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Time magazine interviews Eric Schmidt. Big thumbs up for the technologies Google is already pushing, as you might expect. Not too sure he answers the question, though… Q. In what ways are all the new tech startups — the so-called Web 2.0 companies — changing the competitive landscape for Google? A. Web 2.0 An interview in the Sunday Times yesterday said that Bebo head Michael Birch seemed prepared to wait before earning much money from the service:
I was asked about non-linear search and said I’d give it a go. (The question comes from Simon Collister, who I am sure has a few ideas of his own up his sleeve. But since he wrote a fab post about tagging, which in turn fuelled my own effort on the subject, it’s definitely my turn to go first!) Non-linear search is one of the bounties of the web 2.0 approach that has been relatively unheralded because of the noise surrounding the ongoing “digg/wikipedia/myspace/youtube is heaven/hell” wrangles. The expression comes from a post on the BusinessWeek blog. Interviewing Joshua Schachter from del.icio.us, Heather Green notes:
So what do we understand by linear and non-linear search in this context? The first PR company to start a virtual office in Second Life starts to introduce its services. “What would happen if your company built a space where customers could interact with your brand and products whenever they wanted to”. Companies will be able to “market their products with much more efficiency” as a
Tags and tagging are a big part of the Web 2.0 ethos. Instead of sorting items into folders, you describe them with a series of words. The words you use, the ‘tags’, are up to you. Some people refer to this as ‘folksonomy’ in the sense that tags are home-grown and created by users, as opposed to putting things into folders in a tree structure decided by other people, ‘taxonomy’. This can be useful for lots of reasons. Some of these are obvious: The same item can be tagged with several terms. This post, for example, is about tags, but it’s also about web 2.0, del.icio.us, YouTube and flickr. It then occupies several locations in your filing system, and can thus be found in several different ways. If you decide to bookmark it to del.icio.us or similar, then it’s up to you to decide how might you want to classify it. Your filing system comes to match your way of classifying things rather than one imposed by another person. If your existing mental filing system can’t fit a new item, then you can simply invent new terms to accommodate it. Multimedia, in particular, is very hard to classify using other means. The recently launched Google image labeler game challenges pairs of users to find matching descriptive words for pictures. The matching words are, of course, the tags that best describe the picture. The big criticism of tagging is that it doesn’t work for finding things unless you think the same way as the person who tagged the item in the first place. If idiots do the tagging (viz. people who don’t think the same as me), then I’ll never find the item. The Inquirer, curmudgeon central at the best of times, isn’t entirely pleased about the arrival of the read/write web, social media or the whole ‘letting ordinary people onto the internet’ thing. Yesterday’s article – ‘Web 2.0 is for complete twonks’ – is a masterpiece of spite and elitism, which left me chuckling even as it raised my gall. Here’s a sample:
Needless to say, the evidence given is slight. The main problem with digg, apparently, is that two of Charlie Demerjian’s (the author’s) articles were removed after being reported as lame. Despite having received lots of intelligent comments, the author says this means that people who use digg are mainly “the disenfranchised stupid”. Since he thinks that they are “dumber than rocks”, it’s not entirely surprising that his articles annoyed loyal digg users, is it? I would suggest that he stops submitting his anti-digg stories to the service, unless this is some sort of elaborate trolling. Perhaps Netscape or reddit users might be a little more receptive? Less than a week after the service’s third birthday, social bookmarking service del.icio.us has announced an important milestone on its blog:
This figure comes as a surprise. Just over a week ago, Alex Iskold wrote a very interesting comparative review of social bookmarking sites at the Read/Write Web site. He assumed, reasonably enough, based on the service’s figures at the time it was acquired by Yahoo, plus moderate growth, that del.icio.us had half this number of users. I have to recommend Geek and Poke: |
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