Anyone still reading? David Weinberger (of Cluetrain Manifesto fame) responds to a piece critical of the folksonomy, tagging approach to classification by Elaine Peterson in D-Lib magazine. I’ll paraphrase loosely.

Peterson gives several objections to using tags as a way of organising information, as opposed to the sharp distinctions and uncrossable boundaries maintained by pupils of Aristotle. The strongest criticism she levels at folksonomies is that:

Because tags are relativized, personal, idiosyncratic views can coexist and thrive in the form of tags, in spite of their inconsistencies. Readers of texts on the Internet become individual interpreters, despite the document author’s intent.

Weinberger points out that, uhm, yeah — that’s the point. The author’s original intent is not the end of what a particular artefact, web page, blog post, photograph, movie means.

You upload a picture of your car to flickr and tag it ‘car’. I come along and think ‘mmm purple’, and tag it as such. Now when someone else comes along looking for a purple car, they have an easier time of it. Maybe someone else arrives and thinks, ‘that’s not purple, it’s indigo’, and they add that too.

Contradictions, idiosyncracies… and it’s much easier to find that picture of an indigo car.

Weinberger finishes:

I’ll take one step further toward the metaphysical: Folksonomies are not only frequently more useful than top-down taxonomies; they better reflect the bottom-up, messy, ambiguous, inconsistent, social nature of meaning—despite Aristotle and the tradition his genius spawned.

(found via Euan Semple)

But what is SLATES?* According to Dion Hinchcliffe, it’s this:

SLATES describes the combined use of effective enterprise search and discovery, using links to connect information together into a meaningful information ecosystem using the model of the Web, providing low-barrier social tools for public authorship of enterprise content, tags to let users create emergent organizational structure, extensions to spontaneously provide intelligent content suggestions similar to Amazon’s recommendation system, and signals to let users know when enterprise information they care about has been published or updated, such as when a corporate RSS feed of interest changes.

So it’s the kind of things that we’re used to from blogs, wikis, del.icio.us and flickr, applied to workers in a corporate environment. These also fall under the umbrella term Network IT, IT that’s devoted to facilitating collaboration, allowing expressions of judgement and what Andrew McAfee calls fostering emergence — that is, allowing new information and work patterns to spontaneously appear by making the tools available.

Ross Mayfield, whose wiki software SocialText plays a starring role in the just-released SuiteTwo package of enterprise 2.0 tools, is sanguine about the impact of this on organisations:

Very soon a user will wake up in the morning, log in to SuiteTwo, immediately recognize something emerging. With the top blog posts telling her what the company is talking about, the top wiki pages showing her what people are working on, top posts from the outside that her company is subscribed to and the feedback from what they are publishing — something will emerge.

Sticks-in-the-mud may regard this emergence stuff as ‘chatter’ and wonder when this user is going to be doing old-fashioned stuff like getting on with her job. It’s a genuine concern and the need for small pilot programmes and metrics for its ROI will be as necessary to any Enterprise 2.0 project as it is to any other change in the way businesses work.

*In my view, ‘extensions’ is a bit redundant, but I guess SLATS wouldn’t sound nearly as good. ‘Links’ is a bit lame too, but there’s already something called SATS.

(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:

Joshua made an interesting distinction. Instead of finding information a la Google, social search is about finding knowledge. The idea is how do you connect with the information you need in a context that’s knitted together by people and by human expertise, rather than the linear way we do it now, which is to type a search term into a box.

So what do we understand by linear and non-linear search in this context?

Linear search: You already know the answer in many senses. Or you know exactly what you’re looking for and there is a finite answer. What is the capital of Uzbekistan? (“capital city Uzbekistan”). Even quite tricky facts are accessible. Room rates at the Hilton Hotel in Paris? (hilton paris “Rates” -“Paris Hilton”)

A lot of other searches work less well, though. “Good hotel London” brings up a load of sites that want to sell me rooms. What I really wanted, though, was a recommendation of a good hotel in London that meets my criteria — pretty central, cheap, not horrible. How am I going to find that on Google? How do I find “romantic restaurant cheap rome”, “what are the best blogs about supermarket wine” and “inexpensive ways to make your wife feel special”?

So how can I do better?

Non-linear search: The same search terms about the cheap, central-London hotel on del.icio.us produced this:

A site with customer reviews, a Google site that might help me judge their worth, and a specific recommendation. So which was more useful? (rhetorical)

Back to the idea of knowledge. A lot of the questions we really want to ask are the questions that we’d ask another human being, if we knew a person with the right qualifications for the job. Finding the name ‘Tashkent’ is one thing, but what is it like there? Where should I stay? What things should I see? Is there anything or anywhere I should avoid?

I’ve got no idea how to find the answers to those questions using Google. Simply entering the country’s name into del.icio.us provides me with a lot of better ideas:

These sites provide me with some contacts. Some real people. If I were going there, I’d ask the authors of ProgressoR and Registan, or find a message board there. And I’d probably ask Craig Murray (the UK’s ambassador to the country, as it happens), since he’s a fellow brit. I somehow think they might be more use for my questions than the CIA or Jimmy Wales, the top links on a Google search.

The Yahoo Answers site provides another solution to this quandary, though obviously, you’d need to rely on a resident of Uzbekistan (or wherever, or whatever) being a willing and able answerer. I haven’t tried it, but I’m not sure I fancy my chances on Uzbekistan nightlife. Depends what you want to know — they would probably do better on London hotels.

So how do tags help? Tags are a way of finding people who speak the same language as you. “Good cheap hotel London” means something real to those people — the people who use my language know what I mean to a far greater extent than Google ever could. When I search on tags rather than keywords, there is a better chance of finding them.

It all depends what you want from the Internet. A really big library/encyclopedia — the way they used to describe the web in the 90s? Fine — I think we’re probably already there. But I also think we can possibly expect a bit more. Immediate contact, perhaps, with specialists in whatever field you’re researching. Access to knowledge as well as facts.

People, networks, tags, wisdom — these things, for me, are 2.0. Forget the buzz startups and believe the promise.