A Fortune Cookie for Web 2.0
I’ve been giving a lot of thought to Web 2.0 lately. Specifically, I’ve been thinking about tagging and collective ownership (and sharing) of information. While these aren’t necessarily Web 2.0 in and of themselves—indeed, Web 2.0 is merely (depending on your thought-leader of choice) the notion of the Web as a platform—I think they are becoming integral parts of the concept, and I think they complement one another.
Tagging helps to organize (describe) information in a way in which it is easy for someone other than the “tagger” to find relevant data. There is no obfuscated taxonomy or nomenclature that one must figure out (like with most category- and folder-based systems), and, with the way most tag-based applications now work (i.e., del.icio.us, Flickr), others may add their own tags, so the overall value of the description increases, thus making it easier to find. Flickr even assigns a ranking to this value (which also adds in other attributes such as number of views, etc.) so you can find your “most interesting” photos. All of this works together, making it easier to share information.
So, you can see that I’ve been giving a great deal of thought to this, so it’s no surprise that Web 2.0 was the first thing that sprung to mind when I broke open my fortune cookie tonight after dinner. This was the fortune:
Doing little things well is a step towards doing big things better.
If Web 2.0 has a motto, then this is it. A typical Web 2.0 application is one that picks one thing and does it well. Then, it provides (or should) an open API for others to share in the information available from the one thing done well. As more and more of these applications pop up, there will be mounds and mounds—indeed, there already are—of rich data for all to share. This is the platform. This is the “big thing” that is made better by the “little things” of Web 2.0.
3 Comments
From what I read here and on WikiPedia.org, I fail to see that Web 2.0 is anything but a hype. Unless I've misunderstood something, there is not that more use in Flickr's tags, than in that of HTML's meta-tags. For information to be shared, it has to be much more structured, standardized, and terms (tags) have to be "agreed upon" - it must be possible to unambiguously identify the meaning of information fragments. People might use the same tags for very different things. Due to the nature of the WWW things can easily get very messy. To share and re-use information (large scale) is not possible without using strict languages like RDF and OWL, logics and trust. But yeah, I guess as long as the little things are in fact done well they might be a step towards doing big things better. That's my 2 cents -- after a 5 min. review of "Web 2.0".
In the not so distant future, I think that this meta information will become more important to us, and I think some of the problems you've mentioned will be resolved -- or, at least, there will be acceptable and agreed-upon solutions.
But, yeah, in order to share information, people (and systems) must come to certain agreements.
> meta information will become more important to us
Definitely. Especially for larger businesses. And because a semantic web would make many things so much easier.
> I think some of the problems you’ve mentioned will be resolved
Some of the problems are already partially resolved (but not used on a large scale yet). Languages like RDF(S), OWL and XML Topic Maps do exist, but are mostly used in "isolated" / "expert" environments. Unfortunately, there are some rather big problems remaining - like ontology alignment (already a well-studied field), actually being able to use others' information, etc...