a computer or on paper, emulates its creator's brain, and becomes more useful as it grows, by understanding the relationships between its contents rather than the contents themselves.
In line with James Surowiecki's averment in The Wisdom of Crowds about a properly organised group being "wiser" than its component parts, "just as Wall Street is wiser than any individual investor", tagging is one way of boosting search effectiveness despite a certain risk of chaos. Various people creating various tags for the same subject may render it indefinite and imperfect at times. Nonetheless, it would surely increase the prospects of chancing upon more variegated content.
Many are beginning to wonder what will happen if marketers orchestrate irrelevant tags to pull you towards their ads. While some predict crash and doom if such abuse grows beyond acceptable limits, the potential of tagging is just about coming to light and placing such worries on the backburner, at least for the moment.
The author is a freelance journalist who can be reached at harsh_kabra@yahoo.com